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Perhaps this is filter bubble reasons, but most secular-ish normie parents I know do not want their sons to have gay football coaches, do not like the ‘gayBC’ agenda in entertainment, would think a gay son is a parenting failure, believe that trends originating in the gay community is enough reason to boycott them in ipso, don’t make a massive distinction between gays and trans. These are people that if they do go to church don’t pray at home, expect their kids to cohabit(even as they think the time of doing this should be shorter) before marriage, wear bikinis etc.
I think this is rural catholic filter bubble (whereas AFAIK @MadMonzer is London cosmopolitan filter bubble). My secular-ish normie parents grew up in 1960/1970s Britain, where almost all the best-dressed, most witty, popular, aristocratic men were gay. Being gay is essentially aspirational: they're secretly quite keen on the idea of the idea of having a gay child and are applying slight, unthinking pressure to my bi-questioning sibling in ways that make me uncomfortable. I don't know how they'd feel about gay teachers and they're certainly not into pride or anything; they're conservative in most other ways.
(However, as with many things in Britain, it can be very difficult to distinguish between 'runs a permanent crimestop filter' and 'is actually enthusiastic' even for close family).
I have access via in-laws to the Reform-curious rural UK filter bubble, and there the reaction to happily married lesbians (two thirds of same-sex marriages in the UK are women) is "so what" and the reaction to flamboyantly gay men being flamboyantly gay in public is bemused eye-rolling as long as they remain fully clothed.
If Nigel Farage thought that gay-bashing would gain votes for Reform, he would do it. He doesn't.
Certainly gay-bashing would be a terrible move. I have a vague sense, however, that the very solidity of the 'so what' reaction is disguising less comfort than people are willing to let on. I have no proof for this, it's just based on myself and on a sense that people are...slightly too careful about the subject. The very speed with which even right-wingers tell you they don't give a shit kind of makes me feel like they do, actually, give a little bit of a shit.
Of course this is the loosest kind of vibes-based psychoanalysing, so feel free to discard it completely if you want to. But I don't think we've ever seen anything like the absolute closing of ranks that happened over gay marriage. In about a decade we went from a world in which a younger-me was mildly chastised for being too fervently pro gay marriage to a world where even the suggestion that gay marriage might not have been a great idea provokes universal condemnation. I think everyone remembers proto-cancelling incidents like the defenestration of Tim Fallon and everyone knows how dangerous is can be to be associated with even a whiff of homophobia.
I always feel that Britain is a lot like Japan in some ways. The social pressure and desire to conform can be so strong that there is very little gap between the consensus and people's conscious opinions. In the same way that I'm pretty sure liberal democratic Japan could turn into a Maoist communist state in a decade given a change of leadership, I think the same is true of Britain. Change the right few minds, let it cascade and I think a lot of people might suddenly 'discover' an entirely new set of opinions that would not necessarily be any more 'real' than the previous ones but would feel just as sincere to their owners.
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Rural I will grant you, but I was specifically pointing at non-tradcath friends to avoid that aspect.
But you live in a traditionally catholic area, right? I assumed that your secular friends were Catholic-tinged, so to speak, even though not actually catholic. Whereas for example my parents are secular but they're Church of England secular. Or in California they would be Silicon Valley secular.
I have family ties to rural southern Louisiana(ultra Catholic) but I don’t live there. I doubt the region has majority support for gay marriage but it wasn’t what I was addressing. Most of my extended family lives in Dallas far burbs or traditionally conservative Protestant Tyler. Yes, random fishing buddies in Tyler or Forney or Weatherford or whatever are not a representative sample of American views on ‘the gays’, but it’s not due to Catholicism.
I see, thanks for the clarification.
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