Heidi Boghosian (National Lawyers Guild) speaks @ "Occupy the Center!"

Remarks by Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild
LGBT Center Protest, March 3, 2012

I’m not supposed to be here today!

The National Lawyers Guild Legal Observers are not supposed to be here today!

We usually fight the oppressors who squelch free speech.

This is the first Occupy event that I’ve addressed, and I had to come today because I am a part of this community.

As the legal arm to many social movements for 75 years, the National Lawyers Guild watched the growth of the LGBT Center with great pride. Our missions align in many ways—to ensure that all members of society are treated with dignity. The Guild publishes a legal treatise called “Sexual Orientation and the Law.” We also published the legal treatise “AIDS and the Law”—both working to challenge ill-informed hatred impacting this community.

We urge the Center to keep site of the roots of oppression—an economic and political system that enriches a few at the expense of so many. To the extent that the Center does not support others who are oppresses, its own struggle is diminished and its own liberation is incomplete.

As a community, we must join hands to defeat this economic and political system that create these problems rather than becoming a part of it. Our shared mission is to advance human rights. Let us not permit insular interests to split our solidarity with other community’s unjustly oppressed.
By failing to support victims of international law violations and human rights standards, and by succumbing to the outspoken in power, this Center betrays its historic mission.