If the United States government were to single out the entire metropolitan population of Chicago and deny them equal rights, the entire world would be in outrage. If affordable health care was offered to all French citizens but withheld from anyone choosing to call Paris home, riots would ensue. If residents of both Toronto and Philadelphia were forced to live their lives according to religious beliefs that may or may not be factual and were written approximately 2,500 years ago, an uprising would surely come about. If nine million people here in our very own country were told that they were not worthy of being wed today because of the verbiage within a document that was written by wealthy white men in the late 18th Century, what would we do? In the United States alone, it is estimated that nearly nine million people consider themselves gay or lesbian--equivalent to the populations in the above mentioned scenarios (Gates, 2011). So why is it that nearly fifty years after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the gay and lesbian community is bearing the brunt of such inequality? In the 1930’s, approximately the same number of Jews in Europe were targeted as an inferior class and we are all well-aware of the atrocities that resulted shortly thereafter (Jewish Virtual Library, 1997). While comparing the Holocaust to the rights of the gay and lesbian community in America is undoubtedly a stretch, it should at least open one’s eyes to the wide-spread nature of the injustice that is occurring in our very own country as we speak. All of us here in the United States have grown up believing that we live in a “free” country--one where democracy reigns and justice prevails. We have been taught this since our earliest days in the classroom. But what if we step outside the box for a moment? The founders of our fledgling nation had these thoughts in mind as well