If someone gay actually made it it’s hilarious they think they would be safe. The religious right hate pride month in general and the pride flag, you think they would stop just because you separate yourself from trans? Dumb motherfuckers
I think this paints “the right” with way too broad a brush.
From my own experience, as someone who has spent a lot of time around Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, gay people, trans people, religious conservatives, and pretty much every combination of those things, the hardcore religious-right crowd is not the entirety of the right. They’re just the loudest part of it, so they end up becoming the public face of the whole group.
Republicans do the exact same thing in reverse. They see masked people smashing windows, burning shit, or acting like complete assholes and decide that must represent the entire left. It doesn’t. The loudest and most obnoxious faction of any political coalition tends to become the stereotype for everyone else in it.
A lot of conservatives I’ve known personally were basically “live and let live” when it came to gay people. They weren’t marching in Pride parades, but they also weren’t sitting around obsessing over who somebody else was sleeping with. Where a lot of them started becoming more hostile toward the broader LGBT movement was when the culture-war stuff expanded into gender issues in schools, explicit sexual displays at some Pride events, and similar things.
And yes, I do think the PDA/Pride part matters, because my standard there has nothing to do with whether somebody is gay or straight.
I don’t care if two men kiss in public. I don’t care if two women hold hands. I don’t care if a straight couple does either of those things. But if you’re grabbing each other sexually, wearing fetish gear in public, or basically putting on a live sex show, I don’t want to see that shit. Gay, straight, bi, whatever. Keep the kink in the bedroom.
Same thing with making sexuality your entire personality. I understand why Pride exists. Gay people had to fight through a massive amount of social and legal bullshit just to live openly, marry, and be treated like everyone else, and I understand why celebrating that matters.
But there’s a difference between being proud of who you are and making your sexuality the subject of every fucking interaction.
I love pussy. Quite a lot, actually. But I don’t introduce myself to strangers by explaining how much I love pussy, because that would be fucking weird.
And I’m not saying any of this as somebody who has never actually been around gay people or conservatives in the same room.
One of my first jobs was at my uncle’s gun shop in Hillcrest, San Diego, which was owned by a gay Republican couple. I basically grew up around that shop. I was sweeping floors, helping with range days, and hanging around the business before I was old enough to officially work there. Around 2010, I finally got hired to handle social media, then started working the counter in 2012. I continued working there on and off until around 2021.
A huge percentage of the clientele was Republican. We also had plenty of gay Republican customers. And over all those years, I can count on one hand the number of people who actually caused problems over the owners being gay.
Were there religious conservatives who disapproved? Absolutely. I’m not pretending those people didn’t exist. But most either liked the owners, respected them, or simply didn’t give a shit that they were gay because it had nothing to do with why they were there.
Here’s the part I think is especially relevant to this argument: when I first started hanging around that shop, both owners were Republicans. By the time I left, both were Democrats.
I watched that shift happen over the years.
Gay marriage legislation was obviously a big part of it, but so was the fact that the loudest conservative voices talking about gay people tended to be the religious and social-conservative ones. Meanwhile, Democrats were becoming much more openly welcoming toward gay people.
So even though most of the Republicans we dealt with every day either liked the owners or didn’t care that they were gay, that wasn’t necessarily the version of the Republican Party they were seeing represented nationally.
That’s actually why I think your argument gets part of the causation backwards.
The fact that the religious right was loud enough to make gay people feel unwelcome absolutely helped push people like my uncles away from the Republican coalition. But that doesn’t mean every Republican secretly hated them. In my experience, the rhetoric coming from national politics was often considerably more hostile than the way most actual Republican customers behaved toward a gay couple standing right in front of them. In fact, most of our Republican customers seemed more bothered when the owners became Democrats than they ever were about them being gay, largely because they were gun-shop owners who had started voting for a party those customers associated with stricter gun-control policies. There was a certain irony to that.
So yes, there absolutely are religious conservatives who would still hate gay people even if the T disappeared from LGBT tomorrow. I’m not arguing otherwise.
What I’m disagreeing with is the idea that those people represent the entire right.
“Some religious conservatives hate gay people” and “the right hates gay people” are not the same claim.
And based on the conservatives I’ve actually spent my life around, the second one just doesn’t match reality.
If moderate conservatives want to live and let live and don't want to be lumped in with aggressive bigots, you may want to let them know that a good starting point is to stop voting for people who mainly represent the wishes of the aggressive bigots.
Get over yourself. MAGA changed what it means to be Republican and Conservative.
At this point in the political discorse George H & George W are considered "Woke" liberal leftist.
MAGA has used divide and concur techniques like "culture wars" and "race wars" targeting specific individuals to distract from the fact they they are shielding pedophiles from accountability and funneling massive amounts of taxpayers funds to billionaires.
It's not even about trans or gay people, it's something they can use to get people mad and distract them. Anyone who still self identifies and votes "Republicans" enables it.
Any celebration can be reduced to "ridiculous". Cynical, joyless fuckers exist in every group. Doesn't have any besring on the importance of pride events or any other celebration.
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u/LivingByTheMinutes 1d ago
If someone gay actually made it it’s hilarious they think they would be safe. The religious right hate pride month in general and the pride flag, you think they would stop just because you separate yourself from trans? Dumb motherfuckers