It’s all about distraction. All of us seek entertainment because our lives are usually quite dull. So the media feeds us things to have opinions about. Politicians, big tech psychos, gender issues…
It’s all pointless and keeps us from actually making any real difference. People here on Lemmy fight over which words to use, gender issues, or god forbid, someone admits they are not vaccinated…! Wow. Nuclear bomb right away.
None of this matters at all, it’s just entertainment… Nobody changes their minds from getting downvoted either. Sometimes it feels like keyboard warriors here think they are fighting some kind of fight. But nobody changes their mind guys, even if you downvote them.
So it’s actually pure entertainment and distraction from what matters… :) We don’t have to be so serious.
Because Americans are too ignorant and uneducated to assemble tribally over any actually important issue. Heck most people on Lemmy think if you’re gay and go to UAE they just chop your head off and bury you under a camel. The reality is that the world doesn’t care, just keep your private life private. But when your entire identity becomes a label you have to shout at everyone it’s basically veganism
“Keep your private life private” Okay so I can’t hold my gf’s hand in the street but if I had a bf it would be allowed. In some countries I wouldn’t be allowed to marry her. Are those issues of making my private life public? A lot of people do care and hate us. Im getting weird looks everytime I’m with her in the street. So shut up about issues you’re not concerned with.
That’s not true at all. You have a warped view of the reality because of being fed negative propaganda.
The same way the North Koreans believe weird untrue things. You can see that propaganda because it’s transparent to anyone who has lived outside that bubble. The American propaganda is equally stupid
I don’t even live in America. You should just shut up.
I don’t think it’s good to just generalise a whole country of people. I’m not American but I realise we only really see the lunatics and crazy opinions. The regular people are as boring and uninterested as the rest of us, it’s just that doesn’t drive engagement.
So you see something that concerned 2% to 15% of the population use to hide in the closet and or we didn’t talk about it or know.
Now people are done hiding. Which impacts tons of people who barely understand their anatomy let alone their wives. When school never taught intersex and gender despite it being a thing that was understood in science in the 60s and 70s. A lot of people are suddenly confronted with a reality they don’t understand. When peoples bubbles are popped first comes rejection of thing then comes fear and anger. Issue is with 8 billion people there is constantly people learning about sexual orientation, gender, and sex.
Let’s not even talk about the internalize confusion of you people either. This is just current existing people learning about this stuff today.
it’s only the lucky and the people with enough support in urban enough environments that are not hiding anymore; everyone else is still stuck in the closet.
Very fair. Still the cuntry side are seeing them in their media and world more and more
It’s so dumb, like of all the challenges facing us as a species now, THAT’S the shit that people are getting worked up about? Life on Earth for humanity is in the process of going through a set of major environmental changes that we’re probably not ready for and is going to have catastrophic results for some… and there’s people out there getting bent out of shape about pronouns and sexual orientation. We need to be doing alot more preparing for what’s coming over the next few years and a lot less bitching about things that don’t personally affect us. It seemed like we had made some big strides for awhile there, and that seemingly got erased within the past 8 years.
But those other things is stuff which askes a sacrifice of you personally, while someone else’s sexual orientation only needs you pointing at them. In the Netherlands where I live it’s a lot less about sexual orientation (but still some), and a lot more about foreigners, be it asylum seekers or people of Moroccan descent who’s grandparents were brought over in 1960’s because of labour shortages.
literally russian bot farms
🤦🤦🏾♀️🤦🏻🤦🏽♀️🤦🏼♀️🤦🏿🤦🏾♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽🤦🏿♀️🤦🏾♀️🤦🏽🤦🏽🤦🏾🤦🏽
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.
Is that why I had to fly to a different state to marry my gf instead of my home state who does not recognize same sex marriages?
So now it’s demonstrated this can’t be true was it a lie and if so why? If not then what extra details make it plausible?
All 50 states are recognize gay marriage since Obgerfel v Hodges in June 2015.
Recognize is not perform.
In this case it is. All 50 states are required to perform gay marriages as of June 26th, 2015. The ruling took immediate effect nationwide. Clerks were having to hand-edit marriage licenses to allow for same-sex certificates because within an hour of the ruling people were showing up at courthouses to get married in states where it had been illegal.
Churches aren’t required to perform same-sex marriages nationwide, however.
Pretty sure churches aren’t required to anywhere in the US
Correct. And I appreciate that. A couple wanting a religous wedding should know that the pastor that’s blessing the union supports them.
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.
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 isn’t enough for trans women.
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.
Part of the problem with arguments like that is if you say ‘trans women are not widely represented in women’s jails’ they can say ‘yeah but the left want to change that with self ID and all the other things they push for’ so really the only point you’ve made in their mind is that its good the people pushing these things aren’t in power.
Surely no one can deny that the lefts messaging has been that a trans person should be able to enter any gendered space without question? You never see trans advocates say ‘yes creepy men pretending to be women to gain access to female spaces is a legitimate problem which we intend to protect against by…’ they say ‘its not a problem, will never be a problem and anyone who says it might be is evil and stupid and bad’
Everyone knows a lot of men are creepy, everyone knows that there are rapists who if able to get put into a woman’s jail would jump at the chance - if one side is going to pretend these aren’t true simply because it makes the rest of their belief on the issue difficult to explain then that’s not on the normies who don’t accept it without question.
Up until the run up to the election the UK labour party for example pledged self ID legislation would be made law and there was huge outcry from trans advocacy groups when they changed their mind - you can’t argue that something you’re trying to make happen isn’t a problem because it doesn’t yet happen.
The transition requirements are so high
what are the requirements?
Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery… But whether or not you “fit the requirements” won’t be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There’s documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn’t a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.
It’s also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women’s prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to “expectedly matter of course” .
So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally “at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all”
it’s mostly that it is social wedge issue that drives up ratings, outrage, and politicians can grandstand about it. And make up crazy bullshit about kids being forced to transition by evil doctors or something.
and therefore we can ignore real issues in the country while the media/pols rant on about total nonsense that affects hardly anyone and mostly isn’t real or relevant to trans people or any people at all.
Oh man, I’d never even considered the fact that all these supposed “male rapists in female prisons” have had bottom surgery.
Like, what man cares so much about being able to rape women that he gets his dick cut off? That’s so much easier to believe than the idea that trans women actually are what they say they are (i.e. they are trans women, not men with a fetish or whatever other grossness)?
After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.
We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex… But in talking with cis people I actually think it’s something else. I think the vast majority of cis people’s experience of gender only comes from external influences… I have met cis people who recognize what we’re talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it’s actually rare.
So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who’s entire experience of gender is performance based… So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand… But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.
I don’t think it’s that they don’t have an internal gender identity, I think it’s just hard for them to tell. Ask a cis woman how she knows she’s a woman and she’ll probably say something like “because I have a woman’s body”, but I don’t think that means she has no internal sense of her gender, it just means it takes a lot more introspection and nuance than she’s spent to get to that than it takes to go “boobs, check, vulva, check, I’m good”. She doesn’t have a disconnect, so she’s never had to really consider it, doesn’t mean she doesn’t have it.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think research indicates we aren’t special because we have a gender identity, but because of what it is.
That’s not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.
But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we’re talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people’s. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?
Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don’t really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don’t fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people… But otherwise on their own those things don’t make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.
They also don’t seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don’t tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.
I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don’t actually mean anything to them on their own.
Change the question slightly and they think about it differently. Ask them how they’d feel if they lost some of those features. A cis man with hairy arms and chest probably doesn’t say he feels a great joy when he thinks about them, but would probably feel some real discomfort if he couldn’t grow body hair any more. They assign a neutral value to them because they consider it “default”. And of course not everyone feels the same way about these things, cis or trans, but I think most cis people really do value their genders and sexed bodies because those things match, even if they wouldn’t say so.
Either way, I think we’re both speaking anecdotally and I don’t plan to go look for the research on gender identity right now.
That’s the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it’s root in other people’s perceptions. There’s a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project “manliness” as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces…but doesn’t well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.
It’s a difficult knot to dig down to it’s source but I think it’s a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it’s so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.
To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn’t really happening because cis people don’t really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don’t really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can’t just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate… And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.
There are 8 billion people in the world. If 10,000 people on Xwitter are upset about something, it’s statistically insignificant.
This is what pisses me off about people that go on about I’m sick of this woke society or sick of these “crazy trans people”, or whatever else.
And I’m like brother I do not care and most people do not care. Let people do what they want it ain’t that deep. I’m off the view if it doesn’t negatively affect me then what business is it of mine how people live their life. The things they get outraged over is just from some minority of loons on Twitter and not everybody.
Because right wingers spent the past ten years repackaged the fear mongering about “The Gay Agenda” and call it woke instead.
Which is a repackaging of the satanic panic.
Which is a repackaging of the red panic.
What about reefer madness?!
Sounds like a good time!
Conditions have gotten worse and the ruling class has chosen a scapegoat to distract people from the ongoing class war.
So I am a class? Feel so blessed and afraid at the same time.
You are an instance
Everyone is in ‘a’ class. It’s a classification of the populous. Do you work for money, or does your money work for you?
If you receive a paycheck or have to budget what so ever, chances are you are not part of the classification of shitbags that push the propaganda.
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.
Rich shitbags funding divisive propaganda to make the plebs fight each other and vote against their own interests.
Any war but a class war…
Musk and JK Rowling come to mind, specifically.
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.
I mean, you seem to be assuming that muskboy cares about any of his children.
He just hates that one more because she exposes him for the hateful shitbag he is.
JK Rowling is just mad that gender doesn’t fit the sorting hat.
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.
She may be making it worse but she has made enough money to not give a shit.
? I mean here personality is ugly, but google images make it seem like she is not physically ugly. Not that that really matters.
I cant help but feel like you’re calling all these people ugly and think that’s some how cool.
Perhaps you’ve been projecting the ugliness within you all along and that normal looking non-supermodels can be shitty people for things separate from the way they look.
Identity politics resonates with brain dead public.
We got the government we deserve.
Conservatives have been furious about that progress this whole time. They will never accept progress. If permitted, they will undo every bit of anti-bigotry progress made in the last 100 years and return us to a slave-based economy.
Conservatism is a deadly social cancer. It always has been.
I suspect the truth is a lot more scary than you might be ready to admit. You’re so close to the answer. It’s staring you right in the face.
The unfortunate truth is: The people (tribe) that you’re (rabidly) in support of are merely using those identity politics dogwhistles so that you’ll continue voraciously gobbling up the increasingly miniscule table scraps from the ruling class while thinking to yourself that you’re the last bastion of resistance against some great encroaching evil.
Please read some Chomsky, my friend.
Your commitment to analyzing all of this through a small hole of ideas that are relevant to you is preventing what you’re saying from making complete sense. You’re omitting things and skewing the perspective with a lens.
This is because you’re both correct to some degree. Yes there is a large tribe who is using identity politics to gain support. However that support is less than equal to the other camp who uses scapegoating of said identities when you compare support on said social issues.
For all of time this has worked in politics and as always it is, as you point out basically, used to obscure the actual dealings.
Here’s where you’re completely off the rails. The DNC are masters at very little and especially are not masters at mass media marketing. Their slogans fail, their advertisements are bad, and they have failed to instill ideas that counter those of the right. The line about “conservatives are good for economy” still exists and they have no counter. The DNC are incredibly weak compared to the RNC.
Make no mistake, the DNC is scraping by because they do not represent exactly what the elite class believe as much as the republicans do. The media has mostly turned on them and criticizes their candidates about 10x more. Most of the media, owned by the elite class, does not belong to the DNC. Every major news network, including CNN now, goes against them and works counter to them.
And when we talk about why lgbt issues are present now, it has little to do with the tribalism you’re referencing. Little to do with identity politics. What’s even more rough to hear is that lgbt politics don’t matter to most voters. They matter to an LGBT crowd. Which is far smaller than the fundamentalists that the anti-lgbt are attracting. The DNC are not pro-LGBT in the way that we think of. They are pro-LGBT in the opposite way. The way where the other party has forced them to be.
That was a low effort response to a well written detailed post that took quite a while to write. At least deal with some of the issues raised, don’t just ignore everything they said and dismiss them as willfully ignorant.
It was because I thought the author both understood and even agreed with my point in principle but then did intricate mental gymnastics to disagree with my point and let everyone off the hook including the person that I was disagreeing with.
I don’t want to continue talking in circles with Centrists telling me that the piss pouring on my head is in fact charitable rain drops from the benevolent libs.
That’s a much better response!
Thanks for pulling it out of me.
Kind vibes to you, friendly and intellectually honest fellow fediverse Lemmy user. 🙏
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.
queer and black people don’t have money. those other groups do.
if all the sudden queer people were billionaires, you can sure as shit bet they’d be promised political power. in exchange for their money. they’d be running corporations, in political office, etc.
it just turns out that it’s mostly white dudes who have all the money, and some white women, and the occasional random other non-white person has it. in USA at least. obviously different in other countries.
Gay people have exactly as much money as everyone else. There are proportionately as many gay billionaires as there are gay homeless people.
Is it?
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.
The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.
A huge portion of religious people believe that homosexuality is an especially dangerous sin because it’s a social contagion, they see the increased popularity of gay things and the decreased respect for religion as a clear sign that the devil is winning and faithful, godfearing society is collapsing. To an extent they’re right, modern views on self determination and respect for others is anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years - to the faithful it’s like saying the sky is pink or fish live in trees.
There are of course now grifters using homophobia to draw people into their political ideologies but it’s generally people from homophobic families in homoohobic communities that get drawn into it, it’s easy to forget that when you see a twenty something year old kid making homophobic comments it’s likely at his age his dad was going ‘queer bashing’ for fun with his friends and certainly wouldn’t have hesitated to beat up a gay person in a bar or in the street if encountered.
Even big artists like Eminem had deeply homophobic messages in his music, now that’s backtracked and he’s friends with Elton - this isn’t entirely because he’s grown as a person but because at the start of this century it was unconscionable that rap or hip hop could be anything but homophobic. School kids used the word ‘gay’ to describe uncool or disliked things so commonly it was even part of my own vocab despite being raised in a progressive and accepting family in a liberal area.
Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime but it’s not universal, a lot of religious and conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.
Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.
It’s a hugely complex issue for me, I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is. Forcing things too hard can be painful for those unready which causes resentment and reaction but holding back and allowing non-violent homophobic behavior to exist in our society is hurtful to those struggling to find snd accept themselves. (For example being 17 and trying to reconcile popular music explicitly talking about how your unexplored sexual desires are disgusting, realizing you have to make the choice between humiliation and self denial - and this is probably a big part of other emotional troubles which can lead to rejection of otherwise sensible social norms leading to unhealthy drug use, self endangering behavior and other things that still have lasting damage to my life to this day)
I don’t know what will solve these complex issues in our society, maybe making certain concessions to mildly homophobic sections of society would stop driving them into full on culture war crusaders? Maybe highlighting that it’s not only possible but probable to be gay and boring would help ease the anxiety? I actually kinda think straight pride type events and companies pandering to heterosexuals could be normalized and accepted more - not in a way that pits them against everyone else but more of a everyone gets a party kinda way. Stop heteros feeling attacked or at least make those who want to paint that picture looking silly.
It’s sad to admit but humanity is naturally kinda selfish and shitty, bigotry and group thinking is as natural and easy to us as breathing while compassion and understanding takes effort and the right circumstances to flourish.
excellent writeup
i agree with alot of what you said and will try to hit a few key issues and hope i can add something to the excellent perspective you’ve cast.
The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.
exactly, they know its a very useful mechanism to accumulate power. so imo we should constantly remind ourselves - they’d be doing this anyway. if homosexuality didn’t exist or was non-viable for this, they’d be onto something else. they’d have used any topic to get what they want. (you could ofc have a metadiscussion about why certain topics are more powerful than others. but thats a different discussion).
anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years
another critical point, as you correctly identified, this is how christianity has become, not what christianity was even purportedly about. if you take the actual words attributed to jesus in the bible, afaict never said a god damn thing about being gay trans whatever. according to their own book - after centuries of fucking with the bible - it STILL says the greatest commandment of all is to love your neighbour as yourself and you can’t judge cos you’re all fuckin sinners afterall.
so it’s all hypocrisy built upon hypocrisy , basically typical “there are 5 lights” bs. in other words it has all the fingerprints of a propaganda pathology not an expression of positive spirituality.
Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime
yeah to that end i think the OPs timeline of 40 years was a bit optimistic, or we at least have to recognise that represents a cross-section of OPs experience which wasn’t necessarily universal 40 years ago. that said i feel there has been a backslide in the last say 10-15 years)
conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.
tbh i think thats because its probably both at the same time, its a documented soviet technique to covertly fund two sides of an issue to control the outcome. not picking on the soviets btw, just that they did a great job perfecting these kinds of things, wrote it down and then the power structures keeping them secret began to collapse and the methology leaked to the public.
we see this in a simpler form where corporations invest in pride month and also unironically heavily invest in homophobic organisations, (so i guess it doesn’t always have to be a cold war operation for powerful entities to effect control via seemingly conflicting interests).
and in what is presumably a less consciously aware context, consider how jk rowling veils her attacks on the trans community behind a thin veneer of “caring about gay people”. i’m strongly of the belief if she’d been born 50 years earlier she’d be jumping on the homophobia bandwagon instead of the currently “trendy” transphobia bandwagon.
to say another way, not everyone pretending to be our friend has our interests at heart, infact sometimes they’re just trying to accumulate power by taking the positive stance on this issue - probably for no other reason than the negative position won’t currently yield them as big a return.
and this can lead to eg. conservatives becoming outraged about a stance taken by someone who is vocal and politically motivated, but who has no business speaking on our behalf, then conservatives end up feeling like they’re “under attack from the homosexuals” when it wasn’t even a homosexual who said it!!
next the conservatives says some hateful thing in retaliation, people respond to that and it spirals…everyone loses (except perhaps the actual perpetrator). this is definitely a flaw in human thinking where our tribalism clouds our perception, we feel under attack and in the heat of the moment incorrectly assess which side someone is taking (or even that there’s only 2 sides, when in life there’s probably rarely ever only 2 sides).
Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.
again, its probably both? tbh i don’t think that laziness is the only explanation for the woefully shoehorned characters we’re currently getting. honestly its fucking insulting (to us, not the biggots - though the biggots might feel insulted too?). as you mention its a profitable cash grab, and i’m sure it hasn’t escaped their notice that a certain type of aggressively half-arsed inclusivity will provide alot more value to them from the hysteria it generates vs actually doing it ‘right’ in a sensitive and compassionate way, which might actually lead to healing.
if healing is what they actually wanted i think it’d look very, very different than how it currently looks. and the kindest interpretation is they’ve realised it’s more profitable short-term to produce hysteria instead of healing.
compare in contrast to what i still think (despite modern news) was a great example of inclusivity characters with the lesbian main characters in buffy:
in 1999 no less, it showed a lesbian couple in bed and instead of a cheap sexiness grab, they’re literally sitting up in bed reading & having a mundane conversation. no sexualisation of the lesbian relationship as something existing only for hetero male gratification, or out attacking heteros. just plain, believable real life characters living a boring normal part of their life. so yes i very much agree that the boring normality is a very powerful thing. surely ALOT more positive overall than aggressive hysteria.
In summary my take-aways are:
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their MO is to use a scapegoat, they’d be attacking someone vulnerable, regardless of whom
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not everyone pretending to be our friend actually wants to help us
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hysteria is sadly apparently more profitable (short term) than healing
A positive note?
I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is
i really don’t either, though something think how homosexuality has been hijacked in modern perception (by that 1000 years of fake christianity as you mentioned). in eg. parts of ancient societies, men could love men and women could love women, someone could be a third gender, and it wasn’t even a thing to get upset about it, because it was just normal life. why do we suffer when they didn’t even know they were supposed to be suffering?
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The only identity politics I want to see is us against the ruling elite. Everything else is sparkling fascism.
