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.
According to the GSS, only 10% of Americans reaponded “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” to the statement “Homosexuals 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.
Because social media amplifies and incentivises minority, hateful views to make it seem like everyone is concerned about these things.
The reality is, it’s the same small group of hateful idiots who are always in the spotlight.
In real life, even in small towns, people either don’t care or they celebrate how far we’ve come as a society.
CIA and maybe collaboration with Mossad. Pink and rainbow washing is used to justify regime change operations abroad.
That 40 year step backwards comes from good intentioned politicians making deals with homophobic devils so to speak in order to save other people.
good intentioned politicians
homophobic devils
😂 It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.
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.
What does sexual orientation have to do with economics?
Surely the LGBT population has no bearing on the economy, right? I feel like I’m misunderstanding you somehow.
Class war isn’t about economics, it’s about power.
The “anti-woke” discourse is not as organic/grassroots as it appears; a large chunk of it is astroturfed.
The media don’t simply reflect the public discourse, they also shape it. Who owns the media? The capitalist class. They use the media to keep the working class divided, fighting each other, and focused on blaming their problems on something, anything but the capital class itself.
Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
Conservative pundits (and liberal ones, for that matter) are paid handsomely to distract people, to maintain our false consciousness, to pit us against each other.
Who owns the politicians? Again, the capitalist class, who fund their political campaigns. When politicians like Ron DeSantis rant about “woke ideology,” it’s almost always kayfabe; it’s an act.
This is not to say that none of it is organic. Our upset and our anger comes from our deteriorating lives under late stage/neoliberal capitalism—wherein the capitalist class squeezes ever more out of us—creates fertile ground for reactionary fervor.
How did this conversation go from “good-intentioned politicians” to whatever might be going on in Iran? Do you even know what’s really going on there? Because I don’t.
Imperial core countries and corporate media feed us a lot of garbage about countries they consider their “enemy,” so you should be skeptical of what they tell us. With that said, I’m sure LGBTQ+ rights stand to be improved in Iran, but I don’t really know if they’re getting better, worse, or remaining the same right now. What I do know is that the US wants to paint Iran in as bad a light as possible, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the media should run more stories about the plight of LGBTQ+ people in Iran.
You then don’t see the irony in telling the LGBT “we stand with you” and then going to homophobic nations and homophobic sects and saying the same thing (because they promise help with a certain advancement in awareness)?
That goes along with what I was talking about, about people making deals with the devil (a figure of speech by the way). I’m pretty sure this phenomenon does not need any help from class phenomenon, positive or negative, in order to exist.
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.
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.
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.
A little late-80s perspective: when I was growing up, “gay” was an insult we’d call eachother jokingly. Nobody “was gay” because that’s a (light, funny) slur. Hell, it wasn’t till I was 28 I realized it didn’t “have a dating-girls phase” that I never grew out of, I was just bi.
The homophobia is still pretty deeply ingrained even in people who aren’t that old and are really trying. I can only imagine how bad it is for those who aren’t and don’t.
Cultural progressivism has been used as a shield to implement bad economic policies.
Edit for those who do not understand:
