From Meryl Streep’s Human Rights Campaign award-acceptance speech, delivered last Saturday evening: “Human life has been organized in a certain way, the hierarchies set, who’s in charge, who makes the laws and who enforces them, pretty much the same way for, oh, about 40,000 years. [And then] suddenly, at one point in the 20th century, something changed. Women began to be regarded as, if not equal, at least deserving of equal rights. Men and women of color demanded their equal rights. People of sexual orientation and gender identification outside the status quo also demanded equal regard under the law. [So] we should not be surprised that fundamentalists, of every stripe, are exercised and fuming. We should not be surprised that these profound changes come at a steeper cost than we originally thought.”
