Wednesday open thread: Pride!

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As a man of a certain age, growing up I engaged in the usual homophobia which was common at the time. I used homophobic slurs to put down people who angered me. I would call things I didn't like "gay". In this I was no different than most of my peers. I don't say this to absolve myself. It's just the way it was.

I and this country have evolved in ways that gay activists of the Stonewall generation could never have dreamt of. The first state to legalize same-sex marriage, Massachusetts, did so in 2004. As a result of that, a backlash spread across the country, with states passing laws or ballot measures defining marriage as between a man and a woman. (Yes, even liberal California, in 2008, as in the same election it voted for Barack Obama.) Same-sex marriage seemed dead as a dodo.

Remember that I've written that things are always a certain way until they aren't. That's what happened with same-sex marriage, and gay rights in general. Proposition H8, as the California anti-gay initiative was called by its detractors, lit a fire under the culture. By this time, gay Americans had become interwoven in the country's cultural fabric. (Or, I should say, they were able to be out about being gay and still work, unlike in the days of Rock Hudson.) More and more people came to see a civil contract being regulated by religious mores in a secular republic as untenable. President Obama—with a little prodding from his vice president, Joe Biden—came out in favor of same-sex marriage. Overnight, seemingly, the polling on marriage and gay rights in general did a 180. When the Roberts Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015—just seven years after Prop. 8—it was the culmination of a cultural tidal wave. It was a visible recognition of gay people's humanity in their own country. 

Now, as we see the backlash the trans community is going through, it does help to keep that cultural transformation in mind. No, it won't be easy. There will be many hills to climb. But that same breaking of the dam is already happening. The very conservative governor of Utah vetoed his legislature's bill banning trans girls from competing in girls' sports. And he did so because of the psychological harm it could do to these young girls who were already struggling with so much. Step by step is how you achieve progress, until it becomes a stampede.

As we welcome in this year's Pride Month, I again urge you to remember the arc of the moral universe. Gnashing of teeth and rending of garments does no one any good. All advancements in society have come because the oppressed have refused to buckle under to their oppression. Fear and cowering will win nothing. To quote Napoleon's apocryphal statement: L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace. 

This is your open thread.