Gov. Deal vetoes religious liberty bill

[Derpist]

There was a time when "the people" also wanted slavery

Only if by the people, you mean the elite aristocratic planter class which in many ways was the antebellum Southern equivalent to today's liberal capitalist corporate elite.

[Derpist]

Is being gay an intrinsic or God given difference? Absolutely not. Faith and science are in agreement on this. The Founders are with me on this. Do I need to say what Jefferson said or what Washington did?

No they aren't. You don't get to make up science.

There is absolutely nothing biologically essential about the modern social construction of sexual orientation as it exists almost exclusively in Western societies.

[Derpist]

There was a time when "the people" also wanted slavery

Only if by the people, you mean the elite aristocratic planter class which in many ways was the antebellum Southern equivalent to today's liberal capitalist corporate elite.

"Liberal" corporate elite?  Jesus, man.

Also, what of the elite aristocratic business class in the North that adamantly opposed slavery, mostly on economic grounds?  Hardly grassroots.

The business class wasn't the primary class fighting slave power. It was clerics in the North who saw an unspeakable moral evil in slavery - and rallied a burgeoning Northern middle-class to the cause of abolitionism. The exact same kind of people...who form the Republican base today and are mocked by our corporate elite as being bitter and clinging to their guns. Abraham Lincoln after all, was a rural hick from the West. John C. Fremont grew up as a poor Southern boy. Some of the other most tenacious enemies of slave power were working-class Appalachians, who outright waged a bloody Unionist insurgency against the Confederacy.

Then after the Civil War, it was the liberal capitalist elite that abandoned Reconstruction. The overwhelmingly working and middle-class coalition that coalesced behind Grant lost out to a liberal business and financial elite, who eventually adopted views even more virulently racist than the old Southern aristocracy (see: eugenics, the popularity of a Birth of a Nation, and Woodrow Wilson).

[Derpist]

Is being gay an intrinsic or God given difference? Absolutely not. Faith and science are in agreement on this. The Founders are with me on this. Do I need to say what Jefferson said or what Washington did?

No they aren't. You don't get to make up science.

There is absolutely nothing biologically essential about the modern social construction of sexual orientation as it exists almost exclusively in Western societies.

Then why do LGBT folks show up in literally every society, including in nations that have literally condemned them to death?

If you're referring to Africa, then that's largely an outcome of colonialism.

People who take gay or lesbian as their identity are specific to the West largely because of a history of strange sexual restrictions. History is filled with people who do things that immediately lead Westerners to label them as "gay". Except nobody in ancient Greece or China or Persia or whatever identified as "gay".

It is entirely a modern Western phenomenon to take mundane sexual acts and turn them into the crux of one's identity and OMG YOU KNOW ITS THE NEW CIVIL RIGHTS WE NEED TO UNITE AS A PEOPLE.

Insofar as there is a "gay movement" in places like Africa and Middle East, this is largely a relic of Western colonial imposition. Africans very understandably view the "gay movement" as a Western colonial imposition. Of course, they fail to mention that their draconian bans on same-sex fun is also a product of Western colonial imposition (British anti-buggery laws to be specific). They are both different socially constructed sides of the same particularist coin - a strange sexual puritanism that once convulsed the West.

[Derpist]

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I largely agree with that.

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And I mostly agree with that. Except this history is something largely specific to the West (and more specifically the modern West) - which is why the notion of gay people is a modern Western phenomenon. This identity is entirely a product of the peculiar sexual history of the West and it makes no sense to try to impose it on other societies.

[Derpist]

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I largely agree with that.

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And I mostly agree with that. Except this history is something largely specific to the West (and more specifically the modern West) - which is why the notion of gay people is a modern Western phenomenon. This identity is entirely a product of the peculiar sexual history of the West and it makes no sense to try to impose it on other societies.

If a man moves in with another man with whom he has sexual and intimate romantic relationships with in Uganda, what are they 'imposing' on their society other than themselves?

If that's all they do, nothing. But that is not the entire story. The Western elite then demands that all of society recognize their new Western-style lifestyle as a fundamental identity, which sparks pretty brutal anti-colonial backlash (often ironically based on British anti-buggery laws), which then sparks more imposition by the West (such as denying life-saving humanitarian aid). In fact, this is pretty much that miserable man David Cameron pulled. It's a horrible legacy of colonialism.

As an individual action, it's hard to really get that worked up, but it's a sign of a troubling colonialist trend. Culture and all of that seems to only flow in one direction (and when it tries to flow the other direction, it ironically gets shut down by SJWs as "cultural appropriation"). There's also an irritating trend for people to treat peculiar Western cultural constructions as universals that everyone in the world has to adopt or else.