A Field Guide To The Love Bead Safe Harbor Pin (kind of like a bird watcher’s guide to birds).
If you’re new to the Love Bead Safe Harbor Pin and you see one “in the wild,” on someone on the street, in a restaurant, at school, at work, or any of the places you might find cool people, you might wonder if there’s any significance to the color, or the charm hanging from the pin. The answer? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
The safety pin is what makes it a “safe harbor” pin. So no matter the color or decoration, it’s still a Safe Harbor Pin. The rest is about standing up for a special cause that is close to your heart. It doesn’t mean you don’t care about anything else, just that this particular cause is one you’re especially passionate about, or is especially relevant to your life, or in the lives of people you know.
The LGBTQI Rights Pin:
I’m such a fossil, I didn’t know what the “Q” and “I” were until a friend explained it to me (and I did a bit of research of my own). In case you don’t know, here’s a very basic breakdown of “LGBTQI:”
The most important thing to know about this issue: It’s none of my (or your) business who neighbors/ coworkers/ random people we encounter conduct their sex lives. If you find out someone is doing something illegal, call the cops. Otherwise, it falls under “ANOYB,” or “Ain’t None Of Your Business.” People have the right to conduct their lives as they see best, in safety, and be treated with respect, whether we understand or approve of their personal choices or not.
So wearing an LGBTQI pin doesn’t mean you approve of someone else’s life, because the point is, you don’t have to in order to believe that person deserves to be treated with respect, and his or her civil rights respected. Think of it as “radical good manners.”
This is the rainbow pin. The type and finish of the beads may vary, but the rainbow color pattern makes this pin an LGBTQI pin.
For me, the sex lives of other people fall under “things I don’t have to have an opinion about.” If I’m not being asked to participate or watch, it doesn’t concern me. So I really don’t have any opinion about whether people “should” or “should not” be, say, homosexual. “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” I’m too busy trying to get my own stuff straight. Other people are human and I respect their humanity and right to live without feeling threatened or abused, and I don’t need to suss their private lives because it’s not my job to judge the “worthiness” of my fellow human beings. I don’t have any “gay friends.” I have friends who are gay (or somewhere in the LGBTQI spectrum), but we don’t talk about their sex lives, or mine. It’s not relevant. It’s simply a fact about that person, about on the level of height and eye color.
You can wear the LGBTQI pin and be fully supportive of, indifferent to, or somewhere in between, on any of the many ways human beings experience or express their gender or sexuality. You can even feel uncomfortable with all of this and wear the pin. Wearing this pin says “I believe in the rights of human beings to be treated with respect,” and a recognition that those who don’t conform to what is expected based on the gender they “seem” to be face an uphill battle in this world, and can use allies.
The peace symbol charm on this pin signifies your feeling that people, regardless of what they look like or what they do with their personal lives, should be free to live in safety without fear of being attacked, bullied or discriminated against.
