On a personal note, while i was initially opposed to gay marriage up to a few years back, my stance has softened considerably, not because i was shouted at to change my viewpoints but because after a year of chatting regularly with
@Kei i thought to myself, "she really deserves to be happy and she should get the chance to marry her soulmate, if things progress to that stage."
I thought it was more how people started having relatives, siblings and children coming out and lawmakers started to face the prospect of demonizing their family or supporting acceptance of homosexuals.
Well, why would anyone come out?
They were sick of living a lie and took a risk, they thought their family would accept them, they were encouraged by other success stories and/or their associates to try?
Those are the three I came up with off the top of my head.
No. You're missing my point.
Anyone can come out for any reason. Why would:
- more people come out recently?
- those people coming out create a positive feedback loop that propelled gay rights into fast prominence?
Why now and not...at any other point in history where coming out could apparently not have achieved the same result?
It seems to me that it's clearly not just people coming out. There had to have been something else since this option was always available.
A complex web of changing social conditions stretching far back from the founding of the Roman Empire and antiquity, through the rise of Christianity, through the medieval age.
Homosexuality in medieval Europe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Times change, views change, early christian views on sexuality were informed by the early pagan, roman, and greek views, and Christianity at first viewed homosexual acts the same way they viewed any other sex acts, with sex being reserved specifically for procreation (during earlier inquisitions, homosexuals were not punished for such acts alone but for challenging the churches stance, same as anyone else). In addition, platonic romantic relationships between males and females occured, especially in monastaries where monks would declare other monks to be their 'brother'. As time went on society began to adopt more conservative views, and punishments became harsher, before swinging back around into the modern age, where people accused of homosexuality would be abducted and beaten, before eventually finding acceptance again.
In other words, why now? Why dont you tell me why social acceptance of homosexuality has swung back around again.
TLDR: Its fucking complicated.
While as I acknowledged before things like modern education and a rising middle class have played a central role in progressivism, I think you are missing a very important and pertinent factor given the topic of this thread, and that is the gay pride parades. They told people that they weren't alone, that there were lots of people out there like them, and that it was ok to be like them. It helped pushed more LGBT people to make the dangerous risk of coming out despite the chance of being disowned or worse, and do so in large enough numbers to help make LGBT people be normative, to be friends, family, acquaintances, celebrities.
But do you know what the gay pride movement also did? It upset large tracts of the straight public. To see the 'homos' come out en masse into their streets, to have them not only proudly admit to be 'homos' but to flamboyantly show it? It enraged them. And to this day there are still people who insist that the immoderation of the gay pride movement set back the LGBT cause by offending moderates who'd otherwise be swayable by the softer approach of having people you know come-out, no flamboyance and no parades.
In doing so they miss the point of what the movement did. It wasn't about persuading straight people to respect LGBT people, it was about rallying LGBT people to come out, and force straight people to come to terms with the reality that their friends, family, acquaintances, and celebrities are LGBT, something which could and did persuade the general public.
So once again we have this fable constructed wherein honey wins and vinegar loses. The reality is that if you want to get to the point where honey will matter you will need vinegar first. People forget that MLK didn't exist in a vacuum, that the government knew that if MLK faltered his movement would lose power to the more radical and violent elements. We paint the likes of Malcolm X as 'bad' and 'failures' but to be frank MLK's success rests on their backs, much like it rests on the backs of the national guard who enforced civil rights at the point of a bayonet as needed.
Wouldnt minority movements have to be given power by the majority first? If we decide as a society, that it is morally okay to enslave all people from asia, what are they going to do to stop us? The only choices they have are to A) Flee, B) Fight, C) Accept their new lot, D) Attempt to change our minds. How does a minority protect itself from a tyranny of the majority? If they had the ability to enforce their will, or numbers, or political control, they would be the majority.
Well then how do they get the majority to hand over power or enact rules that restrict the majorities activities? They have to convince the majority, or allow the majority to convince themselves, that such rules or the surrender of such power is in the majorities interests, even if such arguments stand entirely on issues of ethics and morality.
The minority protects themselves by making it too troublesome to not protect them. Part of the reason why the federal government backed MLK wasn't because Northern fence-sitters were outraged by the treatment of black protestors by southerners, but because they realized that if MLK's demands weren't meant, then eventually MLK would lose power to the likes of Malcolm X or worse, and you'd go from having race riots and lynchings to a literal race war. Or worse maybe the blacks would side with those pinko commies.
On the eve of the civil war, northerners, and abolitionists, still held attitudes of racial superiority. The only sticking point was that they found, in their efforts to strive to be a civilized and upstanding society, they found slavery to be a cruel, unnecessary, and barbaric practice. As a whole, society was convinced, or had convinced itself, that in order for them to move closer to a proper, moral, civilized society, that slavery had to go.
The only people who objected were the southern slaveholders who had economic interests in the institution of slavery.
It was this conflict of interest that led to the civil war, a war that saw the deaths of more americans then any other conflict before or since.
Yes, the North enforced its will on the south, but it took a hundred more years before laws such as jim crow were actually repealed, because the South even in its defeat rebelled both through the laws it enacted, and the society and attitudes that formed after the civil war. No one agrees that the Ku Klux Klan was a good thing, but it arose as a direct outcome of the civil war. Laws such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright beating up and murdering anyone who voted were put in to place with the sole purpose of suppressing the black vote, and the political and economic and social activity of the now black majority in the south.
Fifty years after the repeal and suppression of the last overt acts of segregation and oppression, we are only NOW beginning to remove the more subtle acts, such as the laws that take away the right to vote from felons, and the laws that ban the use of marijuana and other drugs. Why? Because again, the majority finds such laws to be opposite our interests, or at least a significant subset of the majority.
The civil war was the greatest act of authoritarian imposition in this nations history, for a good cause to be sure, but it resulted in the direct, violent, uprising and opposition to the federal government. It also lead to over 150 years of resistance and rebellion, and great suffering.
The greatest authoritarian imposition by the federal government in this nation's history was its institutional support for slavery, which among other things included enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act at the behest of Southern States on unwilling Northern States.
The reason why the North failed wasn't because they used force, it was because they failed to use enough of it, and used it on the wrong targets when they did use it. The South phase 1 of the Civil War, but they won phase 2, the part known as Reconstruction, due to disorganization, corruption, and fatigue on the part of their northern opponents. They pardoned the generals and gave the slave-owners back their lands, while leaving the poor whites who marched and bled for the right to chattel slavery that they'd never participated in to rot. Then troops pulled out, blacks lost the right to vote and thus the ability to make some southern states winnable by the Republicans, and as a consequence the GOP basically lost all interest in helping them.
I might add that on a similar note the reason Prohibition failed was primarily because it was never seriously supported to begin with. It was brought into power by a small minority of single-issue voters who simply voted for whichever party appeased them more on the issue, and that was enough to get it passed through the legislative branch, but the executive branch? State governments spent something like eight times as much money enforcing fishing and game laws than they did enforcing Prohibition. Our allies like the British were no help either, in fact they cheerfully helped smuggle alcohol in. And it still cut drinking rates massively, though people promptly resumed drinking thereafter.
Even today there are examples.
The Virginia Governor repealed laws that remove felons rights to vote, because he found it to be in his interests to do so, laws that were explicitly put into place as a means to deprive black people of their rights and suppress their voice. We have only recently begun to legalize marijuana. Why? Because a growing portion of the majority, whoever or whatever they may be, finds such laws to be unethical, or immoral, and against our interests.
SB itself, The Observer drew attention to the fact that he could replace all the moderators and administrative staff with houseplants if it was his wish. Technically, he was correct, SB is a private forum, it is owned by a private individual. He can do with his property as he wishes. No one agrees that this was a smart move, and it lead directly to the foundation of SV as people became incredibly vocal in their displeasure with this statement.
@LordSquishy himself makes no bones about the same fact. SV is a private institution. For all the rules and laws we make governing the activity that occurs on this board, Lord Squishy could one day wake up in a tyrannical mood and replace the entire moderator staff with his pet pug Sam Barkington McBone the Third, Esquire. None of us could stop him, sort of setting up yet another forum. SV is his private property, it is owned by him, he is the majority, he can do as he likes.
That he sets up and obeys (Mostly, he has...adequate reasons when he doesnt but thats another tale) the rules he has made, and everyone is happy. When he acts in a unilateral manner, and violates these rules, even in a minor way, even when he has a decent reason, people lose their minds. They object, vocally.
Pardon me if I ramble a bit, im not used to writing these long winding essays, and I have no formal education on the skill.
Well as I've said elsewhere, every government is an oligarchy in the sense that it is ruled by the haves, and every government is a democracy in the sense that if it fails to appease enough of the have-nots it will be deposed eventually. My perspective is that representative government isn't and will never be representative, but that's ok, because its true purpose is to ensure both the peaceful transfer of power from one group of oligarchs to another, and to provide a complaint box for the have-nots to fill with the haves knowing that if it gets stuffed enough, they better do something, or else.
You say this as if the groups are universally afflicted. The only real solution is to bring individual justice to the individuals affected, not give unfair benefits to people based on the color of their skin.
I used to think that, but the issue is quite simple. White people do get unfair benefits based on the color of the skin, and a lot of them are very subtle things that we couldn't or shouldn't try to legislatively eliminate because of the backlash and other unintended consequences it would have. As a consequence, simply giving it to poor people misses the fact that there is still a marked advantage that poor white people have over poor black people, and rich white people over rich black people.
