To a large extent, I think this explains a lot of it, and it’s sort of a generational thing. Using racism as an example, my parents raised me seeing all races as equal and it’s something that’s ingrained in me. For several years when I was in elementary school, my best friend was black, we only stopped being friends when he moved away. Looking back, I realize it was odd to my parents, not because they weren’t trying not to be racist, but having grown up in the 50s and 60s in a pretty racist area, it had been ingrained that black people just weren’t equal to white people, so even though they’d intellectually gotten past it, some of that training still poked it’s ugly head up every now and then. And I only really realized this after having a conversation with my mom a few months back where she said she was proud of me for having friends of different races and dating women of different races and yadda yadda, and it hadn’t even occurred to me as anything special, it’s just how it is.
And in the same unfortunate way, I was raised with one parent basically being indifferent but the other pressing into me that homosexuality is evil, it’s tearing down society, etc. I never really saw it as more than just a sin and any worse than really any other, but it was definitely still “icky” to me. It wasn’t until I got into my late teens and early twenties and started thinking about it that I realized that was stupid and I intellectually changed my opinion, but it’s difficult to really undo years of training like that, and I still catch a gut reaction contrary to my intellectual beliefs from time to time, though I almost always catch it and it’s gotten exeedingly rare over the years. I think the biggest difference for me was meeting really good people who are gay or transgender or whatever, because it did a lot to dispel that nonsense. And to that extent, I hope that if/when I have kids of my own, raising them believing people as equal, race, religion, gender, orientation, whatever, and as much as I grew up just not even seeing racism as a thing, really seeing all races as equal, I hope I can do the same for my kids in as many or more ways. In short, hate is learned, it isn’t innate.
But again, as a similar story, I used to know someone who considered herself extremely progressive, and went out of her way to talk about a lot of the equality stuff. About ten years ago, when gay marriage and all was really starting to be a part of the zeitgeist, I remember her going off on a spiel lecturing me about how I wasn’t supportive enough because of various candidates I supported or something, I really don’t remember the reasoning, but it was kind of spurious. Nevertheless, about a month or two later, she had gotten a couple new roommates (she was sharing a large townhouse downtown), and she was flipping out because she was concerned one of them was gay and having sex in the house. I was trying to calm her down, pointing out all that stuff we’d talked about before, but she even went on to say that it’s one thing to support it in theory or in other places, just not in her own house. Turns out, he wasn’t even gay, the guy she thought was his boyfriend was just a friend, and he later got a girlfriend and she was totally okay with him loudly having sex with her. I think at that point she realized her concerns were stupid, but only after they were made moot. My point in this story isn’t to bash that person or whatever, only in that even someone who REALLY wants to further these sorts of causes, having grown up in a much more conservative culture than here in the US, where homosexuality was an arrestable offense, she couldn’t just WILL her trained disgust away.
So, I guess what I’m getting at is, society IS changing, but it still takes time. Even for people that really are your allies, we’re going to stumble or fall from time to time. Don’t be disheartened by that, but rather strive to see how far we’ve come in ending that prejudice that has been ingrained in us and in society for so many generations. Hopefully, in your having been out for 40 years, you’ve observed a large shift, particularly in the last 10 years or so. We’ll get there.