My theory is that the internet has been a huge catalyst for the gay rights movement. In the 90’s when the internet became big it quickly became the preferred method of connecting with like-minded strangers, finding support, and starting grassroots political campaigns. Closeted gay people were able to reach out and connect with other gay people and their supporters, and find the courage to come out in large numbers. In the last 20 years almost everyone has had a friend, sibling, child, or parent come out of the closet. People who were previously disgusted and hostile towards homosexuality suddenly realized that someone they loved and cared about was gay. That challenged a lot of their previously held views. And after a couple of decades of realizing that the sky wasn’t falling and wanting their loved one to be happy the hysteria died down and people got on board.
Actually, I think it came out of a movement in the '60s and '70s that was sort of an “anti-witch” hunt…a reaction against ostracizing people for not fitting the mold. That was a good thing that was unfortunately taken beyond removing artificial social boundaries all the way to removing pretty much every social boundary short of physically assaulting strangers.
I do not believe the contention that modern sensibilities include a rejection of “hate speech” as a social boundary. The thing that has changed is which people and attitudes may be openly hated without suffering social rebuke. That is the best evidence I have for why this has essentially been a pendulum swing, rather than the improvement of the human condition that secular humanists sometimes presume it to be.
In Screwtape Letters, the senior devil Screwtape says this:
*…The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere “understanding”. Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritansm; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.
But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate his horror of the Same Old Thing into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will. It is here that the general Evolutionary or Historical character of modern European thought (partly our work) comes in so useful. The Enemy loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking “Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?” they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on. And great work has already been done. Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective “unchanged” we have substituted the emotional adjective “stagnant”. We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is,
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE*
That’s what I think this is…that is, a fashion in what sins are accepted and which are not, imagining that the current fashion in morals represents an advancement in the human condition, instead of a change in what temptations are the most prevalent, what sins may be committed with the most social approval, and what virtues garner the most public contempt and the highest likelihood of persecution. In every age, it has been something, and our age is no exception…
