Are We Always Destined to Repeat History?

Our culture is littered with opportunities to learn from past mistakes. Whether it involved writing slavery into the U.S. Constitution, denying suffrage to and treating women like chattel, denying real voting rights to minorities, giving up on the League of Nations, incarcerating Japanese-Americans during WWII, conducting witch hunts of individuals suspected of advocating communism, engaging in covert surveillance of American dissidents, lying to the public about our involvement and strategy during the Vietnam War, sleeping through the first 5-10 years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, stealing the 2000 Presidential election, starting a war with a country that had not attacked us and using bogus intelligence to justify it, the country I love has a track record of making mistakes. We are lucky those mistakes - and others - did not ruin the American promise and all of the weight this country carries as an example of a type of freedom too few people enjoy.
We fixed most of those mistakes, sometimes based on public outcry and sometimes based on the leadership of a President of the United States and Congress. It is sad to know that we continue to make mistakes that directly impact 15-20 million lesbian and gay Americans, many of whom simply want the same rights as the other 280-285,000,000 take for granted. They are even willing to pay more individual income taxes, serve their country in times of war and get thrown into the mix of the general population. No one should be surprised. The last time I checked, lesbians and gay men love their country, too. All they really want is the right to fully participate in the ongoing project of fulfilling the promise of equality on which this democracy was founded.
Adults and children who are suspected of being lesbian or gay or announce their sexual orientation are subject to violent physical attacks, job discrimination, isolation from their communities and in extreme cases, kill themselves out of shame or embarrassment. Many live in fear every minute of every day. How is it possible that we have not learned or remembered the corrosive effect of discrimination against nearly every ethnic group we can imagine?
We can fix this just like we fixed so many other mistakes. It's not as complicated as we have been led to believe. Federal action is necessary. Laws which would grant full equality would be a good start but it has to begin with parents who teach their children it is wrong to bully, wrong to engage in violence based on immutable differences and wrong to stereotype. It's not happening. Under the cloak of organized religion, there are far too many supposedly pious adults who are unwilling to look past three or four sentences from religious texts that are repeated over and over again by bigoted pastors and who would send us back to 1950. At nearly 46 years old and to quote Fannie Lou Hamer addressing Congress in the run-up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." It harms no one to extend nationally recognized same-sex marriage rights. If one's only justification for discriminating against lesbians and gay men is based on religious scripture, consider looking for real estate in a country that did not invent the separation of church and state.