The other day someone said, “I feel so sorry for gay people; they really don’t deserve to be treated like second-class citizens,” and my response was, “But the inequities they suffer affect you, too!”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her historic speech to the United Nations last December, said, “I want to talk about the work we have left to do to protect one group of people whose human rights are still denied in too many parts of the world today. In many ways, they are an invisible minority. . . . I am talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, human beings born free . . . . [This is] one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time.” She wasn’t the first to assert that “gay rights are human rights”; this has been the hue and cry from LGBT advocates and groups for years.

Yet global recognition of the LGBT community as human beings equally deserving of the same civil and human rights their heterosexual peers enjoy and—too often—take for granted remains a distant dream. Indeed, there are parts of the world where one can scarcely imagine that day, places where LGBTs are routinely ostracized, harassed, bullied, physically assaulted, and even murdered.

And if you think I’m talking about far-flung places, think again. I’m referring to parts of the United States, the “land of the free,” where it is not only acceptable to condemn and victimize LGBTs, it is encouraged and promoted, by established leaders, institutions, and places of worship—not to mention at home and in the schoolyard. Clinton said a mouthful when she admitted that America’s “record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect.” Progress has been made, thanks to years of tireless, well-organized, and proactive efforts, but full equality is still a painfully long way off.

All true, some might say; this is awful, deplorable, and incredibly unfair for LGBT people, and thank goodness it isn’t my problem.

But it is your problem if you have LGBT friends and family members whose happiness, safety, and rights are as dear to you as your own.

It is your problem when young people, the hope of our future, are taking their own lives in nearly epidemic numbers because homophobia and bullying have finally worn out their last shred of self-esteem and their will to stay on this punishing earth.

And it is your problem as a matter of fundamental justice. Martin Luther King Jr.’s elegant words “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” were uttered in the context of the African-American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, but you can set them to the tune of any human rights struggle.

As long as we stand by while discrimination, prejudice, and bigotry are perpetrated on our fellow citizens, we are, by our silence, saying, “That is okay with us. That is not our business.”

But it is our business. One need only study the dark years of Hitler and the Nazis, from 1933 to 1945, to see how evil took over—when millions of lives were snuffed out on a shameless argument rooted in discrimination, prejudice, and bigotry.

“Why does the world shed crocodile’s tears over the richly merited fate of a small Jewish minority? . . . I ask Roosevelt, I ask the American people: Are you prepared to receive in your midst these well-poisoners of the German people and the universal spirit of Christianity? We would willingly give everyone of them a free steamer-ticket and a thousand-mark note for travelling expenses, if we could get rid of them.” ~Adolf Hitler, 1933

Substitute “African-American” or “homosexual” for the word “Jewish” in Hitler’s remarks, and then consider these past comments from two who would later become candidates for U.S. president in the current election:

“It isn’t that some gay will get some rights. It’s that everyone else in our state will lose rights. For instance, parents will lose the right to protect and direct the upbringing of their children. Because our K-12 public school system, of which ninety percent of all youth are in the public school system, they will be required to learn that homosexuality is normal, equal and perhaps you should try it. And that will occur immediately, that all schools will begin teaching homosexuality.” ~Michele Bachmann, 2004

“If you say, there is no deviant as long as it’s private, as long as it’s consensual, then don’t be surprised what you get. You’re going to get a lot of things that you’re sending signals that as long as you do it privately and consensually, we don’t really care what you do. And that leads to a culture that is not one that is nurturing and necessarily healthy. I would make the argument in areas where you have that as an accepted lifestyle, don’t be surprised that you get more of it.” ~Senator Rick Santorum, 2005

Jews were the major targets of the plan to rid German territories of all those who did not fit the Nazi notion of the “master Aryan race,” but homosexuals were also arrested, castrated, beaten, and imprisoned, by the tens of thousands. You might say, well, that could never happen in a democracy. But when we turn a blind eye to the wrongs done to our neighbors, no matter who the neighbor or what the wrong, we risk becoming the next victims of injustice. Nature abhors a vacuum, and those seeking domination and power will rush to fill it, if we allow them to.

So yes, it is your business, because the laws against your fellow human beings are laws against justice, and because injustice anywhere—for African Americans, for Jews, for homosexuals, for anyone (you fill in the blank)—is a threat to justice everywhere, for all of us.