This is honestly. I've been thinking a lot lately about how important it is to remember that the freedoms we enjoy aren't a given.

I think about my own life being a journalist who's free to speak my mind without fear

that the government's going to throw me in jail. I'm a woman that can vote, who can own my own

home, who runs my own business, and who regularly pisses off people on the internet

without fear that all of those things will be taken away from me.

And I'm a woman who's married to my wife and I introduce her as such in every context

without fear of being attacked or even reprimanded.

Until about two seconds ago in the scheme of human history, people would not have even imagined that these freedoms were possible.

More than that, most people living in the world right now don't have the freedoms that I have and I do not take

them for granted. And I am keenly aware of the fact that I only have them because other people that I don't know were

willing to argue for them. We're willing to persuade people with moral arguments and

we're willing to fight for them often by sacrificing their own

reputations for the sake of people that they didn't even know.

Most of the people that fought to make my life possible are now dead.

But some of the people are very much still with us.

And one of them is my guest today, Andrew Sullivan.

The broader argument, which is how do you combat prejudice, which isn't always the same thing as hate. I think the point I'm trying to make there is that if we, it's maybe it's emotionally satisfying for us to say we're

always the victims and all these people hate us and it is true that some people really

are victims and some people really do hate, but there is enormous complexity

of positions in between. The point is how do we get across the people to heterosexual people,

our humanity and our dignity? The only way we can do that is by

talking to them, by engaging them, by coming out of the closet in the first place,

...