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Wut. No one has an interest in depopulation but a few Malthusian kooks. The capitalist class certainly certainly doesn’t: who would then perform the labor from which they leach their wealth?
these things come up whenever the right wing needs a distraction. they have to keep finding new groups to blame society’s ills on, so that conservatives don’t realize it’s their politics that lead to those.
whenever a group inevitably becomes too accepted (or at least not feared enough) to be a distraction, they move on to the next group. sometimes they bring an oldie back because that’s fashion for you.
If that were the case, the Dems could just stand up and say, “You and I both know that those aren’t even issues. They are open and shut case of right vs. wrong. Here are the issues that actually matter to people on both sides of the political spectrum:
- stop sending our tax money to bomb people
- give us Single Payer
- break up monopolies
- increase wages
- help labor
- etc”
and they would win in a landslide (if elections were fair in the first place).
But they don’t because they know that it allows them to give the donors (who are considered PEOPLE because of Citizens United) what they want (more money) while doing ANYTHING to distinguish themselves to their sheeplike electorate.
Identity politics resonates with brain dead public.
We got the government we deserve.
All the comments saying it’s a distraction from how the working class is being oppressed by the owner class are right, but also…
There have always been bigots, small town small minded people who don’t “know any gay people” but there was that one skinny boy in their class that didn’t like sports so he was bullied until he left town at 18. And now, that generation of bigots is finally dying out. Not only due to age but due to an increased connection with the greater world. A small town bigot might not know any LGBT people personally but they are aware of their existence, due to television and the Internet. So quietly ignoring people who are different than you doesn’t work anymore. And a dying animal fights harder than ever.
These death throes are useful to the owner class. But they are still dying out. And if we can exterminate capitalism and figure out a way to survive in a post-warmed globe, we might just see the end of (this particular type) of bigotry.
Dude, plenty of Democrats in their 30s who say they are progressive are raging bigots and support racist policies.
They are just quiet about it. They aren’t saying crazy racist nonsense on tiktok, but if you talk to them about issues like housing or schools… they make it very obvious what they think. Using polite language, of course. Black people are great, as long as they don’t live near them, or go to the same school as their kid goes to! These are the same people who are NIMBY because they don’t want ‘people who haven’t worked as hard as I have’ from living near them.
Do you perceive this as a brand new issue in human society?
Well romans were fine with it. And the US people like to compare themselves to Romans at the height of the empire. But now it seems totally unforgiveable .
That’s… disingenuous. Lot of stuff happened between those points, including the murder of homosexuals for the crime of existing.
The LGBT community keeps the fight up because complacency gets our rights taken away. Justice Thomas has explicitly stated that gay marriage is on his list of wrongs* to right. To say nothing of Project 2025.
Western world is still pretty much the only place where homosexuals aren’t. Rest of the world… murdered pretty regularly. Asia, Africa, South America, middle east, are all FAR less ‘progressive’ than Western democratic countries.
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?
The only identity politics I want to see is us against the ruling elite. Everything else is sparkling fascism.
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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Because gay rights have more and more support so they decided to pick an easier target.
They moved against the gays when abortion stopped being such a wedge issue, which itself replaced school integration to turn out the bigot vote.
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.
The irony of who telling which LGBT people and subsequently going to “homophobic” states and saying the same thing to whom?
If someone understands what you’re trying to say, perhaps they can translate for me.
Because the bigots seemed to have found ways to get in positions of influence to spread their toxic ideologies and get laws passed that targets their ‘enemies’. Even when the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that same-sex marriage is legal, I knew in the back of my mind that things are far from over. Because after that? Like one month later, Kim Davis denied legalizing a same-sex marriage.
And things seemed to have worsened thanks to the existence of people like DeSantis, Trump and any GOP still somehow breathing that wants to antagonize everyone over sexual orientation. Because in their psychotic structure, they want America to be purely Christian, purely White and probably Blonde, Blue-eyed and fair skinned.
Even in 2004, George W Bush back then on February was quoted to have said: “Our Nation must defend the sanctity of marriage”. What he means is, to protect the sanctity of STRAIGHT marriage because he seems to have it in his head that marriage is the property of the church and all that shit.
Doesn’t that sound exactly like the kind of people a certain country named Germany aspired to be like back in WWII? Ironic.
The US isn’t any more concerned about sexual orientation now than any point in the past. Back in colonial times, it wouldn’t have been safe to be anything other than straight with all the hyper religious colonists. They were even forcing their gender conformity and the straight sexual orientation on the Native Americans. Baron Friedrich von Steuben got a pass for being gay, probably because he was the one in charge of training the troops for Washington. 100 years ago, you could be killed on the street for being anything other than straight or denied jobs. The Lavender scare of the mid century brought this more to light. The AIDS crisis that started in the 80s and bled through into the 90s and 2000s as new medicines were being invented, further brought negative light to sexual orientations outside of straight. The cause of all of this attention to sexual orientation has been the religions brought over by colonists.
In recent years, sexual orientations outside of straight are finally being seen in a positive light with Lawrence v TX (2003) legalizing same-sex relationships and Hodges v Obergefell (2015) legalizing same-sex marriages. In Bostock v Clayton County (2020) legal protections against job discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity were finally put into place over 70 years after the start of the Lavender Scare.
The attention to sexual orientation has always been part of North American history. It has just changed from acceptance with the Native American peoples to hate, death, and intolerance under the colonists, to a more accepting present day. With some of the positive news in recent years, it can be easy to forget (if you’re surrounded by progressives in a blue state) that the hate of sexuality injected into North America in the 15th Century still has hold over large portions of the population today.
It’s finally reaching such widespread acceptance that 1. Actual bigots are getting concerned they can’t be bad people anymore and 2. Assorted people are getting tired of the discourse.
So how do we deal with the biggots?
Aside from what everyone else has said, one of the big leaders to this scenario is that the world has gotten so much safer and so much less violent and so much more accepting that people have to literally scrape the barrels to find something to be outraged about.
We all of us know that the Republican playbook of taking rights away from people is a thing that is intended to target people and punish them for not adhering to the moral code of the people doing the targeting.
But the fact that we can spend so much of our national resources on arguing over morality is a side effect of the world being so good that we don’t have to argue over worse things.
I’m not attempting to apologize or forgive anybody for their stance, but it is true that we are arguing over whether or not it’s okay to have an abortion or whether or not it’s okay to be gay rather than whether it’s not okay to let have the country starve to death or whether or not it’s okay to kill everyone all the time always.
I’ve said this before and I will inevitably say it again, human history is a pus filled boil on our consciences.
The only way to fix it is to lance it and to deal with all of the pus. We are in the pus clean up stage of human history, and in time with enough constant patient care, it will get better.
Have you seen the Russian psy ops instructions?
Got a manual?
Especially America? There are countries executing people for their sexual orientation.
Well in america it seems to seems that people are theologically do things against LGBTQ and enacting them. The news we get and i preface this while knowing America is on the brink of it. That other countries or instutions are savages. Not my opinion but what we see daily.
My guy, there are entire countries controlled by Islamic Extremists where you’re lucky if all they do is kill you when they find out you’re LGBT, and it’s entirely for “theological reasons.”
I put this in quotes, because I’m not nor have I ever been a Muslim. But Islamic Extremists will kill gay people for supposed “theological reasons.”
It’s most definitely not just America doing it because “mah holy book says it’s wrong.”
Like I said I am in America and all we see is how backwards other countries are on the topic. It just feels like America is now in the process of becoming one of them
All of a sudden? Where have you been the last 80-100 years?
Not that old yet.
Right, fuck, my bad. Welp, yeah, I’m sorry to say but I think it has more to do with your progression into understanding more about the world and perspectives outside of your own experience. In no way am I trying to be mean or discouraging. You asked a really valid and important question, and i guess i impulsively reacted and forgot there are people less jaded than me. For what it’s worth i admire you and hope that learning some people are STILL stuck being shitty doesn’t make you think everyone sucks. And I’m proud to learn that another person younger than me just ‘gets it’ that people are people deserving of love and respect regardless of bullshit like who they themselves love.
You flatter me mate…internet blushing
