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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Born and raised in the midwest here, and the article has done well to cherry-pick a relatively liberal spot in an otherwise conservative state. The same could be said of the Carolinas and the infamous research triangle park.

I left the midwest for the west coast because of the culture, full stop. I was tired of my state representatives writing my sexual preference off as a disorder. I was angry when the state decided a pharmacist could refuse to sell me birth control and I hated the legislative decree that tried to exert control over what gender got to use the bathroom or not. In short, I did not want to live in a state where the legislature had nothing better to do than fight the culture war to win votes for the next election. Yeah, I cant buy a house in san jose, but at least I dont have to worry about the ten commandments showing up at the DMV in stone or some toothless anti-shariah legislation burning through my tax dollars.

Drive 15 miles outside Columbus and it doesnt matter how many VC firm employees you have in the city, the bible thumpers win this state by a landslide of gerrymandering and arent ashamed to force their backwoods culture on you from the hinterlands. The midwests relationship with silicon valley terminates at the facebook, google, and twitter HTTP connection for a damn good reason.

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I think a whole lot of the divide we see is not state/region based but city vs. rural. See how many quite conservative congresspeople CA sends to the house, many of which just voted on a bill that will increase taxes on many Californians, especially those who live in the big cities. The bay area sprawls out pretty far but drive into the Sierras or up north and it's a different story. Trump won Placer county (aka area around Lake Tahoe) by 51-39%. Further north, he won Lassen county 70-20%. This in a state where Hillary won and the legislature is roughly 2/3rds Democrat.

I see no reason the cities in the midwest couldn't host a tech boom, and over time start to turn the cultural tide as a result.

More globally, this divide makes me sad. I have trouble thinking these people who hold views I find quite wrong are bad people, but it seems somewhere our national conversation has broken down completely. Sometimes maybe for good reasons, but still it's quite depressing.

Edit: typo

> I have trouble thinking these people who hold views I find quite wrong are bad people

Even when we are talking about people who support stomping on the rights of others because of something as private as sexual orientation?

You do realize that massive swaths of the population in virtually every single country in the world are not accepting of homosexuality (1)?

Are all of these people "bad"? Of course not. There is simply a cultural disconnect, and some ideas die hard.

(1) http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-hom...

> Are all of these people "bad"?

In that one respect, yes.

> There is simply a cultural disconnect

Yes, much like there was once a “cultural disconnect” over whether human beings could legitimately be treated as property rather than persons.

Yeah man.

You’re not the first person I’ve seen equate the plight and horror of slaves and slavery to the contemporary condition of the LGTB community in a modern, first world, secular society, but I can’t help but wonder at exactly how it is that you arrived at that conviction.

(1) that's not what “equivocate” means (as in there is no definition of “equivocate” which fits that sentence structure.)

(2) If you mean something like “paints an equivalence between”, I didn't. I provided an illustration of the concept that the existence of a cultural difference does not imply equal validity of both sides of the difference.

(3) The attitudes rejecting homosexuality are almost entirely not found in secular society, though they may be found in national whose government is, nominally at least, secular.

1 - i changed it to equate for you.

2. you did, and your illustration provided no such thing; it’s a strawman with no bearing in reality, and your very self-same argument can be used to undermine your own position...

3. what?

There was no equivalence drawn between slavery and the (modern) treatment of homosexuals.

There was a parallel drawn between the cultural divide on both issues, and the implication was that, like slavery, oppression of homosexuals is wrong.

3. The hatred of homosexuals (at least hatred of gay marriage) tends to draw from religion. A more secular society has no reason to care.

I am acquainted with one very churchy person that admitted to cutting off all contact with a friend of theirs after that person came out.

Yes, that does make them a bad person, and that makes it impossible for them to be more than just an acquaintance to me. And it also makes their religion--or at least their personal interpretation of it-- a bad religion. My imaginary friends don't get jealous of my real friends, and if yours ever do, you might want to consider pretending to break with them instead of turning on your real friends. It's up to you to determine if your imaginary friends have ever actually prevented you from making a real friend.

Ethical development has come a long way over the last 5000 years, but even the semitic monotheist religions have all had "That which is hateful to you, do not do to others," for the last 2000. And yet the faithful still put their own hateful words in the mouths of their gods or their prophets for the credulous to hear and repeat. They do it for money and for status, and care little for the consequences.

It is wrong. We can explain its wrongness with ethical treatise, and demonstrate the wrongness with game theory and Monte Carlo methods. Private behaviors of any sort are fundamentally unsuitable as discriminators in public life. To the extent that they leak, only that portion that is visible to the public should ever matter.

I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

> My imaginary friends don't get jealous of my real friends...

> And yet the faithful still put their own hateful words in the mouths of their gods or their prophets for the credulous to hear and repeat. They do it for money and for status, and care little for the consequences.

To be honest, that attitude doesn't sound any more enlightened or tolerant than the attitude of the person that was being described.

Yeah, I'm not a very likeable person. People don't like me, and that suits me fine, because I'm not too fond of them either. Things might have been different if I hadn't so often been on the receiving end of so many spiteful kicks, but there it is; experience taught me not to trust strangers, and to not rely on others for anything important, including just doing the job they get paid to do.

At least I know that about myself. I don't have to pretend to be a "good person", and can just be a "barely good enough person". I won't judge you if you don't judge me.

If you're my friend--and I do actually have some, shockingly enough--I won't turn my back on you because I don't think you measure up to my standards. It's more likely I'm just avoiding you because I don't think I can measure up to yours, and I'm ashamed and embarrassed of things I have said and done in the past. I can't even imagine how someone could cut someone else out of their life just for being homosexual and still know what friendship means. That person would definitely do exactly the same to me if they ever realized I was atheist, so we can't be friends, ever, even if they thought they wanted to be.

I just can't bring myself to tolerate the intolerable.

You become bad when you take action on it. If you believe homosexuality is a sin and that gay marriage shouldn't be allowed I don't know if that makes you a bad person.

If you vote for a person who says they will ban it, then yeah that's actually taking action to deprive another person of their rights. I don't support that and consider it bad.

I disagree. Expressing an opinion via voting (in the US) means nothing unless more than half the people who vote agree with the person. It's not directly depriving anyone of anything, and if they're in the minority, their vote doesn't have a direct impact on anybody.

Thus if voting leads to somebody losing rights that they ought to have, there exists a problem with the larger community more than one bad actor.

There was a lot of uproar a few years back because Brendan Eich donated a relatively small amount of money to a anti-gay-marriage group, but what got me was that nobody he worked with had any idea. It sounded like he treated everyone fairly regardless of orientation.

To me it speaks volumes (positively) about someone's character if they participate in the democratic process, but if their opinion doesn't win out, they're willing to accept it and live with it.

I'm having a hard time understanding why you would think this. Is the suggestion here that people who are morally sincere can't be bad (whatever their moral views may be)? Or is it that you just don't view homophobia as a genuine moral failing?

> I'm having a hard time understanding why you would think this.

Why I would think what?

>Is the suggestion here that people who are morally sincere can't be bad (whatever their moral views may be)?

No, the suggestion is that morality and ethics are complex cognitive, spiritual, religious, and cultural structures that don't boil down to some silly binary regarding ones stance on one issue.

The point is, saying someone is "bad" on the basis of their view on any one single topic is ridiculous, especially when there is a wide range of opinion on the matter. It's essentialism at its absolute worst. The link I provided shows that 98% of Nigerians have negative views towards homosexuality - do you really think that 98% of Nigerians are bad people? Of course not - there are nuances to these issues.

My greater point is that what I'll call "liberal religiosity" - this idea that if you break in any way from the standard liberal dogma, you are cast as a heretic and judged a "bad" person, like all these supposedly "bad" people in the Midwest who probably go to church every Sunday, help their neighbors out, act decently towards one-another, etc.

>Or is it that you just don't view homophobia as a genuine moral failing?

I'm a live and let live kind of guy.

That is a super dangerous road to go down. Good people can hold horrible ideas and horrible people can be right about some things (Hitler and the nazis were absolutely right that smoking was dangerous).

As a 99.9% libertarian the idea of messing with other peoples sex lives is completely alien to me, but just because others are wrong doesn't make them bad people; I believe it is important to separate the people from their ideas.

what a counter example, do you have any sources for that Nazi's ethos around smoking? Wild stuff.

I don’t know about the smoking thing but Hitler was famously a vegetarian. Many environmentalists argue that if we eliminated meat production the planet would be better off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tobacco_movement_in_Nazi_...

I don't think it is possible to separate a person from their ideas. You are the sum of your ideas. If you hold a bad belief, that is a bad piece of your whole personality.

None of us are perfect. We all have bad ideas sometimes. That means nobody can be an entirely good person.

But the converse is possible; we can separate the idea from the person. And when judging the merits of the idea, we certainly should.

Consider that if you separate all the ideas from a person, what is left? An empty shell of a body? Does it still have a person in it?

> I believe it is important to separate the people from their ideas

Okay, why were the Nazis evil then? Why weren't they good people who just had awful awful ideas?

Why is it wrong to judge people for the ideas they express and the actions they take?

There is no objective way to judge people.

For nazis may be bad people but for nazis other nazis are good people.

>Why is it wrong to judge people for the ideas they express and the actions they take?

If you must judge then judge by actions not by ideas.

If the problem is that nazis murder people then a "nazi ban" is not the right solution. The solution is to ban murder.

You know, in the context of a conversation about California vs. the world that's enlightening. When a midwestern state passed a law against gay marriage they were probably doing it with a heavily gerrymandered legislature.

When California did it, they did it with a popular referendum.

> I think a whole lot of the divide we see is not state/region based but city vs. rural.

If you look at the way people vote, it's not really hypothetical.

https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-urban-archipelago/Co...

Those maps are, of course, a little deceptive because of the population density in urban areas. What looks like a little bit of blue land accounts for over half the population.

that jibes very much with the sort of stuff I read by Victor Davis Hanson on the two states of California, the coastal vs inland. I think he says something to the effect of Coastal California is Massachusettes, while inland California is Alabama or some other state analogy of the like. It's pretty intriguing watching his lectures online and reading his pieces. He has a very deep take on the rural vs city perspective having grew up in rural central valley California on his multigeneration family farm and coming up to do academic work at Stanford and hanging out at cafes and the like on University Ave and other Palo Alto experiences.

They've been indoctrinated into a deeply subversive ideology. That ideology commands them to believe god and religion before country, before mere laws of man. Rural America believes this is a Christian nation, founded on Christianity. And there is to be no discussion of this. The ideology itself is what broke down any chance of conversation.

Rural Americans have no idea "in God We Trust" is not original, that it was added in 1956, that "under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954, they have no idea that Article 6 of the constitution explicitly says no religious test will be required to hold public office, and they insist that the 1st amendment does not make the U.S. a secular state. And they think it's a lie that there is such a thing called the Treaty of Tripoli, written by Washington and Adams, ratified unanimously by teh senate, that says "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion".

In the original case of Loving vs Virgina (1967), the state judge pointed to the bible, chapter and verse, as moral and legal justification for anti-miscegenation laws. Interracial marriage was illegal in nearly 1/2 the states up until that time. And the same arguments then were the same nut bag religious arguments used most recently with those opposed to gay marriage, and transgendered people having equal rights.

Is there really a conversation to be had here? The racism, bigotry, misogyny, sure they all pre-exist religion, but they are enhanced, coddled, protected, by the most popular variety of it in rural white America. I would never work or live there. I don't even care to visit. And I see no time in the near future where this will not be true. They do not want their culture to change. There is nothing wrong with it. Everything wrong is with the gays, the godless, the Muslims, and the illegal immigrants stealing white American jobs, and sluts having abortions. And they have a president who perfectly represents them in helping them blame others for their problems.

> Rural Americans have no idea "in God We Trust" is not original, that it was added in 1956...

'And this be our motto-"In God is our Trust"'. From the 4th verse of The Star-Spangled Banner, written in 1814. (You did know that it has four verses, right?)

Now, The Star-Spangled Banner wasn't officially the national anthem until 1931, and "In God We Trust" wasn't officially the national motto even then. But the idea of that as the motto is far from new, even if it wasn't officially true.

I know that the Star-Spangled Banner was set to the tune of the Anacreonic Hymn, which is a drinking song, so if anybody ever got as far as the fourth verse without forgetting any of the lyrics, they're definitely singing it wrong.

While I understand what you’re saying I’d respectfully disagree in places. You point out that most of these ideas predate religion and I think most people hold the more backward ideas due to habit and overall culture rather than explicit religion. Also I believe that one of the most potent forces for greater acceptance for LGBT people has been that more and more people are coming out and that people realize, “oh hey that’s my daughter or my cousin”.

I think it’s helpful also to recognize that while it is indisputably right that LGBT people have full equal rights and standing, that idea is relatively new to the broader discourse. It’s going to take a little time for it to fully sink in everywhere, the wrong perspective has a large historical head start. I firmly believe it will happen, just over 50 years ago we had explicit Jim Crow in the south. While there’s still a ways to go, it’s amazing how much progress we’ve made in such short time.

But for that to happen I think we have to be a bit patient and willing to talk to people whose views we might find cringeworthy. You can’t persuade someone you’re not communicating with.

Tell the dead they should be a bit more patient.

Most gays don't come out of the closet in religious families, they fear for their life for a reason. The mere fact those who do come out sometimes are a potent change for their families, proves how impotent the religion is when it comes to protecting those same LGBT who put their lives on the line when they come out.

Just two days ago, a southern evangelical asserted to me, "literally gays brought about the end of nations, being gay should not be legal let alone gay marriage." Listen to a translation of this: Gay's are seditious, they are traitors to their country, they commit treason. In the U.S. the only crime that calls for the death penalty is treason.

Considering this merely cringeworthy, needing patience and persuasion? I think the body count of dead LGBT, black, brown, women, children, Muslim, Jew, and many other minorities, is sufficiently high that no more such coddling should be on the agenda.

Advocacy of violence and discrimination should be taken seriously, not suddenly papered over with calls to patience and persuasion just because it's backed by religious belief. Too many people in urban areas have no concept of violent religion and probably think it doesn't exist in America. Newsflash city people! You're ignorant! I for one am not amazed at all, I'm appalled and feel betrayed by how long the progress thus far has taken.

I'm sorry I really didn't mean to come off as dismissive. I have zero doubt of the murderous hatred for gay people (among many others), and the danger people face when they come out. I have many friends in the queer community, I don't in any way intend to minimize these things.

The person you mention holds truly awful views. And I don't know what to tell you, except that at least some people can change. I've seen it myself and I'll cop to when I was younger being squeamish about gay marriage. A decade later I was jubilant when Obergefell came down. Was I a bad person then? Am I better person now? I'd say I wasn't then and I'm still just as imperfect. I just learned more, and although I am ashamed I was wrong, I'm glad I eventually got it right.

Dan Savage gives as advice to people coming out to their families to give their relatives a year to be offensive. A year to ask the just plain ignorant questions. After that, there's a hard space to say, "you accept me or I'm out". Obviously that has its own problems in certain situations, but given the years he's been giving it, it sounds like its been working and it gives voice to the spirit of what I'm advocating.

I think plenty of people hate the gays, the jews, the browns and whoever else. Plenty of those will never change, I can't defend those. But I think many more will, and I think we have to find a way to create the space for them to change without coming at them straight out of the gates with moral condemnation. Good people can be misguided, but they'll never come around if we start from, "you're evil". That said at some point, if you willfully refuse to see the light, there is an end to the conversation.

As someone who grew up in Columbus, went to school in Cincinnati, and moved back to Columbus for work, I think you're being a little dramatic here.

I don't know where you're from in the Midwest, but the vast majority of people I interact with around here are extremely live-and-let-live. In fact I can't remember the last time I came across someone or a situation that was actively hostile about beliefs or sexual orientation. Obviously these are just my anecdotes, but I run in a pretty sexually and racially diverse scene and they all love Columbus as well.

Your hyperbole and vindictive reactions to a diverse region of the country are certainly going to help close the divide.

Then how is this legislation getting passed?

Motivation to get out and vote, probably. Remember Proposition 8 in California?

A Democrat just won in Alabama. It's about motivation for voting. The research triangle in NC is the most heavily populated area in NC, it should carry the state with 1/5 of the state's people living there and actually voting.

Columbus native here. It varies wildly; my wife lived in an upper-class suburban area and reports an experience similar to yours, but I grew up in a poorer, slightly more rural-adjacent area. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I was called a “faggot” for things like wanting to recycle or not wanting to get in fistfights. I overheard racial epithets on a near-daily basis; telling racist jokes where the punchline was the death or maiming of a minority were widely socially acceptable.

Culture is the #1 reason that I have no desire to move back to Columbus.

Was this during the 80s or 90s? Things have changed all over the place since then.

I graduated from Ohio State in 2011 and moved away in 2012, so much more recently than that actually. A woman that I dated in high school is now a teacher at the school we graduated from, and she told me that she sees pretty vile behavior from her students (particularly after the election). So we are not talking about a long time ago, nor are we talking about one or two isolated incidents.

Things are much different in Columbus now, also you can't run from ignorant people. They exist everywhere, even in SV.

And you ignoring a problem that very much exists isn't either.

Further, why is it their responsibility to "help closer the divide" when the other side does not believe they should have fundamental rights?

"extremely live-and-let-live"

That's the attitude that I like. I can't stand false liberals and progressives. Nobody gets to tell anyone how to live their lives. If I wanted that I'd move to a rural village in Pakistan.

> the bible thumpers win this state by a landslide of gerrymandering

Not by a landslide. There's a reason it's called a "swing state." (and, regrettably, it's not because the kids dress up and go dancing...)

> The midwests relationship with silicon valley terminates at the facebook, google, and twitter HTTP connection for a damn good reason.

Let's be honest, that is a pretty closed-minded thing to say.

the article has done well to cherry-pick a relatively liberal spot in an otherwise conservative state

Aren't those called "cities?"

arent ashamed to force their backwoods culture on you from the hinterlands

I lived in Cincinnati Ohio for 5 years. How did people force their backwoods culture on you? I had zero culture forced upon me. I was the subject of a targeted racial harassment once, and I remember one unpleasant discussion with a cringe-inducing person once. Most people there in the late 90's/early 2000's were fairly live and let live. Where they weren't, aside from the above, much of this came from the Left, as an instance of the left eating itself.

"How did people force their backwoods culture on you?"

I'm not the OP, but this seemed pretty clear:

"I was tired of my state representatives writing my sexual preference off as a disorder. I was angry when the state decided a pharmacist could refuse to sell me birth control and I hated the legislative decree that tried to exert control over what gender got to use the bathroom or not. In short, I did not want to live in a state where the legislature had nothing better to do than fight the culture war to win votes for the next election. Yeah, I cant buy a house in san jose, but at least I dont have to worry about the ten commandments showing up at the DMV in stone or some toothless anti-shariah legislation burning through my tax dollars."

I'm not the OP, but this seemed pretty clear:

And from that, I take it that nothing ever happened to him in-person. Did another person do something to him in particular? I think that says a lot more about culture than news/politics issues. From that standpoint, my life here in the Bay Area scores a lot lower than my life in Houston or Cincinnati.

First you ask what the person is even upset about, when they made it very clear in the very post you were replying to. Then, when I point this pretty obvious thing out, you change the standard to "nothing ever happened to him, in person". What?

A) Things did happen to him. Being denied birth control is a thing that happened to him and his partners. I don't really understand the "in person" qualifier you tacked on. Are you implying people in the Bay Area are "doing something to you in particular that happened to you in person?" Any examples? B) "I think that says a lot more about culture than news/politics issues. From that standpoint, my life here in the Bay Area scores a lot lower than my life in Houston or Cincinnati." I'm not sure I follow here? The OP was talking about a situation where they lived outside the bay area and left that other place because they felt picked on and are feeling more comfortable in the bay area. You've decided that this is "about culture", and then immediately jump to "this is why Houston is better than the Bay Area", which makes no sense whatsoever.

>In short, I did not want to live in a state where the legislature had nothing better to do than fight the culture war to win votes for the next election.

California doesn't fight the culture war? California is the primary exporter of the left-wing culture. It just happens to conform to your political leanings, so you like it there. And THAT'S OKAY, I'm not saying you are wrong, you're just now on the side that you agree with.

>Yeah, I cant buy a house in san jose

Who cares about home ownership when you can use whatever public toilet you want!

Who care about owning a house when you can't marry the person you want to live in it with. When you can't fill it with the kids you both want. When you can't sleep together.

Anti-gay sex laws were judged unconstitutional in '03 (yes shockingly late). You can have sex with whomever you want, above the age of consent.

The point isn't what the law is, the point is what some people would have it be.

California isn't denying people fundamental rights. That's the difference.

"Who cares about home ownership when you can use whatever public toilet you want!"

You mean they're allowed to exist in public? If you are not allowed to use the bathroom that corresponds to your identity, you're basically not allowed to use the bathroom in public at all. Which means you're not really allowed to be in public at all.

You know, a couple weeks ago, I was reading a link (from HN, IIRC) about liberal (really!) feminists who didn't want to share a public bathroom with someone who was genetically male but self-described as female. They viewed it as males defining what female is.

The article went on to describe how feminists who hold such views have been subject to literal physical attack by others on the left.

I'm pretty sure I can paint something in that as "denying people fundamental rights"...

This is the sort of reasoning and rhetoric that pushes people like me, political moderates, away from the left.

If I’m following you correctly here, because you can’t use whichever public toilet you want, you are denied a fundamental right, stripped of all public personhood, and not allowed to even venture outside at all.

Are you being serious or are you trolling me?

I never meant me, personally. But a trans person, absolutely. Having to use a misgendered bathroom can not only be extremely uncomfortable, it can be extremely dangerous. A trans woman going into a men's room faces a very real threat of rape or assault.

And, quite frankly, being unable to empathise with those who are different than you kinda indicates to me you never were inclined to the left, and used that opening paragraph to drum up fake support.

Why not let anyone use any toilet regardless of identity?

If it's unjust to segregate public facilities on the basis of sex, it's certainly unjust to segregate said facilities on the basis of gender identity.

"Why not let anyone use any toilet regardless of identity?"

That's the idea behind single person restroom facilities, and it's a pretty good one. Unfortunately, in many places it just isn't feasible to renovate the existing facilities. And having a multi user restroom not be set up like that exposes people to the same dangers as if a trans woman was forced to use the men's room.

What does a single-person facility have to do with it? Why is it legitimate to segregate multi-person facilities based on gender identity but not on sex?

If men’s restrooms are dangerous for trans women then certainly they are dangerous for gay or gender-nonconforming men as well. These men certainly have as much right to avoid a dangerous situation as trans women do, no?

I was raised in the rural midwest and moved to San Francisco for the same reasons as you. It is shocking how much religious extremism, homophobia, and racism exist in the midwest. Growing up in the midwest, kids and adults alike would come up us and tell us we were going to hell, or to go back to where we came from, or call us racial slurs like "sandnigger". Grown adults had no problem harassing little kids at school or the playground. People shot our windows a few times. Racism is so widespread in Missouri that the NAACP has issued a travel advisory and warned minorities to not travel there. Earlier this year a Garmin engineer was murdered in Kansas by a racist who walked into a bar and shot two Indians. There is no way I would raise my children in the midwest.

>Missouri

>Kansas

We have very different ideas of what states qualify as the midwest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States

Huh. To me, being from Michigan, those are both the south.

Sure, but there are plenty of places like that in California as well. Drive a couple hours north of SF or east of Contra Costa or south of LA and you run into similar cultures. CA is the state that created Reagan, after all. San Diego might be the most conservative big city in the nation, albeit in a different type of conservatism.

The Midwest might be generally more conservative, but tech companies are going to started in cities like Columbus, not the rural area.

"I did not want to live in a state where the legislature had nothing better to do than fight the culture war to win votes for the next election"

Funny, I know plenty of people who want to leave east coast cities for the exact same reason with the political poles switched.

Glad to infer you learned not to stereotype. /s

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