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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Let's have a word about gay rights then. Once upon a time a pride parade full of rainbow hair dye and BDSM leather and face paint and drag queens and hairy-chested shirtless men would have been right next to your "spittle-flecked rants" in the proper gentleman's book of ways not to get your message out, but I wouldn't want to be the one to say that they should have been censored over it.

Not everybody is a traditional upperclass gentleman and not everybody who isn't is wrong.

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But that's not actually how it worked out. Gay marriage didn't go from an unpopular stance to a popular one throughout the 2000s by displays like this. If anything, they were used as ammunition by people strongly against gay marriage in order to slow the change in public opinion.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-ri...

First you show the world you exist and convince your friends it's worth trying to change things, then you convince the moderates, then you win the fight, then you wait for your bitter enemies to die because they'll never be convinced but at least their kids are open to new ideas.

Pissing off your bitter enemies can be hard to avoid and still get the job done.

But this article is making my exact point. By the time gay marriage was actually gaining acceptance, the largest pride parades had become as tame as 4th of July celebrations, with SF pride marching with the police, the mayor, and Google employees. They're completely different from their predecessors, like the Stonewall riots.

Because it's a different stage of the fight. You don't start off having a parade with the mayor in it because the mayor won't give you the time of day until your movement is big enough to be taken seriously, which starts with getting noticed and getting out the base. Being bland and studious doesn't do that.

And the parades are still full of weirdos, but they won, so now it's okay.

The point stands that even these seemingly "queer", radically expressed ideas clearly became a lot tamer, less insolently-stated and more agreeable over time, despite the lack of anything approaching real censorship. That's precisely what you want if you care about not harming society at large, especially in the longer run.

> That's precisely what you want if you care about not harming society at large, especially in the longer run.

Please, explain: how do queer ideas harm society, in the longer run?

My whole point is that censorship is what harms society, not ideas themselves.

Regardless of whether they helped public perception, should they have been censored until public opinion caught up?

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