Look at you two, ruining humor with
facts.
--
Sorry for implications, Truean. I try to maintain an outward veneer of optimism about such things, since I tend to fall too readily into nihilistic misanthropy if I do otherwise and I've gotten the impression that that is vastly more grating. Helping to reinforce the impression that hateful shitheads are on the wrong side of history is less depressing than concluding that we're never really going to be rid of them, IMO. :|
Maybe it is genuinely a generational thing. I'm not sure exactly how much older you are, but when I was going through school (in the South, mind) nobody gave two shits about people being gay, bi (or black, or Muslims, or Jews, or latin@; nothing about trans folk since that hadn't really hit the public eye yet) -- or if they did, they kept their mouths very tightly shut. Even going to uni on a rural Southern campus in a county with one church for every two or three hundred people the only times I ever encountered or heard word of open bigotry was from a loony evangelical preacher who got shouted down, and one [context stripped of identifying information] shut-in older person who was reluctant to hire a black guy because "he seems kinda scary" (I know right? Jesus fuck, that was jarring
).
I mean, it was the sort of place where one of the notable athletic teams was the
rodeo team, where people unironically listened to songs with lyrics saying shit like "camouflage is the new Stars and Bars", and if anybody was a racist or a homophobe or something, they damned well didn't breathe a word of it. much less harass or attack anyone because of it.
It certainly hasn't
disappeared, but the last decade or two has been a transitional period in which it quite abruptly was made clear to the people old enough to give two shits (and the unfortunates who were raised on that line of bullshit) that it wasn't publicly acceptable to express such views, that the law couldn't bow to them. Trump's campaign is the dead cat bounce for bigots on the right, and by the time I'm in my thirties the last of the people who were raised when the old sorts of hate were acceptable will be stumbling into retirement homes. By the time
I'm that old, who fucking knows what people will be hating each other for.
Yet another artifact of the god damned religious right that we needed to shatter long ago, but by gosh by golly we're breaking their spines one vertebrae at a time.