My reason for posting this question is to get some perspective, since I don’t live further west than Indiana.
Indiana has a lot of conservative tendencies, usually opposes progressive policies, and a little old school bigotry in the form of religion based disagreement with people’s life styles, like letter community.
From an outsiders perspective, TX, OK, MO etc are even more extreme.
This permalink above from a comment from a person referencing recently proposed legislation against letter community people specifically, though there’s tons of examples of bigotry like the school principal getting sued for discrimination due to a kid’s hair (black hair).
We know Lemmy is a bit more populated with left than right thinkers, but regardless, what’s going on in these western plains states? Is it as bad as it looks?
Do you personally know some sweet old church ladies who ‘hate the gays because they’ll going to hell’ or are there just more extreme law makers being elected that don’t represent the majority?
EDIT: tried to fix link to a conversation instead of a login page.
South Dakota here. I typed out a long reply several times, but I don’t know how to explain it.
Our governor is obviously an extremist, fully subscribing to the concept of a “border crisis,” anti-LGBTQIA+ policies, being so overtly racist that she’s banned from three reservations.
I’m a “redneck” looking cis male, and people will share with me their opinions, thinking I’ll agree. These people don’t think people like Noem and Trump go far enough. It’s actually important to understand that even the “nice church people” types believe this. They support much more extreme policies than what we’re seeing.
Edit: I forgot to say this, but this is only responding to the contents of your post. Your link takes me to the kbin login page.
Holy shit, what do they want, a culling?
There’s some mega churches around me, but they are very modern, kid glove, and do the whole ‘come as you are’. That’s not the same thing as accepting people in the letter community, they still think those people are living wrong, but they are generally more compassionate about it.
Edit, I think some of those churches would love to have letter community people attend, but that’s because they’d hope to love on them enough to have them change their life. I honestly believe they’d be doing it out of genuine concern or ‘love’, regardless of whether that’s misguided or not. How misguided and crazy that sounds to people usually depends on how they feel about these people’s lives and if you accept them for who they are or not.
Example, I think most of the common mega church people around here would follow the Bible’s parable about the adulteress and ‘let the person without sin cast the first stone’ approach. God in that example shows he cares about her more than the bad thing she did first, then calls out people for a lack of compassion and thinking what they were doing wrong was more OK than her, but lastly said ‘go and sin no more’ which was basically ‘try to stop doing this’. My post isnt about religion, I’m just using this as an example to illustrate that I think there’s varying degrees of people/religion/bigotry and I am not sure if regions are all the same.
What you’re describing sounds far more extreme to me than people around me in Indiana, but again, I might be missing things.
Um, yes? There have been plenty of mask off statements to that effect, just imagine how many more keep the mask on for the cameras.
crap, I’ll fix it, hold on. It was supposed to be someone speaking of their oppression. Edit, I think I got the link right. It opened in a different browser for me this time.