As to human beings acting like sheep, how do you explain the sudden “moral shift” (in a little over a decade) by a massive segment of the population to gay persons’ rights to marry?
Many reasons. None of them hard to discern.
Maybe it started with Stonewall, when gay people were encouraged to be themselves. Not to hide away their sexuality. Before that, people saw gays as a threat. Now everyone knows someone who is gay. Friends, relatives, work colleagues, the girl who baby sits the kids, the guy who services your car. There is some discrimination still. Obviously. You only have to read some of the posts in this thread to see what attitudes still linger. But there’s not so much so as to prevent people being open about it. And when you know someone that you like and recognise as a decent person, the fact that they are gay has no influence on your attitude to them anymore.
There’s more travel as well. People have more disposable income. My parents never left the street they always lived in. I had the opportunity to move a round somewhat and become exposed to different viewpoints.
And if you can’t physically travel, then the world comes to you. All you need is a laptop or just an iPhone. Social media gives you more connectivity to more people than is probably good for you.
The pill, strangely enough. It helped people realise that sex wasn’t just for creating smaller versions of yourself. So there has been a lot of sexual freedom. More experimentation and hence a more liberal attitude to gay sex (female as well as male).
But mostly education, in a general sense. More people know about the matter now than they ever did so they get to make a considered opinion, rather than, as you might say, going with the herd. And education in schools tends to encourage less learning by rote and more critical thinking. You are encouraged to think for yourself, to dissent, to make an argument. So younger people today are more wary of being sheep, despite what you think. They are more willing to question the status quo. And if they find no reason to maintain it, they reject it.
And finally, our two Zeds and people like them. Zoltan, for example, is blissfully unaware (even though it’s been explained to him) that his arguments, mostly irrelevant and at best inconsequential, and more importantly, the way he presents them, do nothing but drive reasonable people away from his viewpoint. He knows full well that terms like deviant are inconsiderate and hurtful yet wonders why I don’t pick him up on it. Maybe he doesn’t actually know, so I will spell it out for him:
I want him to continue to use terms like that. I want him to bring up children’s sex education and stds and aids and deviant sexual practices and the APA because I can then ask any reasonable person – is this the type of guy with whom you would like to associate? Are these the types of attitudes to which you would like to align?
You can see the answer for yourself. You recognise the moral shift. People are embracing gay rights because the Zeds are making their views known.