I'm not against gay marriage. I'm using it as an example.

But you're really illustrating my point here, by arguing not that there hasn't been a shift but that the growing hatred and intolerance is in fact a good thing. I feel like this is a more honest position than pretending that prevailing attitudes haven't shifted.

As a personal example, last week I had a comment deleted on Reddit for being "hatred" because I described drag as a form of kink. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but this kind of banal censorship has become a regular experience for anyone who offers any sort of resistance to woke narratives. If you think this is a good change, then I disagree but at least acknowledging that there's been a change puts us in the same reality.

I've had comments incorrectly deleted in Reddit but I didn't think of it as political persecution.

Same on Twitter. A lot.

And if it were political persecution, which it very well could be, Reddit is moderated by absolute randoms from the internet. Starting new subreddits and moderating to one's one preferences is very literal free speech.

>I've had comments incorrectly deleted in Reddit but I didn't think of it as political persecution.

Please. We know that this isn't considered as "incorrect" by the people doing the deleting, and that a well-reasoned appeal would be productive. This isn't happening due to simple randomness, as basically anyone who pushes back against woke narratives will attest - for example, openly endorsing JK Rowling's views on gender will get you banned from most of Reddit and quite possibly fired from your job if you do it under your real name on Twitter. This wouldn't have happened 10 years ago.

Again, you're free to say that this is a good change, or just wave all this concerns away with pithy slogans like "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", but I'm just trying to establish that there's been a shift on the left and it seems like you don't disagree with this.

This has been my experience too, and it's very frustrating for those of us who have long held left-wing beliefs but are skeptical of these recent social trends. The obsessive focus on identity issues almost seems like a deliberate distraction from the larger societal concerns regarding the cost of living, housing, employment rights, environmental catastrophe, and similar.

I feel that social media companies are largely to blame here, with the impact of their efforts to increase engagement metrics at the expense of users' wellbeing. We all have a perpetually-available outrage machine in our pockets these days, encouraging us all to react with emotion rather than be considered and thoughtful.

Regarding your example of gender views, the other reason why this wouldn't have happened 10 years ago is that hardly anyone believed that stuff. JK Rowling's opinions would have been met with a shrug. But there has since been a concerted effort to capture the minds of the younger generations at an age where they're unlikely to see the inherent contradictions in this ideology.

> And when it's such a personal thing with the very families that are our friends, it's not hard to see why gay marriage is so popular. That you feel "hated" by others for rejecting their friends families is a weird way to put it.

I voted "Yes" in Australia's 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite, and if they repeated the plebiscite again today, I'd still vote the same way. And yet, I feel like there is a problem here. It is a complex question, and I don't think it necessarily has a simple answer, but a lot of people treat it as a simple binary "Yes"-vs-"No", with only one answer to that binary being socially acceptable. And even in pointing that out publicly, I feel a certain degree of anxiety – should I? I don't think it is all in my (admittedly rather prone to anxiety anyway) head, there are external cultural forces contributing to it, and I think it is fair to question those forces.

To give just one example of the many complexities I see: I compare my own country of Australia to the US, and although both arrived at roughly the same destination (legal same-sex marriage nationwide), they arrived at it by very different routes. In Australia, federal legislation, in-principle pre-approved by the voters in a (non-legally-binding) nationwide plebiscite – as such not constitutionally entrenched, but anything approved in a nation-wide plebiscite (even a non-legally-binding one), is politically impossible to repeal without having another plebiscite to approve that repeal. And it was mostly a symbolic measure, since (nationwide) Australian law already gave unmarried couples in long-term relationships (de facto relationships as we call them), whether opposite-sex or same-sex, 99.9% of the rights of legally married couples. (I won't deny the missing 0.1% causes real practical problems for some people, but that is the experience of a relatively small minority, and there is no reason in principle why those problems could not be solved with further legal or bureaucratic reforms).

In the US, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision (Obergefell v. Hodges), based on highly contested principles of constitutional interpretation, which the current Supreme Court majority does not share – and, given they are likely to soon overturn a famous decision based on a similar style of legal reasoning (Roe v. Wade), you have to wonder how long Obergefell will last. The whole situation seems to support the idea that social reforms are better achieved through the democratic process than through the fickleness of judicial decisions–a viewpoint which in the US is often labelled as "conservative" or "right-wing", but not so in much of the rest of the world. Indeed, what in the US is seen as "conservative jurisprudence", in many other countries (Australia included) is just the mainstream consensus approach to constitutional law, to which few would attach political labels such as "conservative".

And, at the same time, that has happened against the background that unmarried couples (whether same-sex or opposite-sex) in the US still lack most of the legal rights and protections granted the legally married–an unfairness which few in the US seem to care much about, even on the Left–and which made the legalisation of same-sex marriage a change of far greater practical consequence in the US than it was in Australia. Couldn't this issue have been used as a vehicle to try to address that unfairness? Well, I think it could have, but my impression is that most marriage equality activists in the US didn't want to try, because they saw it as a distraction from their ultimate goal. A squandered opportunity?

I don't think it is unreasonable for a person to look at the two situations, and think the way the US has gone about addressing this issue leaves much to be desired, when compared to what certain other countries have done–I'm sure Australia is not the only country which has arguably done better than the US has–and those deficiencies in the way in which the reform was achieved in the US are a potential threat to its long-term durability there. But, that kind of nuanced conversation is rather alien to the "either-you-are-with-us-or-you-are-against-us" attitude to this topic which many people seem to have.