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Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003

The point was not "whatever the majority wants is therefore good". The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs. That is a pretty unreasonable standard to apply, imo.

Also, come on man. It's in really bad taste to compare stuff to the Holocaust. Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.

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There is a difference between having an opinion and spending money to promote it.

Also, beside the direct murders as @ceejayoz mentioned, the social exclusion of LGBT folks drives far too many of them to many of them to suicide.

The legalization of same sex marriage cause a noticeable drop in their suicide rate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBTQ_people#:~:...).

> The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs.

Standards should be higher for folks with more power. The cashier at the grocery store expressing bigoted beliefs won't harm me much; my boss doing it is more serious.

> Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.

I assure you, homophobia has its murder victims. (Including a good number of Holocaust ones.)

> Standards should be higher for folks with more power.

Joe Biden voted for the "Defense of Marriage Act", Yet many LGBT people supported him becoming president.

Obama opposed gay marriage as well. As did many prominent politicians, left and right.

The swing from opposing it to supporting it was a huge cultural shift, and I'm not sure I've seen anything like that happen so quickly, except maybe during a time of war. It went from being opposed by a strong majority to supported by a strong majority in... maybe 5-8 years? It was pretty impressive, and I think it's a sign that the marketplace of ideas can still function.

It helps a lot that it's really a harmless thing. It's giving people more freedom, not taking any away from anyone, and so as soon as it became clear that it wasn't causing a problem, everybody shrugged and went 'ok'.

Supporting one of two candidates in a first past the post election is simply supporting the lesser evil. There is no other information to glean.

Same goes for CEOs.

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