Asklemmy

excellent writeup

i agree with alot of what you said and will try to hit a few key issues and hope i can add something to the excellent perspective you've cast.

The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.

exactly, they know its a very useful mechanism to accumulate power. so imo we should constantly remind ourselves - they'd be doing this anyway. if homosexuality didn't exist or was non-viable for this, they'd be onto something else. they'd have used any topic to get what they want. (you could ofc have a metadiscussion about why certain topics are more powerful than others. but thats a different discussion).

anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years

another critical point, as you correctly identified, this is how christianity has become, not what christianity was even purportedly about. if you take the actual words attributed to jesus in the bible, afaict never said a god damn thing about being gay trans whatever. according to their own book - after centuries of fucking with the bible - it STILL says the greatest commandment of all is to love your neighbour as yourself and you can't judge cos you're all fuckin sinners afterall.

so it's all hypocrisy built upon hypocrisy , basically typical "there are 5 lights" bs. in other words it has all the fingerprints of a propaganda pathology not an expression of positive spirituality.

Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime

yeah to that end i think the OPs timeline of 40 years was a bit optimistic, or we at least have to recognise that represents a cross-section of OPs experience which wasn't necessarily universal 40 years ago. that said i feel there has been a backslide in the last say 10-15 years)

conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.

tbh i think thats because its probably both at the same time, its a documented soviet technique to covertly fund two sides of an issue to control the outcome. not picking on the soviets btw, just that they did a great job perfecting these kinds of things, wrote it down and then the power structures keeping them secret began to collapse and the methology leaked to the public.

we see this in a simpler form where corporations invest in pride month and also unironically heavily invest in homophobic organisations, (so i guess it doesn't always have to be a cold war operation for powerful entities to effect control via seemingly conflicting interests).

and in what is presumably a less consciously aware context, consider how jk rowling veils her attacks on the trans community behind a thin veneer of "caring about gay people". i'm strongly of the belief if she'd been born 50 years earlier she'd be jumping on the homophobia bandwagon instead of the currently "trendy" transphobia bandwagon.

to say another way, not everyone pretending to be our friend has our interests at heart, infact sometimes they're just trying to accumulate power by taking the positive stance on this issue - probably for no other reason than the negative position won't currently yield them as big a return.

and this can lead to eg. conservatives becoming outraged about a stance taken by someone who is vocal and politically motivated, but who has no business speaking on our behalf, then conservatives end up feeling like they're "under attack from the homosexuals" when it wasn't even a homosexual who said it!!

next the conservatives says some hateful thing in retaliation, people respond to that and it spirals...everyone loses (except perhaps the actual perpetrator). this is definitely a flaw in human thinking where our tribalism clouds our perception, we feel under attack and in the heat of the moment incorrectly assess which side someone is taking (or even that there's only 2 sides, when in life there's probably rarely ever only 2 sides).

Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.

again, its probably both? tbh i don't think that laziness is the only explanation for the woefully shoehorned characters we're currently getting. honestly its fucking insulting (to us, not the biggots - though the biggots might feel insulted too?). as you mention its a profitable cash grab, and i'm sure it hasn't escaped their notice that a certain type of aggressively half-arsed inclusivity will provide alot more value to them from the hysteria it generates vs actually doing it 'right' in a sensitive and compassionate way, which might actually lead to healing.

if healing is what they actually wanted i think it'd look very, very different than how it currently looks. and the kindest interpretation is they've realised it's more profitable short-term to produce hysteria instead of healing.

compare in contrast to what i still think (despite modern news) was a great example of inclusivity characters with the lesbian main characters in buffy:

in 1999 no less, it showed a lesbian couple in bed and instead of a cheap sexiness grab, they're literally sitting up in bed reading & having a mundane conversation. no sexualisation of the lesbian relationship as something existing only for hetero male gratification, or out attacking heteros. just plain, believable real life characters living a boring normal part of their life. so yes i very much agree that the boring normality is a very powerful thing. surely ALOT more positive overall than aggressive hysteria.

In summary my take-aways are:

• their MO is to use a scapegoat, they'd be attacking someone vulnerable, regardless of whom

• not everyone pretending to be our friend actually wants to help us

• hysteria is sadly apparently more profitable (short term) than healing

A positive note?

I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is

i really don't either, though something think how homosexuality has been hijacked in modern perception (by that 1000 years of fake christianity as you mentioned). in eg. parts of ancient societies, men could love men and women could love women, someone could be a third gender, and it wasn't even a thing to get upset about it, because it was just normal life. why do we suffer when they didn't even know they were supposed to be suffering?