My closest friends are conservative Christians. The kind that really, really wanted Huckabee to be the Republican candidate and voted for him in the primary, despite him having no chance to win. A few years ago, in 2004 or 2005, they were complaining about how as moderate Christian Republicans they were so oppressed and the liberals were holding them down. :dubious:
I am moderate (I know this because conservatives tell me I am liberal and liberals tell me I am conservative. :p) and I finally blew up at them. "You have the President (This was sometime after Bush got re-elected), the Senate, the House of Representatives, and most of the Supreme Court. How in the hell are you being “Held down and persecuted!?”
That killed that line of conversation for the rest of the night.
[ul]
[li]There is no mandatory prayer in school. It doesn’t even have to explicitly denigrate the heathens, but we do have to know who they are and spotlight them every day they’re in class. Is that too much to ask?[/li][li]Gays can talk about wanting to get married. I mean, the family needs to be defended from wrongful ideas, like premarital sex and getting pregnant out of wedlock, and blaming it all on the gays is the first step.[/li][li]Medicine is allowed to progress farther than it should. Effectively ending polio is great, but AIDS and cervical cancer are the judgments of an angry God against sodomites and sluts, respectively. Nice people don’t get them and bad people don’t need to be saved from the consequences of their actions.[/li][li]Science is allowed to progress farther than it should. Understanding where life comes from and how it changes over time is evil. Even looking too hard at those rocks in the ground should be punishable, unless you come to the rational conclusion that they’re Biblical giants and demons and genies frozen by Jesus and killed in the flood.[/li][li]Law enforcement is shackled. We know who blows up buildings (Oklahoma City doesn’t count) and we need to act on that knowledge to make ourselves secure (because Richard Reed and John Walker Lindh certainly don’t count).[/li][/ul]
The only real change is they don’t talk politics as much, and when they do, I don’t generally sit there biting my tongue. Which is one reason they don’t talk about it so much.
There were certainly good reasons to oppose some of the ways they went about the effort. But, just like here on this board when someone dares question the effficacy of certain aspects of the gay rights movement, from the standpoint of most posters here, it’s 'Disagree with anything we say or propose, and it’s obvious: YOU HATE GAYS!!!"
You know, I figure with very very very few exceptions (in that I can’t actually think of any) I could happily have a beer with each and every one of you guys. You all pass my backyard barbecue test. We really can get along, we really can work together and agree, and it’s people who find profit in defining our differences and divisions that need the real smack about the earhole.
Heck, I’ve lived in big cities and small towns, east coast and west coast, north and south, ultra-conservative and hippie-liberal. I’ve gone from not really understanding that there were religions other than Christianity to being careful about mentioning my own religiosity in public (not out of fear of being oppressed, God knows, but just because I don’t want to get mocked for it). My friends run the gamut from antitheistic and antireligious to agnostics to pagans to Christians to really Christians to tract-wielding Fundamentalists, and I’d give my shirt to any and all of them if they needed it. One of my closest friends is pro-life, another married couple I’m close to has a Mormon husband and a Jewish wife (asked when they were marrying who was converting, the answer was a very stern “Nobody” from the husband), and my mother is a solitary practitioner of Wicca (“Aren’t you unhappy she’s going to church again?” said her mother. “As long as it isn’t Lutheran,” my mother replied).
Screw gender roles, screw sexual preference (heh) divisions, and let’s have a Hoegaarden.
What happened in the 1960s–well, really, starting back in the 1950s–was that the different generations stopped listening to the same music. Youth culture was born–at that time including only “teenagers”, a term that had not been in common use before, but over the next decade grew to included college students, and later, young working adults. The upper age limit keeps on rising, and today you can’t predict what music a fifty-year-old person likes the way you could in 1970. None of this was meant to be confrontational, but even without confrontation, younger people thought their parents’ favorite music was a bore. Parents thought their kids’ music rubbish. Throw in the protests of the mid and late 1960s, and you begin to see confrontations.
The tactic is not limited to conservative Christians, or any particular religious group, nor atheists. It’s used by anyone who wants to assert victimization in order to justify their words or actions, or, in some cases, actual laws that are on the books. Take the issue of marijuana. It seems that public opinion is very gradually shifting towards greater acceptance of it, as several states have begun to allow its medical use. The average person seems not to care about it much one way or the other, unless somebody sells dope to their kids, which is understandable. Be that as it may, the most strident anti-drug crusaders will often adopt the language of victimization in their campaigns. Victimless crime? Not so, say they. They assert that every God-fearing, law-abiding citizen is the victim of anyone who tokes up.
You just made my day. Sometimes in these pointless threads I forget there are real people at the other end.