"If you start from the premise that the family is an economic unit and take into account what has been happening to gender roles, as an economic category, during this period, I don't think a reading as idealist as this one is warranted. Yes, an incredible moral advance (or if you prefer, moral shift that by definition and like all other moral shifts looks like a moral advance in retrospect) has occurred in the past four decades when there was, broadly speaking, nothing but stagnation for centuries; but why? To say that courageous people had an idea and fought for it is just to restate the fact we start with."
Yeah, that's why I was irked by the morality thread. I suspect the acceptance of homosexuality is not an indication of growing courage or consciousness, but the effect of late capitalism which has emptied the subject to such a degree that we no longer feel to be essentially anything. So, having the right to be gay is like having more shopping options.
No, I can't prove this. But, if in fact we had grown in courage or conscience or were morally advance, a lot of other things would be changing: the prisons, the treatment of the working class, the treatment of the weak and the poor, etc.
Joanna