The Eight Values of Free Expression work together as a unit to guarantee and ensure that our needs of free expression are met with grace and justice. In this blog post, I will discuss the importance and role of two of these values; individual self-fulfillment and promoting innovation and how these relate to the LGBTQ+ community.
Individual Self-Fulfillment
The concept of individual self fulfillment promotes the idea of creating your own individual identity. This can be expressed through opinions, appearance, occupation, or anything regarding your individuality. This concept also focuses on the gratuity experienced from having the freedom to create your own identity and individuality in the world. This type of value of free expression can be seen heavily within the LGBTQ+ community. This community's mission statement is "Empowering LGBT people, building strong community." The first value of free expression focuses on the first part of that sentence. Empowering the LGBTQ+ people to be themselves and create what they see as their own identity. For some this includes being gay, being lesbian, being bisexual, being transgender, being non-binary, being queer, and many, many more. All of these terms relate to "identities" that these people now are empowered to embrace and accept as their own.
Promoting Innovation
The concept of promoting innovation expresses the idea that the free speech that is out in the world is protected and used to create an innovative and new environment for the people who exhibited the speech. The LGBTQ+ community's mission statement is "Empowering LGBT people, building strong community." In this second part of the mission statement is where we see the concept of promoting innovation in play. This community is called a community for a reason. People who express their identifications will often find groups of friends who also identify as something in the LGBTQ+ community. The communities do multiple things to innovate and inspire including something as fun and light as pride festivals and parades, all the way to something more serious and important as fighting for the right for transgender men and women to be able to use the bathroom that they identify with. These actions are not just for the people themselves, but they are actions that the leaders of the community do for the people, so that they feel safe and protected.
In conclusion, the LGBTQ+ community exhibits almost every single one of the eight values of free expression. However, I believe that the most important are individual self-fulfillment (empowering the LGBT people) and promoting innovation (building strong community).
Quote from the Gay Center about the mission statement for the LGBTQ+ community: https://gaycenter.org/about/
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