Projecting a modern perspective back on the past ("rights", riots, organised minority groups) would make dwarf fortress very anachronistic
I find this statement very hillarious compared to the overwhelming use of projecting the present onto the past.
Heck, history is taught exactly as if everyone knew how the future would turn out.
That does kind of bug me. For instance, the 'inevitability' of losing a war for one side argument always annoys me, like how it was "Inevitable" in the US Civil War that the southern states would lose due to economic factors or that the defeat of so and so was inevitable. It's real easy with hindsight and stuff to make those proclamations, but I'm sure if the northern region of the US lost we'd be hearing "Southern officer corps advantages made it inevitable" or whatever.
But on topic- it's somewhat silly, especially given that the impetus probably wouldn't exist. Even if we acknowledge that due to long-standing fantasy convention that most cultures in DF worlds will be psuedowestern with plate armour and dukes and the like, realistically without the long chain of events that happened in our world there's no logical reason for intolerance to happen except as a cultural quirk. Cultural Quirks are neat ("They have a strong code of honour and feel hiding one's face is cowardly- their helms never have faceplates and they never wear masks or assassinate people"*) but shouldn't be overused or overly applied.
Intolerance of gays** in dwarf fortress would be as odd as seeing dwarven archbishops- while the specific contours of armour and weapons and technology and stuff in "Ye Olde Past" seem logical, something just strikes me as wrong and odd for the same idea as DF having a Catholic Church or making it illegal for dwarves to bake their own bread (which actually was true in some areas and times in the middle ages, incidentally)- laws, culture, and religion and the like, is what I appear to mean.
*This is a really cool cultural quirk in my opinion and I hope some day to go on a killing spree in adventure mode face-shooting this culture.
**Again, the concept of such an identity per se is kind of anachronistic but a bit unavoidable when trying to talk in the modern day.