If you’ve ever questioned whether there’s more to life than going to the gym and catching Will & Grace reruns, this is the issue where we give the answer to that question.

In our community, it’s often required the going to get tough before the tough will get going, but when current events get intolerable, people do come out of the gyms.

As writer, and former Gay & Lesbian Times editor, Pat Sherman writes in this week’s feature, our most proud activist moments have occurred in conjunction with the most blatant discrimination on a national and local level, whether it’s discrimination coming from Anita Bryant, the Union-Tribune or the President.

What about now?

With Gavin Newsom and Coretta Scott King (who this week affirmed her support for marriage equality) in our world, maybe we could take a vacation from… caring?

Maybe not. The news this week provides at least four good reasons to stay connected, and to get involved and active in working for our rights.

Reason number one: the United States military.

Just days ago, on Tues., March 30, Congress passed a bill that reaffirms the military’s right to go onto our nation’s campuses and have unfettered access to recruitment of students, while continuing to openly discriminate against gay and lesbian students who are barred from joining the military under “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies. In the fall of last year, a dozen of the nation’s leading law schools – including Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and members of Harvard Law School – filed four separate lawsuits, and one complaint from the Harvard folks, against the military for its violation of campus nondiscrimination policies.

In other words, the smartest legal minds in the nation didn’t like the open, official employment discrimination that was taking place on our nation’s campuses, and they asserted that military recruiters should not be treated the same as other employers who recruit on campuses within nondiscriminatory guidelines.

The military responded with HR 3966, passed this week by Congress, that simply reaffirms the already-existing right of the military to violate campus nondiscrimination policies and to openly discriminate against gay and lesbian students who may want to serve their country in the military.

It’s called official discrimination: Many of our country’s brightest legal minds have recognized it as such, but as long as it exists, there’s good reason to connect with organizations like the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (who have filed a brief in this case) to end institutional discrimination based on our loves and our families.

Reasons number two and three: Doctors Christine Brody and Douglas Fenton of North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group.

In another case set to go before courts April 9, a San Diego lesbian’s case will be heard nearly four years after doctors Brody and Fenton refused to continue 11 months of exhausting and costly fertility treatments because they learned that their patient was a lesbian.

The doctors openly cited their “religious beliefs” concerning gays as their reason for refusing to continue the treatments – after a grueling 11 months of treatments had already been undertaken by the patient. Their refusal forced the San Diego woman to seek treatments elsewhere and outside of her plan, as the obviously inappropriately-named North Coast Women’s Medical Center provided the only clinic with fertility treatments covered by her employer’s healthcare benefits.

If that’s not enough for a woman seeking motherhood to endure, a state court in San Diego two years ago threw out the entire case on the basis of a federal law barring state civil rights claims against doctors when the health care has been obtained through an employer plan. But that decision was overturned last year by a California appeals court ruling, giving the case its day in court.

The good news is that about one year and a half, some repeat treatments and thousands of dollars after the act of discrimination against them, the San Diego woman and her partner celebrated the arrival of a baby boy into their family.

We at the Gay & Lesbian Times – many of us parents, like many of you – believe that the right for every child to be born into a world where their mother and father has equal rights, and the right to be born into a nondiscriminatory environment, is worth fighting for.

That San Diego child is our fourth reason, if you needed one.