Perhaps you might examine the various way in which queer people in general have been marginalized by labelling all their activities as obscene and sexual. For example, you might take the example of teachers in Florida who are in a same-sex marriage being prohibited from mentioning their marriage lest they be sanctioned for sexual content, while teachers in straight marriages were under no such restrictions. Similarly, the existence of queer people itself has been deemed so sexual by some that even mentioning to a child who is struggling with their identity that queer people exist has been called–in all absence of reason–child abuse.

If you can take those example, and then consider that your perspective of furries, much like homo- and transphobes’ perspective of queer people, is skewed to view it as entirely sexual despite all the parts that aren’t and classify the parts that would be normal sexuality in any other subgroup as deviant. This, as you might be able to deduce, can be quite restrictive of those people’s “allowed” place in society.

Sorry, were you around for the past several elections? Perhaps the 2020 elections where, upon the progressives banding with Biden to get him elected with the expectation that we would be able to “push him to the left”, the Democratic party decided that the reason they didn’t win more seats was because Progressives had damaged their chances of winning, and they must be marginalized. Or perhaps the 2016 elections where, the target of a long running hate campaign was preferred by the party over the popular progressive candidate who was then blamed for his supporters not being won over. Or the 2012 elections where the incumbent Democrat failed to deliver on progressive policies and was a high water mark for drone strikes, but progressives helped bring the win over the candidate Republicans weren’t excited for.

I voted for Harris in hopes that she’d beat out Trump despite how much she and Biden before her discarded progressive policy. I was under no expectation of Progressives being able to do a damn thing to reach her.

I’m all over this comment chain. It rather bothers me seeing this kind of bigotry get deployed against a queer subculture, and a rather long standing one, because it’s the same oppression that gets put on us from the outside, and it is especially galling when I see queer people do it to other queer people. I presume that TERF lesbians calling trans people “predatory men invading women’s spaces and misguided sisters” is something you can’t stand at least as much as I do? Please recognize that painting furries as sexual degenerates is the same thing. Maybe I’m at a nexus of the gay furry community, but so many of the queer people in my locale are also part of the furry subculture, and, no, their existence is not purely sexual, and, yes, furry is a pretty core aspect of their identity and culture.

Oh, indeed. I’m sure you have a tight five about identifying as a helicopter you’re just dying to share with us.

And now the pivot from furries to trans people. I am utterly shocked that this would be the case.

Another day, another sensationalization of the sexual aspects of a queer subcultures. If it’s not the “inherent sexualization of discussing gay people”, or trans people as "autogynephillia and autoandrophillia’, it’s furries or kink at pride. It’s really disheartening hearing the same tools of oppression being deployed over and over again.

Tell me you don’t know queer subcultures without telling me you don’t know queer subcultures. Would you like to complain about drag shows while you’re at it? I hear it is very in vogue at the moment.

If you can’t see daylight between the parties, and hold that they are identical rather than one being markedly less awful than the other (note: less awful, they still have are awful in their way), then you are as annoying as the people who were screaming back in 2021 that anyone who wasn’t voting Biden in 2024 is a monster (please, tell me again how criticizing Biden is the worst thing I can do to keep Trump out of office). Y’all are catastrophizing so hard that you’ve forgotten how to build political power, and are relying on big orgs to do it for you.

Eh, First Past the Post is party suppression, tbh. When the math pushes us towards two parties, a third party is always at the cost of some other party that is nominally “on the same side”.

I’m not sure how “tens of billions of dollars of military aid” counts as not intervening in a foreign conflict.

It is a bit galling to be told endlessly that we must shut up and choose when the choice is “genocide or more genocide”, even when the reason Harris is on the top of the ballot at all is as a result of speaking up about the issues with Biden. I’m not all that comfortable merely accepting that, to escape the chopping block myself, I must remain silent about my family members. I’m sorry that Harris is so tied to Israel’s expansionist agenda that my inability to stomach rampant slaughter is threatening her and the Democratic party’s chances against Trump and the Republican party, but I can’t let some tens of thousands of killing go.

Perhaps they should have left Western style Manifest Destiny in the past.

Not my point. You absolutely can point to homophobic passages of the Bible. You can also point to passages of the Bible that are not talking about homosexuality in specific, but that are commonly interpreted as such. My point is that expecting even Christians to agree with other Christians about what texta constitute the Bible let alone what those specific texts actually say is an exercise in futility.

This is the why of the existence of all the various sects and denominations of Christianity. There are theologians who have done lots of academic work to show how the Bible does not need to be homophobic. There are others who have worked just as hard to justify doing grievous harm to homosexuals. Trying to explain both of those with the One True Reading of the Bible is committing the same error they do.

For my queer ass, if Christians all spontaneously decided to follow the theology of Rev. Fred Rodgers tomorrow, I’m gonna breathe a sigh of relief and leave them alone to be just the nicest people and hope they stay that way.

Expecting Christians to follow a given text to the letter will always be setting yourself up for failure. Not only do people pick and choose the doctrine they follow (or more often have it picked and chosen for them by their spiritual leader), different traditions have different emphasis and even different texts they’re operating off of. Expecting an legalistic following of a specific interpretation will leave you expecting far different behavior that most of your observations will show.

Sorry, but it’s actually pretty hard to dismiss the Romans passage, but it is something that can be chalked up to Paul being sex negative, going so far as to exhort people to be chaste or get married if they can’t control their passion if, as he noted, they were not free from such passion as he claimed to be. The other passages commonly cited don’t reference homosexuality nearly as directly, but it would not be a difficult argument to make that the word choices were specifically defaming homosexuality (especially given how common it is for people to use the same sort of defamation). Which isn’t to say that every denomination adheres to the same interpretation of these passages, but they aren’t on as theologically shaky ground as we might hope.

The Heritage Foundation is wild, and one of the most significant public policy groups with deep ties to American conservatism. Basically, any crazy policy that the Republican party has taken on as a major party plank in the past 50 years has a distressing high chance of having its roots in Heritage’s recommendations.

For example, in 1981:

Among the 2,000 Heritage policy recommendations, approximately 60% of them were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan’s first year in office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation

Yeah, given how much Trump and Republicans lean on Heritage, and Trump has been talking about doing some “light” tyranny on day 1, it’s ridiculous to attempt to write off the Heritage Foundations’ plan to Christian Fascism.

Now tell us how many Heritage Foundations recommendations do the Republicans and Trump take on board! Distancing the Heritage Foundations from them rather undersells the position of one of the most influential public policy organizations particularly within conservative politics.

Which is also why they wind up filled with “small business owners” who seem to all be about making money off land they own.

Based on the numbers I’m looking at, the people who didn’t vote were the ones that were likely Republican voters. The people that stayed home were likely Republicans who did not vote for Trump. I’m all for political engagement, but I’m not sure how invested I am in making sure Trump gets all the votes he told people not to cast.

I’m not sure how intense your off year elections are, but one of mine had only a single uncontested race, so I’m not sure I’d jump to considering missing some of the offyears “abysmal”.