(no subject)

A friend on FB was looking at all the happy rainbows and lamenting that the culture and laws of her own country are still so incredibly homophobic. This is what I told her. (The "posts just like this one" at the end refers to her OP about thinking her country should be more accepting, and wishing it were so.)

Here's the thing.

In the early 80s, rampant homophobia was so much the norm that I would not let my father kiss me on the cheek because I'd internalized how terrible it was for a man to kiss another male.

In the mid-80s, mainstream broadcast news was pretty sure that if a woman turned up HIV positive, it must have been because her husband had been hanging around gay bars. Anchors noted in passing that there were respected clergy who were convinced that AIDS was a punishment from God for all the dirty icky sinful things gay people did. And everyone knew that a stable gay relationship was one where you stayed with the same man for the whole night.

In the 90s, a major question in the news and in Congress was what to do about the discovery that gay men wanted to serve in the armed forces. On the one hand, there were those who didn't want to exclude anyone willing to fight, but there were many who felt it would be inappropriate and hurt morale and destroy unit cohesion. Eventually, over many objections, we got the compromise of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Which seemed pretty fair at the time. Just stay in the closet and no one needs to worry. Problem solved!

In 2008, on the same night Obama was elected, thanks to a massive ad campaign financed by the Mormon church, marriage equality (still a fairly new idea that only the most Liberal states were even trying) was repealed by popular vote in California.

And now, here we are. DADT is gone, and we have nationwide marriage equality.

But DADT was a hard fight. And it's only in the last couple of years that marriage equality gained a tenuous majority of popular support. It was passed by various state legislatures, but never won on an open ballot. It had to be imposed by the courts. And still there are many deeply opposed.

We've got a long way to go. But look at how far we've come. In one generation.

And I think a fair amount of that came from the Internet, which gave people a place to find support, make connections, build a movement... And expose the populace to a new narrative, new realities. To openly gay friends.

Change is possible. And it starts with posts just like this one.

(no subject)

I don't know how much this will help, but I'm going to try to clarify some things.

1. Drug testing welfare recipients is a bad idea. Florida implemented this law. Very, very few of recipients tested positive. The state ended up paying out orders of magnitude more in testing fees than they "saved" by withholding the pittance from the few who did test positive. And the tests are prone to false positives. Eat a poppy seed bagel a week before the test, and it will show positive because it can't tell the difference between lingering opiates from that and traces of heroin. It's just a further indignity and bureaucratic hurdle heaped upon people who are already having to swallow their pride and ask for help. The law has been a disaster for everyone involved except the woman who owns the company that does the tests... Who just happens to be the governor's wife.

2. The Confederate flag is racist. I cannot believe this is in dispute. The leaders of the Confederacy made it explicitly clear that they were fighting for the right to subjugate Blacks and keep them as slaves. The Confederacy were also traitors, starting the bloodiest war in American history against the legitimate Federal government with the goal of breaking the country apart. The flag itself did not go up on state capitols until the 1960s, as a direct protest against desegregation, and as a visible symbol of the entrenched power of Whites over Blacks. Oh yes, and in much of Europe, where swastikas are banned, the Confederate flag is used by neo-Nazis as a proxy. Just in case you had any doubts about how racist it is. And that attitude and the symbol of the flag itself directly inspired the Charleston shooting.

3. The rainbow flag, on the other hand, is a symbol of pride from an oppressed minority. People who are asking for equal treatment, protection, and respect. They're not out to hurt anyone or take anything away from anyone. Rights aren't a zero sum game. Giving them to others doesn't deprive you of anything.

4. Marriage is a legal contract. It's entirely in the government's hands. A church can preform a wedding, and that's within the laws of the religion. But a marriage is a matter for the state. And, in this country, we have separation of church and state. No one gets to impose their religion, especially not when it means taking rights away from others.

5. That your religion describes homosexuality as a sin is irrelevant. In my religion, pepperoni pizza is a sin. It is an abomination before the Lord to eat the meat of a pig. And even worse when you cook that meat with dairy. Guess what? I don't get to outlaw it. I can't tell you that you're not allowed to eat it because my religion forbids it. I don't get to impose that on you. My religion applies to me and those of my faith. No one else. And it has no place in secular law.