Comment by ceejayoz
6 days ago
> When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group...
That's one possible interpretation, yes. Not everything works that way, though. Gay people getting married didn't take anything away from me. As the meme goes, "it's not pie".
One of the arguments against gay marriage, back in the day, was that gay marriage would somehow take away from straight marriage. It was a pretty vague argument and I never really heard a coherent articulation of it, but a lot of people repeated it.
Gay marriage succeeded as a movement long before the issue of wokeness came to the fore (with the BLM movement). If you actually read the positions of the thought leaders of the latter movement (people like Ta-Nehisi Coates) the argument is exactly what liberal, white, and right-wing people are afraid of:
The Case for Reparations [1]
People are right to react with vigour to these sorts of large-scale redistribution plans. This is a design of the far-left in academia that has its roots in the communist movements of the early 20th century in Europe and Russia, whose worst excesses led to the deportation and execution of millions of Kulaks in the Soviet Union [2].
You might call this a slippery slope argument but the historical precedent was exactly that: a slippery slope where society slid all the way to the bottom. Once enough people have convinced themselves that it is good and right to use the political process to take property away from a group they consider to be their enemies, there is no limit to the amount of destruction they can achieve.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Reparations
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
> Gay marriage succeeded as a movement
It's still illegal in half the world https://www.hrc.org/resources/marriage-equality-around-the-w...
Illegal in well more than half: the UN has 193 members and same-sex marriage is only fully legal in 36 of them, which is less than 20%.
If you look at a map of the world, it is only really a thing in Europe, the Americas and Australia/New Zealand. The only country in Asia with it is Taiwan, which is largely unrecognised and contains less than 0.5% of Asia's population. In Africa, only South Africa–arguably Africa's most Westernised country, and less than 5% of Africa's population. In the Middle East, only Israel – like South Africa, very much the "odd one out" in its neighbourhood – and Israel only recognises same-sex marriages performed overseas, they aren't legal in the country itself.
Not only is it only legal in less than 20% of the world's countries, countries in which it is legal are only around 20% of the world's population