The Log Cabin Libertarians?

[JasonBlack]

(04-16-2022, 01:59 PM)David Horn Wrote: This is a perfect example of Woke Overreach. Setting a whole new woke agenda for an unwilling nation is a fool's errand, and the fools have been at it now for several years. Nothing ever changes that quickly barring a cataclysmic event that impacts most if not all of us. I don't discount mayhem, since the stage has been set for it to erupt. I just fail to see evidence of it coming any time soon -- especially in this social sphere. I'm a cisgendered heterosexual -- about as safe a place to be as there is. It I was otherwise, I would be fearful of the Woke crowd as much as the haters. They feed on each other. But the fact is, a serious confrontation in the LGBT space will not affect enough people to generate real change in the larger sense, and, perhaps, not even in gender awareness. Sad.

More or less my thoughts as a conservative gay man. Many of the more toxic elements of woke culture are not new concepts. What is new is their breakout into the mainstream establishment, away from the academic towers and nightclub backrooms where they had previous been cloistered away.

When I was younger, I still had some hope that we would be able to live the kind of normal lives that straight people often take for granted. Gay rights were supposed to give LGBT people the opportunity to embrace the stability, loyalty and simplicity of traditional marriage, but instead they did the opposite: attacking them at every turn, to the point where mainstream straight culture has adopted more norms from gay culture than the reverse.

I need to remind myself to view other gay people with some compassion, given that, before circa mid 2000s, we really had nowhere to go to meet others like us other than nightclubs, entertainment districts, etc. However, that doesn't make the norms which were adopted in such settings any less self-destructive: serial monogamy, alcoholism/drug addiction, histrionics, youth obsession and all manner of nasty ways of dealing with shame and lack of intimacy.

In many respects, I view many liberal causes in a similar vein, albeit usually from a standpoint of less personal experience. People who were hurt in the past seek to distance themselves from those who would persecute them, but often at the cost of casting aside more beneficial norms of behavior: norms like monogamy, frugality, close family bonds....we have romanticized rebellion, sexual degeneracy, histrionic celebrity idolization and other destructive psychological patterns to the point where they have contributed to wide spread mental illness and anxiety (one could argue the mental illness is a result of persecution, but as we're seeing the rates climb higher and higher as people get more and more rights and less and less persecution, that would be a difficult case to make).

Hopefully, when all of this settles down, society can enter a new era. Not one of returning to rigid gender roles or persecution of sexual minorities, but of....sobriety. A rest from the angry, shame-ridden circuses and psychological death spirals that have taken the gay community hostage.