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Why does it seem the world is all of a sudden concerned about sexual orientation? Especially America. Did I miss how far we came as a society to see it take a 40 year step backwards?
It’s not “all of a sudden”. And it’s not “the world”. And it’s not even “America”. Rather, you’re now consuming media that’s exposing you to thoughts that have always been around, often on the fringes.
Remember, bigots have always existed, and polite bigots toe the line as much as they’re forced to. They aren’t going to disappear, ever. (That being said, we can make them less relevant and powerful.)
exactly. and bigotry isn’t limited to sex or race stuff.
people pretty much hate anyone who is different than them. even so called progressive inclusive hippie types… will express crazy bigotry towards groups they don’t like based on crude stereotypes that are largely not true.
our brains love to generalize. They don’t like treating people who are different than us as worth our acknowledgement and esteem.
Why are people so interested in defining themselves along sexual identity and orientation in relatively recent western culture?
Why now? Why is it so different from most of human existence?
Because we are no longer facing famine. The Green Revolution has made our relationship with food so secure we no longer define ourselves in relation to it.
Throughout most of history people are farmers or ranchers or shepherds or bakers or butchers or millers.
So, we climb the Biological hierarchy of needs looking for our next characteristic that needs fulfillment.
It’s finally reaching such widespread acceptance that 1. Actual bigots are getting concerned they can’t be bad people anymore and 2. Assorted people are getting tired of the discourse.
I don’t think the site admins would be appreciative of my suggestion :^)
In reality, forcing higher standards across the board raises the floor and can prevent enough bad behavior to be useful. Education and experience also encourage good behaviors. Basically, make it illegal to be a bigot, and let people learn why they don’t want to.
Ok probably a stupid question how do these rich shitbags get their money to work for them when in the public they, as you called them shitbags and push propaganda? To me pushing an agenda would do more harm than good instead of using it to organically grow itself without any interference
They (the investment/owner class) make their money work for them by investing and by playing the banks. Generally, they want to invest the vast majority of their money, and never cash out of their portfolio. When they need “cash” to buy something, they do it with loans and there’s lots of tricks (that I’m not super familiar with) to make loans as cheap as possible, and potentially even profitable if their investments are doing better than the cost of the loan.
Now, why would they spend money pushing propaganda when instead they could be investing that money? Well, when you are that rich, you don’t actually have to spend that much to push propaganda. People are already clamoring for your opinion, because they see you as successful and think, if I copy you then I too can be successful. And when you do need to buy an article, it’s pocket change compared to your vast wealth. And if instead you need to buy a TV news network, a newspaper, or a website, that itself can be an investment. As long as you don’t run it into the ground, it may make you money at the same time as allowing you to push propaganda.
And why do they want to push propaganda in the first place? Because if the working class (those that live off paychecks instead of investments) has the time, energy, and knowledge to do something about wealth inequality, then the investment class will start to have to pay their fair share and lose a bit of their wealth. The investment class doesn’t want that to happen so they need to rob the working class of those 3 things. Manufacturing a culture war is one way to steal time and energy from the working class, because they now have to spend that time and energy on defending personal rights. Busting unions is another way to rob time and energy, as the fewer rights workers have, and the less they are paid, the more time and energy they have to spend to stay out of poverty.
It’s all a ploy to get people to pay less attention to how the investment class gets their money so that they can keep racking up the score without interference.
That said, some of the investment class actually truly holds hateful views, as does some of the working class, but the working class has nothing to gain by acting on that hatred except a sense of personal fulfillment. The investment class benefits financially, so they may act out the hatred even if they don’t feel it.
Right, fuck, my bad. Welp, yeah, I’m sorry to say but I think it has more to do with your progression into understanding more about the world and perspectives outside of your own experience. In no way am I trying to be mean or discouraging. You asked a really valid and important question, and i guess i impulsively reacted and forgot there are people less jaded than me. For what it’s worth i admire you and hope that learning some people are STILL stuck being shitty doesn’t make you think everyone sucks. And I’m proud to learn that another person younger than me just ‘gets it’ that people are people deserving of love and respect regardless of bullshit like who they themselves love.
According to the GSS, only 10% of Americans reaponded “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” to the statement “Homosexuals should have the right to marry” people should have the right to marry in 1988 (first year the question was asked).
In 2004, it was 30%.
In 2022 it was 67%.
Also according to the GSS, 40 years ago a third of Americans thought homosexuals shouldn’t have the right to speak.
We’ve made remarkable progress in a very short period.
Yeah, trans people are just new targets. DOMA wasn’t that long ago, but regressives lost the battle against gay people, so trans people are just the next rung on the hate ladder for them.
Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people’s understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.
It’s all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.
Like “There are trans rapists in women’s prisons”… Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery is enough for a trans woman to meet the requirements.
Or
“Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men”… When hysterectomy isn’t even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.
But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won’t.
The capitalist class has class consciousness, and they understand that this is a class war. Until you develop class consciousness, the capitalist class will continue to take advantage of your false consciousness.
Are the Dharmic faiths particularly inclusive of queer folks? Or just by comparison? I don’t know about Buddhism but China is somewhat antigay, and it’s not like the Kama Sutra had any gay stuff in it, and with all the erotic Hindu temple art I’ve never seen any gay stuff going on. Happy to be corrected if I’m wrong in my amateur assessment here
You know my friend, I am just starting this journey, and I haven’t got there yet, so I have no answers for you. TBH I don’t think I want to learn about anymore than the handful that I do. So far they all have positives to add to a life well lived but taken as a whole they don’t make sense. Or they are just plain ol straight fucked up.
Well in america it seems to seems that people are theologically do things against LGBTQ and enacting them. The news we get and i preface this while knowing America is on the brink of it. That other countries or instutions are savages. Not my opinion but what we see daily.
My guy, there are entire countries controlled by Islamic Extremists where you’re lucky if all they do is kill you when they find out you’re LGBT, and it’s entirely for “theological reasons.”
I put this in quotes, because I’m not nor have I ever been a Muslim. But Islamic Extremists will kill gay people for supposed “theological reasons.”
It’s most definitely not just America doing it because “mah holy book says it’s wrong.”
Like I said I am in America and all we see is how backwards other countries are on the topic. It just feels like America is now in the process of becoming one of them
You’ve gotten enough good answers that I think it okay to address a tangent.
Things are definitely at the point where christofascists, and other hate driven ideologies are getting louder.
But, and this is vitally important as to why the pushback is making it a matter of public discourse at the level you’re asking about, there’s more allies now than ever.
Be ready for old man talking here, and ignore if not interested. Disclaimer: I have arthritis, and it’s easier to type gay than LGBTQ, so I’ll be using the shorter word for that reason, not as an exclusion.
Back in the seventies and eighties, gay rights was a thing for mostly gay people. Before that it had been gaining minor support, and the eighties were when social restrictions started changing enough that gay people were allowed to have some degree of public awareness in both news and fiction.
I keep bringing it up in various places, but Billy Crystal played the first recurring openly gay character on television. That was in 1977, and ran until 1981. I don’t think it can be said enough how huge that was in bringing awareness of gay people as just people was. That role brought gay into our homes and lives in a way nothing had before.
When something makes a group real to the majority, makes things stop being a dirty secret and just another part of life, you get kids growing up that are more open and accepting. As acceptance grew, so did the amount of people coming out.
As people came out, the straights realized that not only had they always known gay people, but they liked them, and even loved them for years, sometimes a lifetime. When that starts spreading, you have more people that are willing to support gay people and their rights as fellow humans.
Instead of being pariahs, gay people became part of life, part of our hearts. Eventually, more and more people that didn’t have direct relationships with someone gay became allies, supporters.
However, the more gay people became a part of life, the more noise bigots made, in their own homes and in public. So, instead of it being a dirty little secret nobody talked about, that way of thinking got nastier and louder. Before, it wasn’t something everyone would even know about until much later in life, but as the gay rights movement in the seventies started building up steam, you had more hatred being spewed as well. There had been before, but it was more likely to be handled with dismissive or contemptuous remarks rather than outright venom and bile in the open.
Now, us folks that were kids during the late 70s and early 80s didn’t just accept gay folks. We would often defy elders that opposed gay rights or bad talked them. As time passed and we grew up, the segment of that generation that became allies tended to be more and more vocal in our support. By the nineties, my generation was moving into adulthood and willing to vote our conscience. We were willing to put our time and money into the cause. Sometimes, we’d put our bodies on the line when things got ugly.
Move forward to now, and you’ve got two or three generations actively and loudly opposing the bigots, and not just the gay people. The bigots are smaller in number, but have been pandered to by political groups around the world, so have more weight than their numbers should give them.
Mind you, the bigots also include people of every generation too. Don’t imagine that there aren’t kids even that spew the same kind of nastiness that’s been used since before the 70s. But there’s more in direct opposition to them, and plenty of passive dismissal of the bigotry. Bigotry is not a relic of the past, nor is it limited to older generations; some of the loudest and most obnoxious hatred gets spewed by younger adherents. But the seeming percentage of hate is lower in younger generations, and the seeming percentage of outright support is higher.
That puts us in the situation we’re in, where hate has a bigger voice than it should, and love/acceptance has to shout louder to oppose it.
it really feels like it’s at a boiling point though right now. World governments have all shifted more to the right on average than they have in the last 80 years.
Things are definitely at the point where christofascists, and other hate driven ideologies are getting louder.
Good time to bring up how their numbers are drastically thinning. This is a big win and part of why we need to fight them hard as their fear of marginalization causes them to switch from dirty tactics to outright fascism to cling to power.
For an ugly fucking lady like Rowling, you’d think she would understand that going down the path of “that woman isn’t feminine looking enough to really be a woman” is anti-feminist at it’s core and could hurt her in the long run when people begin questioning her gender for being an ugly ass.
Or does she really think she’s some hot shit and not some ugly twat?
It’s literally already happened to Kyle Rittenhouse and Andrew Tate. She’s making this worse for herself in the long run.
They both genuinely hate trans people though. Hell, Musk disowned his own trans daughter. Like if he was just in it to divide the population he wouldn’t be treating his trans child so horribly.
Exactly. Its no coincidence we went from Occupy Wall Street and national level discourse about actual healthcare and UBI, to such debates as ‘is genocide okay?’ and ‘are nazis bad?’ Purposeful misdirection that in it’s staunch opposition to anything left of capitalism, created fascism.
You know, it’s perfectly OK to group voters by identity, so long as that identity cannot exclude “Normal” people. Soccer Mom, Six pack Dad, Middle class, working poor, labor, Small Business owner, Rural, Urban, and Suburban are all perfectly fine to promise these groups political power. But you do the exact same thing for queer people or black people and that’s identity politics all of a sudden.
can you please explain further what you mean? it could be interpreted a number of different ways.
i’m not sure if this is your point or not? but there is obviously overlap between each of those groups, there’s black sixpack dads, and poor/middle class lgbqti etc etc
anyway imo none of this revived division appears organic. there’s always going to be the odd biggot, but afaict the majority of modern biggots are being indoctrinated and radicalised by an organised media effort (and our leaders are either complicit or ‘inexplicably’ powerless at protecting us from it). for sure these radicalised biggots should do better, but we’re also talking about average people going up against billion dollar propaganda machinery. it’s certainly asymmetrical warfare.