All of which is apropos of nothing. The point is that just because these elements may have existed then, they didn’t define the society of that time. As I alluded to above, the country’s population then was 150,000,000 + and only a miniscule number of those people ever engaged in lynchings or beating up gays.
The notion that these kinds of things were commonplace and happily accepted and engaged in by people of that era is a post-1968 liberal fabrication, and it’s purpose is intended to try to make liberals look wonderful, caring, enlightened and superior at the expense of the truth, and to excuse what has become of life in this country in the meantime.
But you don’t have to be afraid of getting killed to feel bad about being gay. You can feel bad that your parents don’t want to meet your significant other, that you can’t get married or associate with your SO the same way straight people can. You can feel bad that psychiatrists are telling you that you suffer from a mental illness. You can feel lonely because no one talks about being gay and you feel like you’re the only person you know who has this issue. There’s a lot of ways to make people feel unwelcome without threatening them with death or physical pain.
That’s a nice acknowledgement. And no, I wouldn’t expect Americans to appreciate it exactly - that includes a lot of gay Americans. Not everything is done in order to please others, though, and there’s a happy tradition of potentially offensive irreverence towards religion amongst many Americans. Merry Christmas everyone - I may spend the rest of this Christmas Eve watching American Dad…
I’m going to lead off with one of your mistakes as it is a perfect example of what is going on here. You have invented a fictional time period and are comparing it unfavorably to today, even if things are significantly better now.
Ahhh yes, the school systems. I often find, myself, that my administrators rebuke me for not advising the girls in my classes to fuck.
And, no, you are wrong. In fact, you have it exactly backwards. From a preliminary report that actually overestimated the data for 2000:
“The rate of teen childbearing in the United States has fallen steeply since the late 1950s, from an all time high of 96 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in 1957 to an all time low of 49 in 2000”
And before you object: “Among teens in the United States, at least in recent years, declining birthrates are not the result of more pregnant teens opting to have an abortion.”
You can note that if we look at total pregnancies rather than births: statistics confirm this. In 2000 there were 821,810 pregnancies among 15-19 year olds and 235,470 abortions out of 9,826,000 girls/women of that age. That gives us roughly 83 pregnancies per 1000 women. So even with abortions still factored in as pregnancies, the number of total pregnancies is still lower than the 96 births per thousand in 1957, a number that would be even higher if we included miscarriages as during each year in the data set we have, miscarriages make up roughly 1/8 to 1/10 of the total pregnancies for that year.
In short, you have created an idealized version of a past that didn’t actually exist, in order to denigrate the present.
Racist, misogynistic, McCarthyistic… not a nasty place?
The KKK kidnapped and murdered three voter registration volunteers in 1964 as a message to anybody helping blacks, a terrorist gesture if ever there was one. This happened in Mississippi, the same place where black churches homes and businesses were firebombed and civil rights workers were beaten.
That’s just a snippet of one single state. Deliberate, terroristic, brutal and societaly sanctioned violence. The Klan was quite active in the 50’s and 60’s. No, they didn’t always lynch people. But the necessity for the Deacons for Defense didn’t arise out of thin air. And I’d wager if you were black in any of the towns that the Klan terrorized, it wouldn’t matter to you whether or not you had first hand knowledge of lynchings.
While I’m at it I could mention the ‘internment’ camps we created for Japanese Americans. Maybe that marital rape was still legal until 1976?
Not a nasty society to live in? Concentration camps for law abiding citizens based on ethnicity alone was civil behavior? Legally raping your wife was more polite back then than it’d be now?
Well, first, you’ve provided an excellent argument that shows just why the whole ‘family values’ schtick is a very bad idea.
Second, no, I wasn’t alive then but that’s not exactly relevant. To start with, women were still systematically discriminated against (but politely!) even if they felt perfectly free to divorce. Yes, a large number of people felt that divorce was wrong, but that didn’t change the fact that a woman didn’t have much chance at all of getting a decent paying job and being well off without a man’s help. As I said, it was partially a factor, not the only or the deciding factor.
And a look at how the ‘better’ more ‘civil’ and more ‘polite’ nation treated women:
Women didn’t even gain suffrage until 1920. It wasn’t until 1936 that information about birth control could be distributed through the mail or classified as ‘obscene’. minimum wage laws for women. In 1961 the SCOTUS upheld Florida’s rules making it harder for women to serve on juries due to their reasoning that “woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life.” It wasn’t until 1964 that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created. It wasn’t until 1965 that states were finally prohibited from making birth control illegal. It wasn’t until 1969 that institutions like Yale College started admitting women. It wasn’t until 1970 that employers weren’t legally able to simply change a woman’s job title in order to pay her less than a man for doing the exact same job. It wasn’t until 1972 that Title IX was created. It wasn’t until 1975 that states were prohibited from barring women from serving on juries. The Equal Rights Amendment which specifically made denying equal rights based on sex failed to be ratified by the nation. It wasn’t until 1986 that sexual harassment was found to be illegal.
But because they’d have called her Miss or Mis, I suppose it was better than today, what with its gangsta rap and such?
They may be called ‘bitches’ and ‘hoes’ by some rappers, but in 1945 they’d only been allowed to vote for 25 years. A 45 year old woman in 1945 would have spent virtually her entirety of her formative years legally restricted from full United States citizenship. She’d have to wait another 25 until she could be assured that her boss wouldn’t just change her title while she did the same work, and pay her substantially less than men doing the same job.
Stonewall was in 1969. In New York. In the freaking Village.
That a celebrity who happened to be a homosexual wasn’t beaten doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a truly ugly and shameful time in American history wrt our treatment of homosexuals. Up until 1962 homosexual sex acts were still criminal in every state in the US. Up until the 1974 DSM homosexuality was still listed as a mental disorder. In the 50’s the American government underwent a purge in order to find and fire homosexuals.
The fact of the matter is that until 1975, the US didn’t even have a commission to monitor and document discrimination based on sexual orientation. As such, obviously, reliable figures won’t be had. Even today, there are still a disturbingly large number of anti-gay hate crimes in America per year, and that should give you a good idea of what things were like before being gay was anywhere near socially acceptable.
Also confusing things is that vastly more gays were closeted in the 1940’s-50’s than today largely because it was not a socially viable option.
Damn those liberal revisionists! Damn them!
Those pesky liberals didn’t invent the Lavender Scare, however.
The reality of McCarthyism, the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare show that such attitudes did in fact penetrate society and government and informed their character.
Cite?
You claim sounds quite similar to your assertion that teen pregnancy is up from the 1950’s.
We also have you, doing the same exact thing.
Traffic laws are about safety.
What you want to do is akin to making flame decals on cars illegal.
And yes, everybody is free to decide what they want to do as long as they don’t break the law.
It’s the job of families to teach morality and codes of behavior, not government. Your earlier evident confusion over how you could raise your own daughters not to get pregnant or to get STD’s, and blaming that on society itself, is not without irony. I’d remind you that Consevativism is the philosophy of personal responsibility, not government helping raise/shelter your children because they might be exposed to other viewpoints or aesthetics.
The points you raise are good ones, but I was responding to assertions by Miller, **FinnAgain **and some of the others that pre-1968 society was a nasty, violent, evil society in which physical attacks and killings of blacks and gays was commonplace.
In my opinion the issues you raise could have been fought in the same way that women got the right to vote and blacks gained legislative and societal support for civil rights. If most people of those eras were so hate-filled and dead set against women and blacks, no meaningful progress could ever have been made. The fact of the matter is that the great majority of people of that era could readily see the injustice inherent in denying women the vote and blacks their civil rights, and they’re being thanked for it now by being portrayed as violent, murderous bigots.
The way to address the issues you raise is with knowledge and exposure and by creating an environment in which people can see that gays are just like everyone else, that they are not mentally ill, they didn’t choose to be that way, etc.
I’d like to add more but our family is getting together tonight and I have to go now. Perhaps I can elaborate more later.
My specific claims were “[r]acism was endemic and institutionalized.” And
“[h]omosexuals were much more likely to be subjected to violence and/or discrimination if they weren’t closeted.”
You’re fighting with a strawman.
The Civil Rights Act was legislated, not put up for popular vote, and passed largely due to Kennedy’s postmortem political clout.
Brown vs the Board of Ed was judicial and not put up for popular vote.
When schools were integrated, the National Guard had to be called out to facilitate it. The Decons for Defense had to go, armed, to prevent fire houses being turned on black students trying to go to school.
Freedom Riders were still arrested and in mass.
De La Beckwith got away with murder.
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was jailed for a murder he obviously did not commit.
In 1954 a slight majority were in favor of Brown Vs Board of Ed. By 1959, virtually the same percent of people now thought that Brown was “more trouble than it was worth”.
In fact, in 1961, a majority of Americans were against even the polite actions like sit-ins and the Freedom Riders. Only 23% wanted a potential civil rights act enforced fully and immediately, 62% wanted a “gradual, persuasive approach.” That is, a “gradual, persuasive approach” to granting people their civil rights.
In 1964, only 62 percent supported a law to guarantee blacks “the right to be served in any retail store, restaurant, hotel or public accommodation.”
They couldn’t even get 90% percent of Americans to agree on such a basic principle of civil rights, let alone 99.9%.
You may want to cast that 62% as some sort of victory, but that it really means it that a full 38% of people, at late as 1964, were against or at least not for giving blacks even the most basic of civil rights.
And yes, millions upon millions of Americans against civil rights, or simply not for them, does indeed make it an ugly time in American history. You might have a case if it was .05%, or .5% or maybe even 3% or 4 %, but 38%?
That’s about the same percent of Americans who attend a place of worship weekly, today.
I’m amused that Starving Artist dismisses racial violence in the '50s as an aberration, but is eager to offer up school shootings as proof that modern society is degraded and valueless.
Kids these days and their guns! Back in my day, if a kid wanted to kill someone at school, he had to use a slingshot. And he had to walk five miles uphill through the snow to get there!
As I have always said, gay people want to be equally part of society, yet they go and separate themselves with gay parades, gay bars, gay schools (they are trying to open one), gay pride events and other things and events like this one in Amsterdam.
Fat people want to be excepted by everyone too, but there aren’t any fat people bars, fat people parades, fat people schools are there?
They “separate themselves?” So you figure there was, and is, no real problem with gay people openly expressing their affection in non-gay bars, schools and the like? Most modern bar patrons are just as comfortable being approached by a member of their own gender?
“Go on, Doug! Take a chance! Ask the captain of the football team if he wants to be your date for the prom! If he’s not gay, then no harm done!”
I remain dubious.
ETA: My use of “Doug” is in no way intended to depict any particular SDMB member named Doug; so if it actually does, it’s pure coincidence.
Gay schools were set up for an important reason - to reach the Gay and Lesbian students who are at risk just for being themselves in a “normal” school. Many of them were attacked either verbally or physically on a daily basis and are ready to quit school rather than continue to be harassed.
I definitely don’t think every Gay or Lesbian student should be at a different school, but when it comes to safety - and school administrators in many schools do nothing when it comes to homophobia - I think the schools are needed unfortunately.
And that’s a GOOD thing? For kids to grow up in that kind of home? I had a friend who used to wish her parents WOULD get a divorce. :rolleyes:
And quite frankly, if bigoted jackasses like you are a product of that era, I think that it pretty much proves that the fifties were a fucking cesspool.
Look, they’re not saying to Christians, "This is what I think of your stupid religion!" (Though many idiots will read it that way.) Many of the celebrants are Christians themselves, I have no doubt. They are saying, “I can celebrate Christmas in a flaming-gay way without disrespecting the holiday or the faith.” It’s simply a variation on “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”