Don’t get me wrong: in my actual life I don’t have to deal with much of that stuff.
I go to friends’ religious ceremonies with my husband all the time, for example, and nobody blinks… or if they do, they keep it to themselves. More generally, people who don’t consider me a social and moral peer are cordially invited to get the hell off my lawn, and I have enough social power to make that stick, enforced by an awesome community in which my basic humanity is simply never in question. (Well, at least not because of my sexuality. I do get a certain amount of “What planet are you from, Dave?” but that’s different.)
I suspect that if I didn’t have those advantages, I would rapidly lose my sense of perspective.
All of that said, I think it’s the correct perspective, and would remain so even if I lost it. It makes no sense to judge people against my social context rather than their own.
Don’t get me wrong: in my actual life I don’t have to deal with much of that stuff.
I go to friends’ religious ceremonies with my husband all the time, for example, and nobody blinks… or if they do, they keep it to themselves. More generally, people who don’t consider me a social and moral peer are cordially invited to get the hell off my lawn, and I have enough social power to make that stick, enforced by an awesome community in which my basic humanity is simply never in question. (Well, at least not because of my sexuality. I do get a certain amount of “What planet are you from, Dave?” but that’s different.)
I suspect that if I didn’t have those advantages, I would rapidly lose my sense of perspective.
All of that said, I think it’s the correct perspective, and would remain so even if I lost it. It makes no sense to judge people against my social context rather than their own.