'More in common with the Taliban': Outrage erupts over state GOP's anti-Pride vitriol

My understanding of what is going on is that they're suffering from the same precarity (food, rent, housing, work, family, etc. all in a state of precarity) that the rest of us are, but rather they don't challenge their own values. The don't challenge the traditions or the decades of pro-capitalist, pro-nationalist, anti-communist propaganda they've been spoon fed. Instead, it's much it's easier to blame those in the society they already don't like because they're creepy or weird. (And it occurs to me, this may be instincts -- called or related to Fixed Action Patterns -- from migratory tribes to combat infectious disease. When things feel wrong, you shun or stay away from the members that are looking zombiesque.)

And the ownership class is fueling its propaganda engine (financing it directly, often) to continue to feed them hate rhetoric, the notion that their fellow citizens (or immigrants) are the enemy within causing them grief, and not the deep abuses of the ownership class.

This mythology runs deep, it's why all our stories point to ramblers, gamblers, adulterers and thieves as sinners and criminals, rather than war profiteers, pharmaceutical companies and tobacco moguls pushing their respective addiction epidemics, or fossil-fuel billionaires pushing an automotive culture while burying data about the climate crisis. Even though all of the former category cause only a tiny fraction of the death, destruction and economic cost that the latter category does.

If we investigated and prosecuted white collar criminals and set all serial killers and bank robbers free, we'd have a lot more people living and a lot more money. And so decades of copaganda have absolutely figured into redirecting that outrage towards the marginalized.

And yes, the ownership class would rather see human extinction than give up their money and power. So I don't know how we're going to navigate through this great filter.

It really has nothing to do with people choosing sexual and romantic partners, and that's not really what Pride is about. That's why there are many LGBT people who don't participate in or support Pride events.

Choosing who you love, as long as its between two consenting adults, is part of true freedom.

That is the hedonistic principle. Not everyone agrees with that principle, and almost no one agrees with it when taken to its logical conclusion: That all expressions of sexual desire are expressions of love, that all expressions of love are equally valid, and that no expression of love should be repressed.

For example, very few people would agree that scat play -- eating other people's feces as part of sexual play -- is a healthy, normal, or acceptable expression of love. Most people would agree that scat play is sign of sexual deviancy and degeneracy. Yet, the queer movement must necessarily present all forms of sexual deviancy as being equal in value, which is why This Book is Gay -- one of the books that parents are calling to have removed from classrooms and school libraries -- includes a friendly definition of scat play in a list of bizarre sexual fetishes presented to children as normal, healthy expressions of sexuality.