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Comment by joeblau | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but are people in Dallas truly open minded? I've never lived in Texas but from my understanding, Austin is the only place in Texas which really fosters an truly open thought process. Without that, it doesn't matter how many of the other elements a city has.

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Well, you sure sound open minded.

If by open minded we mean writing off 26 million people because they live in a geographical area that's different than yours (and perhaps hold religious views, "quelle horreur!"). But what you really mean by "open minded" is "votes for Democratic politicians". And lucky for you, Dallas (just like all of those other bastions of conservativism, San Antonio and Houston) has a mayor who is a member of the Democratic party!

Funny, huh, stereotypes aren't always accurate.

To be fair, he said he hasn't been to Texas, implying he is not familiar with it, and was only asking a question. He wasn't throwing out stereotypes as truth, just fro what he has heard.

I mean..if you ask half the people in Europe they still think we ride horses everywhere...

I've actually lived in Boulder, CO. and I think Austin is more "hippy" than Boulder...I know...crazy but that was my experience. I'd say Dallas is pretty well balanced as far as number of republicans/democrats.

The horror is when such people use their biased views to impose un-American legislation to strip rights and freedoms from other people because it satisfies their fear of anyone who thinks differently than themselves. Texas has an established track record in this domain.

Remind me when the good people of Dallas stripped the rights and freedoms of any people, besides banning fracking in 2013?

For god's sake, they passed a law prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity/sexual orientation in 2002. That's 10 years before Barack Obama realized that same-sex marriage was a fundamental American right.

I dunno man, I can't say any of this reads as encouraging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Texas

Ctrl-F "dallas" on that article mostly leads to things like "LGBT Protections: Housing, public accommodations, city employment, private employment, city contractors"

In the city, yes, absolutely. Now if you go out way into the suburbs and the country....well..they don't call it the bible belt for nothing...

Note: I'm not knocking on Christians..I am one myself. Just saying a lot of the people out there are not as accepting. However I have found a larger percentage of "nicer" people here than in other places I've lived. "nicer" is hard to define in words though...so I'll leave it at that.

This is speculation, but like most parts of the U.S., I'd suggest that maybe it's more an urban/rural split than anything else. Texas has its pockets of reasonableness and progressivism (and outside of Austin, too--I quite like San Antonio, Dallas is fine, and while Houston is best described as a highway in a swamp a million lanes wide that you merge across to get anywhere, it's a very tolerant community with a gay woman as mayor from 2010 to 2016, when she was term-limited). When you get out of where the money and the people is, it may be different (never been), but the urban areas aren't much different from any other urban area in that regard.

I've lived in small towns in Texas, and I've only found good natured people. Small town life is different. It's a little bit slower, I never had to deal with traffic, and I could drive anywhere in town in 5 minutes. But even my medium sized hometown (pop 60,000) stocked vegan cupcakes in the town bakery. Maybe it's not as progressive as Austin, but I don't appreciate how everybody else in the world writes it off as a joke.

I'm sure the evil bigots living somewhere, but I don't know where.

Did you notice anyone openly gay or transgender there? One of the issues with small towns is that you end up thinking people aren't racists, bigots, whatever because there just aren't that many people there for them to discriminate against. I grew up in a small town and thought it was open minded and didn't realize how wrong that was until I was older when I would listen to political conversations in bars, restaurants, and coffee shops how much mindless hatred was hiding beneath the surface.

If you can drive 5 minutes and still be in town, it's not "small".

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