Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
It's what the conservative right did when I was young. Which is why I spent my youth fighting against them. And now the far left use the same tactics, the same line of attack. And that's why I fight them now. They've become a mirror image.
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This is the thing I find most obnoxious and simultaneously depressing about the political landscape right now. When I was arguing with bible thumpers and "it's just not natural" conservatives in the early 2000's about gay rights, I always thought to myself, "if only these people weren't so confident that they had the weight of the moral majority behind them. If we can just get enough people to recognize that we're right about this, or enough of these self-righteous jerks to die off, they'll lose that smugness, and we'll enter an age where we can talk about these issues with the measured reason the left always uses to stake out a position on important issues, in place of just trying to paint the other guys as immoral." Call me naive, but in my life experience, there was never any way to know that this behaviour wasn't just a product of right wing Christian piety.
Given how quickly the tables have turned, it now seems clear that whoever holds the upper hand in terms of culture's dominant mores, that side will act in precisely the same way. It's depressing both because it suggests that human beings are fundamentally broken, and because it feels like such a betrayal by people whose basic goals we supported before they entered the fray. We spent so much effort and emotional energy trying to get society to this place, where it's recognized by anyone worth listening to that you're not "less than" for being "different from". Oppressive religious fundamentalism isn't gone, but its yoke has been removed in most places. We've gotten to a better place than where we started. How can you
treat it this way?