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Midwestern roots here- I don’t want to see any kissing in public or know anything of anyone’s sexual identity. It’s not my business and its quite impolite of you to make it so. So yeah, keep it to yourselves, everyone.
More seriously, I can’t quantify how many homophobes exist in the wild and the extent to which they make it known. I’d agree that homophobia remains, but I disagree it’s the cause for the political enmity. Hating across party lines is something new.
It feels like the implicit argument, to put words in your mouth, goes like this: the homophones, however many and however vocal, hate you and yours after all this time, so you are justified in hating them back, and twice as hard. There is no off ramp here.
Do you go around telling straight people to keep it to themselves? What about seeing a man and woman holding hands with prominent rings that indicate their marriage? Or are we going to say that straight isn't a sexual orientation? You may have some friends over at /r/GamingCirclejerk if you think that.
If you only ever raise issues with the identities of gay people publicly, how are you meaningfully going to differentiate yourself from those who just hate gay people?
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I'm not particularly approving of PDA either, but that's not the core of I'm talking about. It's merely an illustration. You have aggressive homophobes who actively lobby to oppress homosexuals (e.g. they want to roll back things like gay marriage), but you also have low-key homophobes. They grudgingly tolerate homosexuals on a day-to-day level, but they'd prefer they be excluded from public life, regard them as intrinsically suspect (see also: groomer discourse), and will support homophobic politicians and policies.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the enmity continues to exist because the war is still on. It's not like all the homophobes gave up and decided it was okay after all. Homophobia still has social and political power, even if it has fallen on hard times. As @Nantafiria notes, you still have children being disowned by their families for being homosexual. You still have anti-homosexual laws being proposed (and passed). It's not about justification, it's about acknowledging what is actually going on. As long as you have people trying to shove homosexuals back in the closet, homosexuals (and their allies) are going to shove back.
There might have been a compromise built around public institutional neutrality and pluralist tolerance, but that was never actually on the table. Instead we got attempts to entrench legal discrimination. Every concession to tolerance and legal recognition of homosexuality was, in effect, torn from the unwilling hands of people who want homosexuals to stay in the closet (or not exist). As long as that is the case, you're not going to get people to back down from ostentatious celebration and inclusion of homosexuality and hostility towards even mere disapproval. Though it almost certainly is no off ramp at this point - when total victory is in sight, there's no reason to settle for anything less than unconditional surrender.
Thank you for sharing your view on the matter from the other side. I’m sure I don’t notice much of what is going on because it’s not directed at me.
I do see quite a few anti-trans laws being passed in national news but I haven’t seen any anti-homosexual. Are you lumping the one in with the other or perhaps I just haven’t noticed? Would you mind providing an example or two?
The push for total victory is counter productive - it pushed me in the opposite direction and I’d guess I’m not alone. I got off the train when actual friends started unironically talking about literally bashing in the skulls of people with my political beliefs. I know I shouldn’t pin the beliefs of Bay Area radicalists on the movement at large, but I don’t know how to not do that, either.
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