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The progressives disagree with you that these spaces were ever non-political, and frankly, I think they're right. I could talk at length about Dutch pillarisation and the funny consequences this had for society, but the people who bemoan politics being everywhere now are people who haven't been paying attention for all that long.
For a while they were at the very least acting like all they wanted is apolitical treatment, if they never believed it, why should I take them at their word regarding anything?
That's flatly wrong. It was indeed possible to participate in hobby groups and focus on the hobby instead of any politics for many, many years prior to the awokening.
The standard response, and the correct one, is that the people who used to get them fired and beaten and marginalised are suddenly uncommonly invested in a tolerance they never believed in. Why should they believe anyone who talks about it when it never seems to have been on the table before?
Not for gay people, it wasn't. And lest you compare their fate to yours, they were in fact born that way in a way the people bemoaning anything rainbow-colored aren't.
That may be the standard response, but no honest person can claim it's correct. For example, you are not talking to a person who tried to get them fired, beaten, and marginalized, you are talking to a person who tried to protect the from getting fired, beaten, and marginalized, and tried talking extremely bigoted and aggressive people into acceptence.
The correct response is that people who were arguing for broad principles of acceptance and free speech are suddenly uncommonly invested in intolerance. I'm not going to say that they never believed in it, because it's starting to look like they always did, and were just hiding it.
Yes it was. No one cared what you were doing outside the hobby group.
You can do better than insist you're only talking to liars, and I'd appreciate if you did that rather than accuse me of lying to your face.
Because, for what it's worth, I'm sure those are the things you believe. And I'm also sure gay people are right to point out that these beliefs, today, are the ones of people who'd love to shove them back down the closet. Until there is a way to distinguish the likes of you from the likes of them, a good deal of them are going to take a dim view of people who bemoan a lost tolerance. A tolerance, I'll add, that they didn't see much of in the first place.
The workplace. The military. Public life in general.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. History didn't start off in the 2010s, and plenty of people cared about that just fine.
But there was a way to determine it, public people like James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghosian, the Weinstein Brothers, etc. have a track record. Private people like me also do, even though it may not be accessible by randos on the Internet, it was accessible to people in my immediate environment, who suddenly decided continue the march of progress and steamroll over all concerns.
Scroll back in the conversation, it was about hobby groups. You were claiming politically neutral spaces never existed, that's what I'm disputing. You might notice the issue people are raising isn't about taking politics out of public life - something that might very well be a contradiction - but about having some spaces were we can set aside intra-societal disputes, and focus on the things that we have in common.
Then, as an example we're both familiar with, I'll point to the Boy Scouts of America as a hobby group (which it effectively is) gay people couldn't openly be a part of.
Wasn't it an explicitly religious hobby group? I recall "reverent" being a part of the Scout's Oath or whatever.
I'm not familiar enough with the organisation to know. Wouldn't that make the 'no apolitical spaces for The Gays' case even stronger?
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