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Comment by thelopa | Hacker News Reader

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As a middle easterner who has lived all over the world, you sound like someone who has never traveled outside of your cocoon of a bubble.

Please have some perspective ("touch grass", if you will). I live in one of the most socially conservative states in the union and there are openly married gay people here, gainfully employed and forming a part of society.

Meanwhile, in a full third of all the countries in the world, homosexuality is still illegal (sometimes punishable by death), and the majority of the world population still thinks homosexuality is wrong. There's about twenty in the world that are more friendly to "queerness" than the US[0] -- mostly monoethnic white countries with a couple of exceptions.

You may also be surprised by how socially conservative nonwhite people in this country are in general; even less than a decade ago, the majority of black Americans did not support gay marriage[1].

[0]: https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/28/5/967/4919666

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/10/07/blacks-ar...

A leading candidate for the 2024 US presidential election has made a campaign promise to make healthcare that I rely on virtually illegal. Dozens of representatives in congress have cosponsored a bill that would make it illegal to even teach doctors about this form of care. I would not survive without this care. Things may be worse in the rest of the world, but if healthcare I rely on is taken away then there is no way I will stay in this country.

Moving to a heavily blue state may be a better and far cheaper option, they are holding the pro-queer line for the time being. Judging historically on blue states' treatment of some other issues like immigration, I don't expect them to cooperate with any anti-queer laws on the federal level.

> Judging historically on blue states' treatment of some other issues like immigration

Blue states don't have a great history on those other issues, either. Oregon literally prohibited black people from entering its territory. The last Major League Baseball team to integrate was the Red Sox. A quarter of all present-day blue states have never elected a black person to the House of Representatives, and another quarter have only ever elected one.

Actually, even today, most professional athletes point to Boston as the most racist city they'll play in. "Sanctuary cities" in blue states like Chicago and NYC are pushing refugees out to the comparatively redder suburbs right now. In the meantime, college-educated black people are moving back to the South.

Point being, differences are only felt in the extreme margins; red states and blue states are just the difference of 49% vs. 51% one direction or another on almost every divisive issue.

This is a perfect example of first-world privilege in display. I'm really jealous that people live in such good places that anti-queer rhetoric is their major problem.

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