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The Right passed actual laws in the 70s and 80s that banned gay people from teaching in public schools, or even someone advocating gay rights in public outside of school contexts. And there were the FCC crackdowns on indecent content, e.g. Howard Stern, the Helms Amendment.
There was also quite the panic around video games, movies, music, and board games, though that was admittedly bipartisan. I remember one teacher I had freaking out because I was reading one of those choose your own adventure books, which she associated with Dungeons and Dragons for some reason.
Did you ever feel like your fellow Americans hated you? Maybe I’m being histrionic but I guess 2016-2024 I just need knew fellow Americans were capable of doing things they did to me then. Like evil. The America I grew up with was united. Muslims hit us and we would all go kill them together. But 2016-2024 we were enemies with each other. It’s like losing my innocent. A civil war I never saw coming. And it honestly feels like we almost lost and America was over.
I'm not american, but welcome to how atheists (and gays, and so on) felt under the moral-majority-style religious right. It was the same kind of split were the moderate religious right was publicly saying not believing was fine, but they were actively politically allying (and thus empowering) a more rabid wing that would regularly go after people who do something that goes against their beliefs. Like, it's fine to be an atheist, as long as you don't do anything that might offend random christian activists.
To be fair, the woke actually still feels worse to me since it has more internal institutional backing inside academia, but there definitely is some symmetry here.
Your argument would be stronger if you focused on gays instead of atheists. I have no recollection of atheists facing any discrimination. I can 100% understand they thought the moral majority people were annoying but there are not any big everyday life frictions.
Gay potentially. But they did successfully lobby to keep gay bath houses open, during the AIDS pandemic. So they were not lacking political power.
I am also moral majority. Don’t be gay. It’s bad for you. Just find a nice wife.
You don't need to save me or anyone else, we don't want you to. Just live your own life. Other people being gay does not affect you.
I can imagine to an actual gay person hearing comments like that feels a lot like your fellow Americans hating you.
This argument is a good one right up until people start blaming me for the negative consequences of your personal choices.
It seems to me that Liberalism is going away and is unlikely to return for the forseeable future.
What you've shown me is Authoritarians wearing the skinsuit of the latest crisis to pass increasingly draconian laws. The article makes it clear that the local community, the victims father, and the governor of Wyoming were all committed to not trampling on the rights of others for the failure of personal choices.
The Authoritarians saw an opportunity to gain more power, and neither side decided to stop them. Liberalism dies in the dark. It is not a fundamental fact, an universal law, and the sweet seductive whisper of hurting your outgroup is such strong primal vice of humanity. Liberalism requires active support.
Liberalism will return, it is the currently known best possible solution to a multi-polar society. The foreseeable future will require us to re-learn that bloody lesson.
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To be fair to my argument. They actually did believe creating a moral society was good for the gays. I still believe that 1980’s culture was better for the gays than 2020.
In one area it seems most certain to me is with respect to children. Would Sam Altman be happier in the closet sneaking off for gay sex twice a month but with a loving wife raising his children or with the motherless child from a surrogate. To me it’s fairly obvious the former is better for him.
And obviously the children are effected.
Other people's children. Those people don't need you to come in and save their children. Just like you don't need the progressives to come in and save your children. This entire problem is because both sides want to "save" other people's kids. Stay in your own community and stop sticking your nose or your opinions in places that don't affect you.
Yes I'm sure Gays were so absolutely grateful that they definitely didn't protest soooo hard to stop it, and definitely aren't existing in a multi-generational state of trauma, forcing the rest of us to deal with that gratitude... I'd say the observed outcome of people's actions is that the 1980s culture was not better for the gays. Of course right-wingers are very biased in their opinion about this, because they need to see themselves as the hero, not the villain. Have some epistemological humility, the arrogance is staggering.
You mean a bitter wife who knows he's cheating on her with men but can't say anything about it, can't divorce him, being forced to hide who he is because otherwise his community will shame and ostracize him?
What I really don't get about you right-wingers is the amount of complaining you do about having to hide who you are around progressives because otherwise you will be socially shamed and ostracized. And then you turn around and say that other people should suffer that fate and call it the better outcome. Here you are getting a taste of your own medicine and it is bitter, but rather than learning, having empathy, understanding the other side's feelings, you cling to the delusions that when you do it, it is ok, it is moral.
We truly are fucked.
Maybe some people really are just better?
The rise of mental illness and reported happiness surveys would seem to strongly support that some people really just have better ideas/values.
I don’t believe gay people were ever banned from jobs or banks. I don’t believe their speech was restricted back then.
Also your saying it’s ok to torture kids (hopefully not having a mother is just mildly). Society does have responsibility for the vulnerable.
I also have not once said anything about being bitter. I think homosexuality is bad for society. I’ve never once said I am a libertarian so there is no hypocrisy. I do think society has a duty to protect the commons. If something is bad for society then we should want LESS of it.
But the difference between the 1980’s and today is I don’t believe the 1980’s tried to take offer communication systems so that debate ends. I don’t think they banned the POTUS from mass media. Or put him in jail. Etc.
No argument, but it might shock you, that I consider Christian Activists and Progs Activists to be Untermensch of the same caliber. Y'all are barely more evolved than apes. That sweet seductive vice of tribal conflict is just too much for you to resist. Like children in candy shop, you lot can't control yourselves.
Progs think you are torturing your kids. Who's to say they aren't right and that you are? What evidence do you have?
Are you a Consequentialist or a Deontologist? Christians are almost always required to be the latter so stop trying to use the arguments of the former. If I showed you the reduction in mental illness and increase in happiness flowed from prog values you would not change your beliefs, so stop trying to use that as your argument. It's disingenuous.
This comment expresses differently. link
Additional evidence:
This forum is full of conservatives complaining about having to keep quiet and call a man in a dress a woman. It's been a common complaint for years at this point. You might not be bitter, congratulations, but it is so incredibly common that to dismiss it, would be laughable.
Of a shock to no one, escalation begets not equal response but an increasing one. I think WhiningCoil said roughly: When the younger child pokes and prods the elder, and the elder hits the younger, sometimes its best to turn a blind eye because the younger clearly was equally involved and its an important lesson that escalating has a response.
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Yeah, you're really not helping my impression here. Progressives literally say 100% the same. It's fine to be a conservative religious, as long as you're like one of the good ones in their tv shows who lives a conservative lifestyle and is spiritual in some undefined way, but who doesn't actually espouse any conservative values nor seems to have strong specific religious convictions, either. And certainly doesn't "spread hate" about trans people, or "threatens reproductive rights" or whatever.
It's true in a sense, you can mostly live life just fine as a religious conservative as long as you don't trigger random progressive activists.
I think at this point we can all agree if you lose a culture war - you mostly can not just go live your life. Not in 2020.
I do think it’s an interesting question whether you a gay could just live their life in 1980. Probably not in pro sports. Elite investment banker you were probably mostly fine.
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I was more late 90s and 2000s, and the closest I got to feeling hated was around the Iraq War, when I was vocally anti-war in a time when everyone supported it, in what we would now call a red state (back then, the blue-vs-red framing barely existed).
I would say I feel more hated now than I did then; my politics are the same, but my visible identities create negative reactions (and my invisible ones--like being bi--I don't advertise).
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