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> 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.

> 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.

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.