It doesn't matter what level of wealth some people have right now because they still live in the culture where these disparities cause these mindsets to exist. You have to actually change the whole world first and then the culture will fall in place, sorta like filling a mold with sand. Right now the mold we have will produce discriminatory feelings. Hearing about all those inner city crimes and about other people crying out about losing their jobs has an effect on everyone.
Religion is also something I think greater economic and technological prosperity can cure btw, since a lot of people resort to religion because life's conditions are too rough right now. It's no accident poorer rural areas are also way more fervently religious. Both in our country and worldwide this is a trend. Religion is a sort of soul-morphene that dulls the pain but if you use it too much you get hooked and can't be without it. Remove the pain and you remove the need for the morphene.
You're way more optimistic than me, then. I've seen far too many well off people hold onto irrational hatred and spread them because "it's what I was raised with, these are my values and culture".
Religion is a different story, as, yes, the less you need it as a source of hope, the less likely you are to need the so-called "opium of the masses" to make it through the day. It's a little more responsive than bigotry to the quality of life of people.
I think there's way more people who are either actually homophobes or who don't care about homophobia and wanna just live their lives though. If they like this chicken sammitch, they are gonna eat it. The type of person who will boycott chicken sandwitch places is not your average mainstream individual. You can see this by the fact that chick-fil-a is still in business. Hell, don't they stay closed on sundays too cause they're religious as well? If they can afford to do that and also be homophobes and they still don't go out of business that says something.
I'll grant you that there are more "I don't care, I just want my consumer goods" people than anything.
But that's the thing. They'll buy your stuff whether you have a pride cap, a homophobe cap, both, or neither. They don't give a damn. So, as a company you don't need to worry about offending them by picking a side, they'll buy your stuff regardless, so long as you don't say stuff like "You fence-sitters are evil" or something.
And at this point, I think the LGBT + Woke demographic outnumbers the homophobes. Because the homophobes are mostly on their own. The LGBT demographic has a bunch of people backing them up who are either fully supportive of them, soft supporters of them, or people just trying to look woke.
Hence why most companies tend to back them, at least on a cheap performative level. They have made the calculation and found that the numbers and money line up more with them than the bigots, and they know that the "I don't care" people won't switch supermarkets either way.
Either way though, the important thing here is that you do this from a liberal perspective. The same thing that protects people's rights to be gay and not get thrown off a roof is the thing that protects the rights of people who don't like them to be openly hateful with their views, you gotta protect both of those. Otherwise, when you lose cultural power, the roof-people will get to be fascist back at you, and that is gonna be when we have trouble.
The most catastrophic of errors here is letting the right to own liberal values and free speech and so on when it is in their nature to wanna censor things to preserve order way more. It is as you say, the bigoted and right wing places are the only ones upholding liberal free speech values right now. And as someone who values those ideas more than cultural marxism and trans folks lifting weights next to the people they want to and what have you, I am troubled by having to constantly side with people whose economic policies I disagree with, because they are the ones standing up to the greater threat to free expression that we face.
Yeah, mate that's the thing.
There's a healthy pile of evidence that shows that most of the right doesn't give a damn about actual freedom of speech and are just using it as a shield because their social views are becoming more and more unpopular and they want a shield. And for some dumb reason, people believe them.
Many in the right wing, or at least their most popular people are:
- Extremely angry at Colin Kaepernic for using his freedom of speech to kneel for the anthem and got him booted from the league (Classic "cancelling")
- Vehemently against any criticism of the illegal settlements in Palestine (you know, where settlers burn peoples homes, steal the land and set up a new town in its place) and in some states literally made emergency relief funds conditional on "You cannot support any movement that criticizes them" (which is full on censorship)
- Angry at Snowden and Chelsea Manning for revealing their own country's war crimes to them, and claim they're traitors who need to be locked up or executed.
- Several Red States literally have it on the books that "an atheist cannot run for office" (Even though this would be slapped down by the constitution if it were ever challenged, because DUH)
- There are Red States that have de-facto made it illegal to protest recently, and literally arrested people for "protesting without a permit", but also refusing to process ANY permits to protest.
This is to say nothing of the president being like "We should make burning the flag punishable by a year in jail" and having the support of a lot of the right wing despite the fact that case was handled by the supreme court a loooooooong time ago and it was ruled to be freedom of expression, and thus, protected.
Meanwhile, when there's an attack on freedom of speech against the left in
any form, the right is completely silent. And I mean an actual attack, like, the government taking some kind of punitive action for speech, not "oh noooo, people on twitter didn't like what I said and are engaging in Economic Boycott and Social Shaming of me! I am being CENSORED! My free speeeeech!!"
And finally, the far FAR right already doesn't believe in free speech at all. They caught Richard Spencer on mic saying that, no, of course he doesn't believe in freedom of speech, he just thinks it's a good tactic to use while his odious views are not mainstream.
Now, you can totally be worried that "cancelling" (ie, organized economic boycotts and social shaming) may have a chilling effect on free speech, that's totally reasonable to worry about. But if you think that the Right owns freedom of expression as anything other than an opportunistic tool, you're being silly.
For a youtuber with similar views to you on quality of life leading to less bad behaviour, and a belief in free speech absolutism, but who actually routinely points out just how much the "free speech warriors" don't actually practice what they preach and points out the ways they're hypocrites, I'd recommend you look up Secular Talk / Kyle Kulinski. He's actually one of my main political news sources for the US, because his instincts are generally correct.
