(04-13-2017 10:57 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(04-13-2017 10:32 AM)MplsBison Wrote:  

(04-13-2017 10:27 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  While other states are considering these laws, it's the last stand of backward bigots in a world that is changing every moment.

Is it really the last stand, though??

Here's the damned problem: non-bigots live too close together. Basically, because 15 bigots live off in the middle of nowhere, they get to elect a bigot representative who gets the same vote in the state senate as a rep for a million non-bigots.

Combine that with gerrymandered districts, and you have a bunch of states that vote around 50-50 for governor, but whose state legislatures are between 60-40 and 70-30 skewed.


This won't change until the people take control and end this farce/fraud. Pitchforks in hand.

VOTES are the only thing that matters, not land area!

Maybe it's my naivete, but I do think it's the last stand on at least the LGBT rights issue. The societal attitudes in the past 10 years (and even just the past 5 years) is one of the most dramatic changes on a social issue of anything in modern history (really only comparable to the sea change in views on racial segregation in the 1960 to 1965 period). The pro-choice/pro-life split on abortion, for example, has remained virtually unchanged since the mid-1970s. In contrast, support for marriage equality was non-existent in the 1990s and was still a small minority in 2005 (with even California passing a proposition against gay marriage in 2008), but then rapidly became the majority position within the decade and it continues grow swiftly. Part of this is simply that support for LGBT rights is one of the few issues that is *directly* correlated with age. Believe it or not, this is actually very rare among political issues. Using abortion again as an example, there is no statistically significant difference between pro-choice/pro-life support based on age. In contrast, the younger you are, the likelihood that you support LGBT rights goes up dramatically. Essentially, the anti-LGBT people are eventually going to either retire or die off.

Note that we're seeing this debate in North Carolina, which actually rapidly went from a solid red state to a purple state during the past 15 years (essentially a few years behind the political trajectory of Virginia). It's interesting to see the "last stand" occur in place like North Carolina instead of a much more conservative state like Mississippi. It's similar to Arizona's hard core approach to immigration over the past decade despite being much less of a socially conservative state compared to the Deep South or even some of its Interior West counterparts, where the old guard that had been in power for so long has essentially been scrambling to pass every wacky law that they can since they know it's going to be completely different sooner rather than later. The fact that North Carolina legislators even felt the need to pass a bill like HB2 in the first place was actually an indicator that the state's political composition is moving completely away from them and the remnants of the old Bible Belt guard wanted the legislative equivalent of Custer's last stand.