Considering, no one cared about gay men or women in history until Christian based religion dominated (see Greece, Rome, etc.) I blame religion. A lot of people aren't going to read the bible, but cherry-pick it to suit their needs. Removing pedos (the cherry-picked same sex attracted ones) from the equation (as there were a lot, especially with Spartans and Romans), and there are still LGBT people, of age.
The same bible that says gay people should be killed also says to love thy neighbor (ironic, as I am cherry-picking right now). I feel as if the only reason LGBT people are in the bible is someone had an agenda against someone they opposed, and decided to slander based on something like who they chose to slept with.
Years ago when humans walked around in Tribes, it was super important as a survival tactic for everyone in the group to work together and believe the same things as if there was conflict about beliefs in the group it could jeopardise the groups integrity and risk lifes. This is why humans tend to follow stuff in trends or is seen as socially acceptable by large groups of people.
The reason hatred happens towards LGBTQ+ communities from a small number of people is usually due to the above, the people they hang around with and are in their safety circle have hatred towards these communities and people follow the trend, now why do people in the first place hate these groups?
Fear of social change - Especially true among older people, when they were younger they had a set of beliefs that was inset into them and like the above its ingrained to believe what the majority believe, but as people get older and times change, anything which causes a change in soceity makes them feel like their beliefs are changing and older people tend to stick more to their original beliefs as its served them well, even though it maybe wrong. This turns into very much an "Us vs Them" mentality where likeminded people all oppose another group which differs from their beliefs.
Fear of the unknown - A lot of people simply don't understand something about a group of people as they haven't ever experienced anything the group has and because they don't understand it, in their brains it could mean its a threat to them so they oppose it as a default stance.
Fear that their beliefs will be forced to change - similar to the above, people as they grow old start to feel more vunerable and as stuff changes they fear that groups may want to change what they do or believe in, obviously this is irrational as no one in an LGBTQ group is going to force sexuality onto them, but they fear this. They may fear that they will lose privillges as society changes.
I don't have anything useful to say other than: I am a cis person who doesn't despise anything about the LGBT community. Of course a lot of the stuff is not my taste, but for me you are mainly people. And I like people...
Be yourself, be proud of yourself and what you've acomplished and coming out is an acomplishment
I don't get what the fuck these dumb religios people have against the community or queer people in general, I don't get what politicians have against you eigher... I guess because you are different and a minority they think they can belittle you for their own good while proudle swinging the american flag or something...
People want scapegoats when life doesn't go well, and there's an entire industry devoted to manufacturing them. However, in normal conditions, they don't get a lot of traction. People used to point and laugh when some of the more "outspoken" TV preachers would blame $latest_tragedy on the existence of homosexuality.
I suspect the LGBTQ+ community is the current easy "easy target" because the social acceptability of blaming a clear "skin colour/nation of origin/religion" groups have faded. It's also probably easier because you can add a blame component-- many people still treat sexual and gender preferences as choices rather than innate, so it's more viable to say "Blame Steve: he chose to be gay/trans/etc" where you can't say "Frank CHOSE to be Black".
However, I suspect we have a secondary force that turbocharges these messages these days. We're not dealing with a one-off crisis anymore-- it's systemic problems (stagnating wages, climate change, student loan debt) which require major economic changes to fix. There are plenty of people who obviously want to avoid that discussion, so it's in their interest to pick at social disputes and demonizing a minority because it keeps them off the radar. They can bankroll the campaigns of candidates who spit hate, and steer the focus of the media in ways that encourage polarization.
Every day we're arguing about taking out books from the school library because they have LGBTQ+ character is a day we're not asking "are our schools producing students who can compete with China/Japan/Korea/Uzbekistan?"
Every argument we have about "should insurers pay for HRT" is time not spent asking "why don't we have national health care and pay UK or Canadian prices for meds?"
Every minute spent debating transgendered people in the bathroom is a minute ignoring the cishet white men in the boardroom shipping your job from Topeka to Tijuana.
You're being used to rile people up for political gain. Plain and simple, you're just the demonized minority of the decade. Good news is many of the haters will be dead in the next 5-10 years.
I think that you are on the right track, once it wasn't ok to be mad at color they had to find a new demon and they were like this bible has to have something more for us to hate, and bam it was there, notice they always are like man shouldn't lay with a man (as if men are the only ones out there that get to pick who they are sexed by or do the sexing with [lets not even bring up love]) but they are not out in near the force for female on female scenes (pop media where there is a innocent girl on girl kissing scene), its all just to get the base riled up.
While I am just a supporter of rights (gay or otherwise) I am just going on what I was told and shown when I was forced to goto catholic school. And I am sure that all people get more then the fair share of BS from the haters out there (I wasn't trying to minimize the hate any group gets, it was just the talking points I was pressured on as a child) but its all typical bully behavior, they need a punching bag so that others will look up to them, and its sad that any one has to be a punching bag for others (as long as the interactions of the people are understood and consented too) . Thats my 2 (very removed) cents on the issue as I have seen it.
@Bicyclejohn at first my position as a Muslim was that frankly, I don't care. I'm in the west, and even though my religion strongly condemns the act (but having thoughts are not sinful, rather a test as the blind is tested, the poor is tested, etc. and your reward is in the afterlife for abstaining or, if failing to abstain, to repent constantly from sin), I know I can't reasonably expect my country to conform to my own beliefs.
That being said, it did not really end at "oh yeah two men or two women can marry now". It's a cult-like ideology with a month long celebration. The flags are thrown up on the White House in a really strange and eerie way to me. It's very prevalent among children even in elementary school. All this pronoun stuff, while I don't typically care, is being presented to children under the age of 10. This is concerning to me. A lot of the so-called science is clearly funded and published by those with agendas. And even if it isn't, we can't say the long term effects of transitioning are positive because we only have a few years of data anyway, and mostly in adults not minors.
So that's why I have become more hateful. It is not just "I can marry a man/woman now". It is a powerful, cult-like ideology that itself focuses extremely on sex and sexual acts. I just cannot agree with this. There are no parades for heterosexual people. There are no public displays of lewd acts. There are no flags thrown up on the White House. You have the rights you wanted but for some reason the ideology only grows more feverish with time. Why? What is going on?
I see it and to me it is comparable to the description of the people of Lot in the Qur'an. They were also feverish. They were extreme in their actions and in fact forced people into it. The traveler who made the mistake of stopping in their town was not left to his own devices. I'm not saying this is how the LGBT is now, but that's the path I see it taking. And when Lot called them towards better behavior, they called for his "cancellation":
• Sahih International:
But the answer of his people was only that they said, "Evict them from your city! Indeed, they are men who keep themselves pure."
Al-A'raf, Ayah 82
They wanted him ostracized and removed from society. Why? He was a lone man calling out this action. It wasn't an organized effort to actively hunt down or execute these people. He merely said:
• Sahih International:
Indeed, you approach men with desire, instead of women. Rather, you are a transgressing people."
Al-A'raf, Ayah 81
So yeah. That's why I've become more hateful. It didn't stop at "we just want to get married". I don't care what people do in the privacy of their own home. The problem is it isn't just the home now. It's media, schools, politicians, the White House, and more.
You have given a very accurate answer to OP's question, without knowing you were doing it. People like you have come up with these false charges against the LGBTQ community because of things you've read/heard/believed off of the internet.
Let me ask you a question, and please answer with all honesty. If you did not have the internet, if you did not have tv and multimillion dollar news companies to watch, how would this group of people have any weight on your life at all? How would their celebrations and actions affect you? The answer is, quite plainly, they wouldn't, not one little bit. However, you have bought into things you have read on the internet and heard from outlets like Fox News.
Where I live, the only time I hear about Pride is when there are people crying about it, even though there is nothing having to do with it in 100 miles. The fact of the matter is that people like yourself have always and will always want to be seen as the victim. Gay people exist, and people are going to celebrate it, get over it and mind your own business if you don't like it.
@HandOfKarma My brother's school has events like this. They had tried to have one such drag queen come read a story to a class of 9 year olds. It affects me. If it didn't, I wouldn't care, you're right. If I had no internet and it wasn't splattered over stores and flags were up in my local park for some reason (no flags during black history month, no flags that symbolize christianity during christmas, no flags except govt flags otherwise), then yeah obviously I would not care. But it is in my face, impacting my younger brother. So yeah, I care.
Still doesn't tell me how it affects you. An adult reading a book to a child doesn't affect you, I'm sorry. Are you so soft that hearing about someone reading a book to children is offensive? Get real.
@HandOfKarma you're phrasing it as "someone", as if it's just any person. It isn't.
Would you be okay with a neo-Nazi reading a book in a school to your children? What about a murderer? No, you wouldn't, because these people represent, in and of themselves, a dangerous ideology that goes against what you believe in. They aren't just "someone", though I imagine other neo-nazis might phrase their response to your outcry in a similar manner.
And also, what affects my brother affects me. That's what being family means. If you attack him, you attack me. If you insult my mom, you're also insulting me.
I hate responses like this because they’re filled with so many falsehoods that you know they’re in bad faith.
Pride isn’t about sex. Pronouns aren’t about sex. Gender isn’t about sex. Nobody wants to corrupt the children with sex in the lgbt camps. Stop making our entire existences about sex, it’s fucking disgusting.
Even though I understand how this works on an intellectual level, it's still astounding to me that you can ascribe yourself a literal ideology as an identity -in that you start as a Muslim, instead of as a member of Islam- and accuse a whole lot of people who have a literal identity inextricable from their person of subscribing to an ideology.
It's very interesting.
I could say the same from the point of view of an atheist living in a western country with muslim populations. First it was these people can go to mosques to pray and can cover their hair if they are women. Why do I care. But it didn't stop there. Now they want me to respect their fasting on ramadan and not eat in public, force me to listen to their call to prayer five times a day, including at the crack of dawn, force alcohol serving restaurants -if they permit them at all- to be out of sight. That's why I became more hateful...
@CynAq I am a Muslim first and foremost, before anything else.
If the west chose to approach Islam in this way, I would not complain. I have no expectations of non-Muslims to respect or treat my faith with dignity. You want to hate it or whatever go ahead. A lot of so called progressives called Muslims allies but the reality is no Muslim agrees with 90% of the social issues from these groups. It's that simple. You have the right to hate.
Next, it is one thing to be gay and another entirely to take part in all the, yes, ideological events that surround LGBT. You can be gay and Muslim. You are not punished for your thoughts. Even if you act upon them, the door of repentance is open until your last breath, to all Muslims and people. You cannot be Muslim and say that the action is permissible, or that such a lifestyle is encouraged or praiseworthy. Like I said, some people may be tested in this way, but it doesn't validate the culture around it.
I'll opin that in many cases it is because of a profound lack of science education - especially in evolution / natural variation in species. All living creatures change, humans are no different. The spectrum is real. People vary in appearance and composition. Brains are part of this and brain composition / structure has a role in gender, right?
Now this doesn't apply to everyone because there certainly are scientists who are anti - but I would assume at much lower rates...and then factors like parential beliefs or repression?
And for me, this perfectly explains why religion is anti. (and alternative sexuality gets in the way of population growth - gotta fill those pews/collection plates.) Of course now science :-) has provided clinical insemination and the possibility of cloning / clinical gestation...
I'm not any kind of lgbt+ myself but I think most of the hate stims from religious values or the concept of othering. With religion they think it's morally wrong and something to stop. With othering it's about someone just being different. Some might also be in the closet and over compensating with hateful actions to hide it.
Obviously there is nothing wrong with being lgbt+ or different.
I'm inclined to think that the primary reason is how sexually repressed the average person is.
I'm thinking of it this way:
The average person hides their kinks, and normalizes the utter segregation of sexuality from life in general in rhetoric. Obviously life isn't separate from sexuality, therefore any display of mainstream sexuality from which there's no hiding, is deemed non-sexual. Hyper-sexualized tv shows, sexualization of young people, cishet couples walking hand in hand or even kissing publicly are ignored to a large degree. Of course there are puritans out there but we're talking about the average person here.
When all this contradicting behavior pushes the cognitive dissonance to unbearable degrees, the average person looks for a target to lash out, to blame for the stress their own sexual repression creates within them.
As a result, the sexually repressed average person can't see, hear or think about any aspect of the lgbtq+ community without their own sexual urges boiling over like an overfilled pot of soup. They think the difference between themselves and the openly out members of the lgbtq+ community is that the average person knows how to keep their kinks, fetishes and sexuality to themselves, while the lgbtq+ community makes a culture out of showing off theirs.
They literally can't understand being lgbtq+ isn't a kink or a fetish, nor is it solely based on sexual expression, because their own sexual expression is normalized into everyday culture for everyone to see 24/7, thus a gay couple walking their kid to school in the morning is no different to them than themselves getting a footjob on the sidewalk next to the school.
There's also a reason most of the really awful stuff comes from religious rather than secular communities. Not only do religious communities often thrive on the type of repression you're talking about - usually ratcheted up to truly insane levels - opposition to the existence of LGBTQ+ people has become a central pillar of the Christian identity in a lot of places, especially in the American/Evangelical space. It's an aspect I don't think gets talked about enough, in that if LGBTQ+ people were to vanish tomorrow, many of these religious sects would just fragment and fall apart immediately. Gays are the external "enemy" and the glue that's holding them together. It's especially true of Evangelicals.
As a teenager/high school student in the mid 2000s, I was a full bore, "god hates f-gs," white-shirt-and-black-tie Bible thumper. I lost my religion in 2008. As my religious indoctrination failed, I went from thinking about LGBTQ+ people every single day to never thinking about them at all. Literally in the span of a month, the amount of my headspace that the gay community occupied went from substantial to zero. That's how hard a lot of religious communities were (and still are) leaning on generating hatred for the gays to prop up their entire religious organization.
That's not to say that the religious indoctrination issues were completely without permanent effects. I've basically never been able to form normal human romantic relationships because of it and that deep-seated repression is still there. Fast forward to the last two years and I've come to the realization that I'm considerably less straight than I thought I was - whoops! - but that never even factored in before.
People can be fundamentally simple and shallow; tribal and afraid of the unknown and of being away from the tribe, and these seem to make the most noise.
I will always strive to be intolerant of those who choose to show intolerance, but will love everyone for being themselves.
I was raised in a conservative Christian family that belonged to a church denomination branching off of Mormonism - It took (is taking?) years to deconstruct and understand the hate that I participated in and supported.
I strongly recommend watching the movie Jesus Camp to get a better understanding how Christian youth groups/camps can brainwash kids so they grow up to become adults who are so ignorant of the world outside their small Christian community that they know little more than what church authorities tell them. In my case I hated the LGBTQ+ community because hating you was my identity. I was taught to be one of "god's chosen people" preserving the correct way to live. It was often preached that natural disasters were god's way of punishing non-believers and those whose faith was not strong enough. The congregation I attended literally believed that all the natural disasters, pollution, and systemic failings around the world were god's vengeance against gays, liberals, and socialists. - e.g. I attended a sermon where the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill was literally and explicitly blamed on Obama's support for gay marriage.
If you were raised in such an insular, dependent, and ignorant community it is most likely you would learn the hate too. When you believe you and your religion are literally the center of the universe (you are the "chosen people" in a supernatural power struggle between good and evil) you too would feel anxious, threatened, pressured and quick to resort to violence.
The conservative Christians I grew up around who hated the LGTBQ+ community were generally emotionally immature. Their personal development, like mine, stunted by the church from an early age. It takes years to unlearn the judgemental conformity, moral superiority, and cognitive dissonance that is so integral to many congregations and denominations today. Faced with the prospect of questioning your core-beliefs, leaving your friends and family behind, and abandoning so much of your identity it's totally understandable, yet horrible, that people will choose to double down on the only beliefs they really understand.
That's why I hated the LGBTQ+ community - Because I was taught that you were the root of so much supernatural evil in the world, but if I were asked "why do you hate gay people" I would have told you "I don't hate gay people, I hate their actions. I just don't like them, it's unnatural". Eventually I realized that people are their actions and you can't hate one without hating the other.
As someone "outside of the community", I don't think I have ever talked to anyone who hates lgbtq+. Granted, I'm a filthy (European) liberal, and it's not the first thing I talk to people about, but still.
If anything, I'm tired of this being a politicized issue - I just wish the small, insecure, socially conservative bigots would crawl back in their hole so that we go back to focus on less obvious issues than "whether sexual minorities should have human rights". It's a stupid question and I don't want to waste any more time on it.
I think it might have something to do with changing social standards. There is always a group of people who are afraid of any kind of change - in particular, change that makes them feel like their rights are being taken away. For example, the right to pick on a minority. (I'm not saying that it ever actually way "their right" btw; it's just that I think that they perceived it as such.) It used to be a lot easier to pick on minorities, like the LGBT+ community, and find resonance with other people. Nowadays however, there's a good chance something like a sexist joke will hit a brick wall (which, imo, is a good thing). The feeling of social exclusion is one of the most terrifying feeling a human can have, which means that your mind will seek for any way to "address" this issue. But of course, you don't look at yourself (You where able to do it in the past, so why shouldn't you be able now?), you look for some external reason for your problems. And the "obvious" target in this case is, the LGBT+ community.
Note: This is just my own interpretation, the interpretation of a straight male bystander, so it might be entirely wrong. In addition, I don't believe this is the whole picture, or even anywhere close to it. "Hate" is an incredibly complicated and nuanced topic, and there's no way I could get it fully right.
I think that the people who are most vocal in their hate are opening a window into their own internal judgement. They are filled with toxicity that is designed to keep people in line, to serve specific roles (man, especially). It spills outward, but it works inward too.
If you believe in the importance of your Masculine Role™️, in the rigidity of it - and it's the most important part of these people's identity, everything revolves around it; trucks, guns, gettin' er done, etc. - when you see people who reject your entire concept, its a personal attack. It calls into question the validity of their own identity, which they didn't get to choose anyway - that was the point. Their minds are forced to contend with the reality of a diversity of gender/sexual expression - it either softens or hardens their hearts.
Imagine being a manly man in manly ville who has defined their entire life around manliness. But hating it the entire time. The burden of a role you didn't make for yourself. Accepting that you could have done different, been different, is hard, and their community makes it impossible.
Obviously the right thing to do is to soften on traditional roles, for their own sake and others, and to reject pressure from everyone they know even if it means being alone. It's hard to do.
I just saw this on my feed. I'm not LGBTQ+ (nor subscribed here) but just wanted to drop in and say many of us don't hate you. I personally have some friends from your community and love hanging out with them. Keep your chin up.
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