'One of the folks we’re talking about just asked me on Twitter, in so many words, "What happened to free speech? Now if you don’t agree with gay marriage you’re in trouble?" Obviously we all have free speech. But what people usually want with free speech is the ability to speak their mind and not have people think worse of them for it. And on gay rights if not quite yet on full marriage equality, these folks sense they may be losing that right.'
It's always hard when your opinion, openly expressed, goes from being the norm, to the majority, to debatable, to the minority.
See, also, this: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/gay_marriage
Whiplash
Over the last few days, as the emerging national marriage equality consensus has become more clear, a number of social conservatives have begun suggesting they are now in a new and oppressive climate …
Consider the US-Internet attitude to age of consent. Its jarring then funny to watch posters on Memebase (hardly the most conservative of sites) consider sexual comments on 16-17 year olds wrong. The European then remind them that AoC in Europe is different.
Now I know the US has State by State AoC, but in a number of the ’16+’ ones there is a ‘Close in Age’, and also for under 16’s, but the US-net-user has ’18’ in their head.
In Europe once you reach AoC, that is it – doesn’t matter if the other person is 66. In the UK it is 16- and that’s it – 1 minute past midnight and it’s legal.
Now consider the point of view of those who are pro-gay, but horrified at sex under 18- they think Europeans are perverts.
Now consider AoC in Britain was 12 in 1900. In the US in 1880, the age of consent was 10 in most states but ranged from 7 in Delaware to 12 across nine states. How would you treat someone who thought the age of consent in Colorado should be 14, no exceptions?
Yeah, AoC is a touchy topic, esp. since (in the US, at least) the social pressure to not seem skeevy about leching after under-age females (except in the pr0n field) is high. (Something that, to be fair, as the father of a just-about-to-be-teen daughter, I appreciate.) My inclination is to be (at least within a given nation) consistency in consent ages, rather than a mish-mosh that treats sexual consent differently from contractual consent differently from the privilege to drink alcohol (perhaps with gradations, similar to “learner’s permits” for driving — though I’m not quite sure how that works out across multiple categories).
It’s difficult, given that sensitivity, to have rational discussions on the topic, or appreciation that different times and spaces have different rules — especially when those rules may be arbitrary, or driven by different reasons, or, in some fashion, wrong.
It is worth remembering, though, two things: (1) as you note, AoC has varied widely across time and space (and, as you point out, that includes today), so treating one magical number as The One True God-Dictated Age is asking to get outraged; (2) people do tend to treat the local magical number as The One True God-Dictated Age, and so get outraged by those who have numbers lower (or, for that matter, higher).
As a corollary to the latter, known your local laws.