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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

It is how people work, as evidenced over and over again by a widening view of compassion for others.

Just look at the past 20 years and the success of the gay rights movement. Views changed because of millions of one-on-one conversations between people who disagreed on gay marriage. No censorship was required for progress. In fact, censorship would have been counterproductive, as I believe it is here.

It's no coincidence that the countries with the least free speech also tend to be the most regressive on civil rights and some of the worst places to be an ethnic minority.

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>It's no coincidence that the countries with the least free speech also tend to be the most regressive on civil rights and some of the worst places to be an ethnic minority.

Feels like this is an attempt to simplify something complex. Most Western European countries have more restrictions on speech than the US, but many of them do a better job of upholding civil rights. Just today someone posted a thread about the broken bail system in the US - for example.

It's not a perfect correlation, but even if you just look in Europe, the countries with more freedom of speech have more civil liberties.

It's also worth noting that only half of the EU member states have legal gay marriage -- something that all Americans have access to.

Political change of this magnitude happens because different people are voting, not because the same person changed their mind. Literally it’s because the old people died before they could pass 100% of their bigotry to the next generation.

This isn't true. Approval for gay marriage has gone up for all generations. It's now at 45% approval among people born before 1945, up from just 17% in 2003.

https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...

Thanks for linking to the poll, I had no idea that that was what the distribution of support for same sex marriage across ages looked like. Fascinating that almost two thirds of Catholics and Protestants support same sex marriage, would never have guessed that. Even more surprising to me was that the trend line basically goes up over time no matter which way you slice and dice by demographic or religious affiliation or church attendance.

> Views changed because of millions of one-on-one conversations between people who disagreed on gay marriage.

That is not actually how it happened.

What is your alternative hypothesis for how it happened?

There was actual activism and political organizing that took place. Conscious and thought out attempts to change laws and society generally. It was not "one-on-one conversations" and much less millions of them. To large extend, issue was legal and it took Supreme Court decision. Those are not won by personal conversations, those require legal strategy, selection of the right case, right Supreme Court composition (e.g. picking right time) and so on.

The individual gay were not about to go out of closet unless it was safe to do or unless they had strong motivation to risk.

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