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MelodicBerries  virtus junxit mors non separabit  1yr ago (freddiedeboer.substack.com)   3920 thread views

It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

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Religious abuse of children and non-believers, censorship, restricting access to contraceptives and abortion, practicing marriages between children and adults, discrimination against atheists and other non-Christians, discrimination against sexual minorities, violating church-state separation, etc.

Religious abuse of children and non-believers

What is "religious abuse" of children? How were non-believers abused, exactly?

censorship

What censorship, specifically? Every attempt at censorship I saw in the 90s failed utterly. Carlin suffered no significant consequences for saying "the words you can't say on TV" on TV. Internet porn proliferated beyond all measures. Attempts to restrict artistic output, even when that output had obvious, legible, serious negative consequences, were uniformly rejected.

restricting access to contraceptives and abortion

How was it restricted? Roe was the law of the land. Condoms were handed out in public schools as a routine matter.

practicing marriages between children and adults

I have zero doubt that some religious people somewhere did this. Where was it done in socially significant numbers?

discrimination against atheists and other non-Christians

What discrimination, specifically? Who was discriminated against, and in what contexts?

discrimination against sexual minorities

Discrimination how, and against which sexual minorities? You know Matthew Shephard's murder wasn't actually a hate-crime, right?

violating church-state separation

What violations, specifically?

...I'm intimately familiar with the narrative that the 90s were a horror-story of oppression by moral busybodies, but I actually lived through them. The moral busybodies wanted to censor, restrict freedom, and otherwise impose their values through force of law, but they were completely unable to do so in any practical sense. Meanwhile, the people who decried their "restrictions" have gone on to actually censor, restrict freedom, and otherwise impose their values through force of law to a degree that is completely beyond even the caricatures they've generated of their opponents.

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