At this time tomorrow, I’ll be 20. As I write this, I’m still 19, so maybe I’m missing some of the wisdom I may have when I turn 20. But to tell the truth, I’m depressed about my birthday. Twenty seems pretty old, doesn’t it?

In the past 20 years, the world has changed a lot. When I was born, Ronald Reagan was president and was trying to convince people the Cold War would last forever. Leonid Brezhnev died, starting a power struggle that would last three years, ending when Mikhail Gorbachev became premier.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon in an attack on the PLO. Lebanese Christian Phalangists killed hundreds of Palestinians at two refugee camps. The United States Congress failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982.

I still have trouble understanding what happened with the Equal Rights Amendment; I thought it was part of our Constitution until I was about 15 years old. I thought discrimination, based on sex, race, age or sexual orientation was illegal and I was shocked when I learned it wasn’t. My whole life, I had been taught the glories of this nation and its freedom. But this nation still denies women, minorities and homosexuals equal rights.

All right, technically, racial discrimination is outlawed by the Fourteenth Amendment, but strides weren’t made until the 1950s toward actually implementing this amendment. And, even today, de facto segregation is legal. According to an article in The New York Times Magazine on Sept. 15, a local court decided to stop busing between different school districts.

Maybe Chancellor John Silber was friends with the judge in that case. Well, that statement went a little too far — Silber hasn’t defended racial discrimination. He only defended discrimination based on sexual orientation, claiming the Boy Scouts have the right to deny a gay man a position as Scout leader and by cutting the BU Academy’s chapter of the Gay-Straight Alliance.

Discrimination, whether it is based on age or sexual orientation, is wrong. Silber even mentioned in his speech to UNI students Friday that he was denied admittance to the Masonic Lodge because he only had one arm. That is wrong, even if he said he didn’t care. There is no difference between discriminating against a man with one arm and discriminating against a man who happens to be gay.

Maybe there is one difference: Silber disapproves of gay people and does not disapprove of people with one arm. Well, who knows, maybe he disapproves of people with one arm; he told The Daily Free Press reporter Ray Henry during a Dec. 5 interview that he tried to join the army and the Marines during World War II, despite his physical limitations.

Is that why Silber is defending discrimination? Does he believe homosexuality is something that can be overcome with hard work? In his speech Friday, Silber refuted the theory that homosexuality is determined at birth. Does he think he can change a person’s sexual orientation by preventing him or her, as a teenager, the right to identify with other people who are similar?

I attended a public school on Long Island and, as far as I know, there was no Gay-Straight Alliance. Two boys I grew up with have come out of the closet since entering college. They are the only two boys I know of from my high school who have come out of the closet, but it’s more than likely more have. I’ve never found the nerve to ask either of those boys if things would have been different if our school district was more accepting of gay people, but things might have been easier for either of them if they could have met other gay people and identified with that lifestyle.

Two of my parents’ closest friends are a gay couple. I grew up knowing them, I baby-sat for their three children and I was shocked when I learned their insurance would not cover in-vitro fertilization for one of them because she was a member of a gay couple. They were just two people who wanted to have a baby, and their insurance told them the procedure was not covered. At the same time, the procedure was covered by the same insurance for another woman who worked with them.

Is this the type of discrimination Silber is talking about? These women are two of the best parents I know. Should they be discriminated against because they happen to be two women who live together?

According to The Daily Free Press’ excerpts of Silber’s speech, there are homosexuals “who insist on recognition, approval and endorsement of homosexuality as an equally acceptable alternative lifestyle.” Isn’t this what everyone wants? Wasn’t recognition of a different lifestyle from England’s the cause of the American Revolution? Wasn’t that the reason behind the Bill of Rights?

Twenty years is a long time. The world has changed, but Chancellor John Silber seems determined to keep BU in the past. He defends the right to discriminate and disapprove of different lifestyles.

Of course, Silber also instituted the Guest Policy during the last twenty years. From the responses to his letters’ last year, I know students feel this is another archaic policy, another one of Silber’s ways to keep us in the past. It’s time for BU to move forward with the times, and recognize the changes of the past 20 years, to foster the students here into adopting a freer world.

That would be a good birthday present for me, John Silber: a University that rejects all types of discrimination and embraces the changing world.

Instead, I’ll probably have some friends over to celebrate my birthday; since it’s Thursday, I will only be able to have four at a time and they will have to leave by 1 a.m.

Happy birthday to me.