Michael didn't say that Americans had become more morally advanced and didn't mention growing courage or consciousness. He said that a shift in the moral values that determine the behavior of the dominant American society had taken place specifically with regard to acceptance of homosexuals, and that this had taken place because it had been shown that discrimination against homosexuals is in contradiction to the dominant American moral system.
Discrimination against homosexuals is pretty clearly contradictory to American cultural norms of individualism. Bad treatment of the poor isn't.
--- On Tue, 7/28/09, Joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
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