Are those supposed to be sea monkeys?
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Some issues are actually left vs. right, but it seems like quite a few are far more old vs. young. Marijuana is the same - young republicans are more likely to favour legalization than old democrats (here people who were teenagers in the 60s are a bit of an upward blip). Obviously you canāt actually just divide people up by age and say āthese are your opinions, and these are yoursā, not really. But who cares about āreallyā?
I just find it galling that old people are so stupid. I mean, I find the stupidity of everyone galling. Some things just donāt make any sense to me. All of us have experience with getting very upset about silly misunderstandings, but how many of us, when we feel ourselves getting upset, say, āOh, wait, what if this is just a misunderstanding? If it was, I obviously wouldnāt know. I should investigate that before I act on these emotions.ā If you donāt do that, you are a complete fucking moron human being (weeps softly).
So when old people say things like, āThese youngsters are ruining the marriage!ā why doesnāt it occur to them that: 1) at some point there were old people who thought they were ruining marriage because old people always think that about young people; and 2) young people are so much more likely to be on the right side of history than old people that an old person, no matter how reasonable their position seems to them should probably expect that they are wrong if they disagree with most young people. If people canāt understand that their idea of how-things-ought-to-be is just a fear-based window into how-things-were-when-they-were-kids then they are too stupid to be allowed to vote human beings (still weeping).
Some days I just canāt take it.
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You do realize there are Baby Boomers on this forum, right? Weāre BBBBs!
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If you look at it from the point of view that the Baby Boomers and Silent Generation grew up being told by every person they knew that homosexuality is wrong, whereas Gen X and Millennials grew up being told that gay people are equal to everyone else, then the fact that 39-45% of us āoldtimersā have evolved to understand that gay marriage is a good thing is pretty damned impressive. Going from 0% to around 40% is a lot better than being born into a 90-95% society and plummeting to as low as 59%.
All yāall better get off my lawn!
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But you didnāt go from zero. The lowest point on that Y axis is 20%, so kudos for doubling, still less than half thoā¦
Says the smug Genx-er. 
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Some days I just hang out in my office all day, crying and listening to Coldplay, thinking about old people.
######(cueing the āthatās straight up age-istā accusations, for posting a picture of an old dudeā¦) ā¦WEEPING SOFTLY SOME MOREā¦
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Hey get outta my hair with your logical counter points!
Iām all tryinā ta listen to my grunge music and feel ennui about the state of the world, maaaaan.
I think I feel the same way about boomers as I feel about English people. Deep down I know Iām supposed to dislike them but I keep having the disquieting experience of meeting awesome instantiations of them.
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When itās eventually your birthday, I will wish you a happy instantiation day.
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My should-ers are made of would, so I will be unable to join yāall in the could.
In a boing-boing covered interview, Chris Rock said something about how by the time people are 30 they have pretty much locked in their views on everything. That also isnāt true, but it often seems pretty true. 30 might be an exaggeration, but it does feel like most people, at some point in their lives, just sort of tune out and stop trying to keep up. Wherever you set the people-over-X have stopped learning and adapting line, Iām probably over it or fast approaching it, but, as in my post above, I know that, and Iām going to be skeptical of any impulses I have to think that new trends in relationships or social rules are symptomatic of the damn kids these days. (Of course Iām not sure Iām even going to have those, back when the homophobes were saying homosexuality was a slippery slope to various other things, I mostly thought, āGood, we should allow those other things too.ā)
But your analysis is stone-cold wrong. Since acceptance of homosexuality has gone steadily up, and younger people are always leading that upward trend, itās always young people being born to parents who are less tolerant than them growing up to be more tolerant than their parents. No one (in the last few generations) was born into a society that was more tolerant and then dropped.
But obviously in the past this has happened since tolerance of homosexuality has gone up and down in various societies, and often homosexuality was kind of just overlooked or ignored only to suddenly be vilified in a wave of homosexual panic. I wish we had data from history like the kind we have from today so we could see what that looked like in the demographics. Was if that a new generation grew up being scared of gay people? was it parents of young children who suddenly started feeling threatened that their kids might be gay? was it stupid old people? or maybe it wasnāt so divided by age at all. Iād like to know so that I can properly contextualize my āold people are stupidā position.
*blinks
21% and 32% in 2001. For people born between 1928 and 1964, 2001 is barely yesterday!
The world is so different these days. It really was nigh-on 0% acceptance when the Silent Generation was growing up, with regard to a LOT of different prejudices.
Maybe they just didnāt like to speak up about it?
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I wish that the true history of LGBT people were taught in schools. āAcceptanceā is a fraught word, but Iām going to use it and another one, āintegration.ā Acceptance and integration of LGBT people into society-at-large has waxed and waned through the millennia, across different cultures and around the continents. There are and have been places where people of all stripes are simply people, part of everything. And of course notorious purges and pogroms all through history. The true history should be taught so that we have a better perspective that if we continue the current course, in about 40 years, most of the bigotry towards LGBT people will be a thing of the past. Unfortunately, like with racial equality, there can be backslides and hiccups. Without the perspective, though, we are just blundering along. We need to have it.
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I canāt understand fighting LGBT acceptance. The thing is, gender identities and sexual orientations are just randomly distributed in the population. If you speak out against gay men, you are just rolling the dice about whether you are speaking out against your own brother, son or grandson. This ought to tug at even the crazies. Dick Cheney couldnāt escape having a lesbian daughter, and you know he would have if there had been a way.
At least with racism segregation is a dream that racists can try to keep alive in themselves (will never actually work, to paraphrase Bishop Tutu on how they got white people to get on board with the end of apartheid, āEvery white person was raised by a black nanny, they all loved black people before they were taught to hate them.ā) But homosexuality? Wow, itās going to be your own kid (or, in most cases, I guess, your own self - those loud anti-gay people sure are gay a lot, eh?)
