@Marvin Edwards I have not been a part of a church in many years. I have a community of friends that I care about in the same way, though.
I seldom ever see true gender fluidity, but it's very fun when I do. I could never pull it off, myself. My style is far too drab and boring. The closest I come to dressing up is putting on a little pair of DRAGON WINGS that I got while I was at a gift shop in Memphis. It is not even slightly serious. FYIAD! Dragons are very special to me. Some people think that dragons are monsters, but they are really just a funny-looking angel.
I do not see us as becoming progressively more moral, though. The information that is available to us changes generation-by-generation, and we adapt to that changing information either competently or incompetently. In some cases, we turn our attempts to make society into a better place into a destructive moral crusade without really meaning to.
For example, anti-gay persecution might have been an outcropping of early 20th Century attempts to improve the lives of children. The idea was that children deserved a "normal" upbringing, and modernist ethics were all about fitting people into idealized molds for what a good person ought to be. The idea that "all children are born good," in most people's minds, precluded, for almost all Americans, the idea that they could be born gay, so when some of them turned out to be gay, anyhow, this caused them to panic. During the McCarthy Era, many people believed that homosexuality was being spread in the same way as communism, which led to the Lavender Scare policies that started in 1947.
The curious thing about the Lavender Scare, though, was that it really constituted an unintentional outcropping of a movement that was started with excellent intentions. In fact, the movement to improve the lives of young people, by giving them a chance for clean and normal lives and universal free education, was overall successful. Nobody expected the persecution of scapegoats to get so out-of-hand.
If you want to know what the next iteration of the Lavender Scare is going to come from, then I suggest that you examine the current efforts that we are making to try to erase the evils of society. It is most likely something that you agree with, and I probably agree with its intentions. Nevertheless, you cannot always predict the negative externalities. Protecting stakeholders that we never really intended to hurt is going to be a whole new project, and it's going to be just as complicated and difficult as the gay rights movement.
The toughest part is that most of us will never see it coming. Most of us will think that we know who the good guys and the bad guys in society are, but we are going to be wrong. The real heroes are probably going to be people that we fought against, and we are going to owe them one truly eloquent apology. This is not really shameful.
We never really have it perfect. It cannot possibly be perfect. There is no finished product. It is a living, constantly evolving sort of thing. It is always growing and shifting. It is very like science in that way. If it ever stopped changing, it would cease to be ethics.
I'm worried the next big thing is going to be a push against autism and neurodivergance.
We've seen several iterations of negative aspersions directed at the neurodivergant, with the autism/vaccine discussion.
Usually the call is far and away from the same general voices I have seen originate "panic" responses (satanic/lavender/comic book/reefer/prohibition) that is largely 'the basic stay-at-home' population.
Be basic enough, and have enough time on your hands, and that's a lot of nervous active energy that has nowhere to go. It goes somewhere, and usually that's "protect the children from... Something?"
Some things can in fact be observed on the trends of what kids must be "protected" from, and featured heavily in that set is "that which autistic kids tend to gravitate towards". Well, those things and "drugs".
I am not precisely autistic, personally. I am definitely neurodivergent, but after several years of talking it over with my psychiatrist, he eventually admitted to me that these classification systems are largely artificial, imperfect, and based more on convenience than precision.
Ultimately, what I mean is this.
There are a large number of characteristics, about the human race, that are not really mutable. For example, I cannot really change the fact that I have a slight stutter. If I quaff a certain quantity of alcohol, it is slightly diminished, but it never really disappears.
Well, what if our society were to decide that it is "immoral" to stutter?
Do not ridicule this scenario. Similar things have happened before. People believed, for centuries, that gay sex was "immoral," and look how abominably gay people were treated as a consequence. The way that they were treated, for centuries, was really horrifyingly cruel.
However, the standpoint of society was that being gay was not inherent to anybody's nature. From the standpoint of society, people were either willing or unwilling to behave morally. If you were not able to restrict yourself to morally acceptable behavior, then you were clearly not interested in behaving morally at all. If you were engaging in gay sex every day, perhaps even several times a day, then how dare you expect society to trust you at all? It truly is rich, society said, that such a person would claim that society is wrong to punish people that clearly have no respect at all for society's morals. If you are going to engage in such despicable behavior, society said, then you clearly do not deserve society's sympathy.
Therefore, society could simply deny that a stutter is really inherent in anybody's nature. By doing so, they could construct an argument that, whenever I stutter, I am consciously deviating from clear speech, and if I would do so, then I clearly do not have respect for society's moral beliefs regarding clear speech. Why should I expect society to trust me at all if I am constantly stuttering in their faces? Their philosophy would be that if I did not want society to punish me for stuttering, then I am at liberty to stop stuttering at them anytime that I took it into my head to respect society's moral principles regarding clear speech.
I might object that it is hard for me to speak clearly.
Society would say, it is not hard at all. Do you hear me stuttering? I am not even sure how you make that stuttering sound in your speech. It is as easy as breathing. By these simple remarks, I am proving that you are a liar. It is a lie that you could have difficulty performing such a trivial act.
What should I do, then, under this scenario? Should I and my fellow stutterers gather in stutterer bars and drink away our sorrows?
No! F-f-f-f-fu-, uh, to heck with th-that sh-sh-sh-sh-, uh, stuff.
Instead, it is imperative that we develop a better relationship with society. The first step is recognizing that that improved relationship does not come for free. To the concept that we can just say, we stutterers cannot help being stutters, so you have to accept us, the answer is no.
The King's Speech is an example of the kind of content that can demonstrate that stutterers can be just about any kind's of people, even the figurehead of a nation, and we would have to prove that that person is a well-meaning and hardworking individual. We would have to prove how much that person suffers from attempting to suppress their stutter, and we would have to prove to society that making stutterers self-conscious about their stutter truly only makes it worse and gets in the way of people that are really fully committed to pulling their weight in society.
If it had not been for the film
The King's Speech, I am not sure that Joe Biden would have won the 2020 election. He has always had a natural stutter, and while it shows up substantially less often at this point in his life, it still shows up. When Trump's supporters attacked Joe Biden over his stutter, the alternative scenario would have been that the "moderates," DINOs, and wavering Republicans would have been substantially more influenced by those attacks. It would have been substantially easier for them to portray Joe Biden as somebody that is clearly slipping, mentally. Thanks to that film that showed how a historical King of England was really a highly talented statesman that successfully organized the defense of his country during the most serious and deadly war of modern history, people that otherwise would have been skeptical of a stuttering Joe Biden were able to perceive how Joe Biden might really be a talented statesman in spite of his stutter.
However, some members of society might truly care deeply about their moral beliefs about clear speech. They might go through life bemoaning how society is truly corrupted. They might go through life saying, society is so terribly wicked. They allow even their presidents to stutter at society. This society is full of sin and wickedness, they say. We are living in a dark time when the idea of clear speech is but a memory. They might spend their lives dreaming of a revival in the idea of free speech. They might go door-to-door evangelizing their clear speech beliefs. They might open the hearts of the people and get them to believe that clear speech matters.
If they got their way, though, then society would waste endless time and energy persecuting stutterers, and it would not really fix the real problems of society. It would just make a substantial number of people deeply unhappy, and nobody would really gain anything at all from their misery.
We must regard all moral ideas with skepticism. Moralizing often translates to "treating people like crap for no self-evident reason."
I do believe in the idea of ethics. Ethics involves a problem-solving approach to figuring out how we can get along peacefully with each other. No solution is deemed to be absolute. Our ethics may change fluidly in order to accommodate for newly discovered groups, and as we continuously discover new groups that need to be bargained with on how to integrate them with society, we may strategically alter our ethics in order to find peaceful solutions. No solution is deemed permanent, and every solution is deemed worthy of eventually being improved if at all possible.
Ethics works more like a science. We never declare that we have our ethics exactly right or completed. Every new solution we devise, for helping our fellow human beings get along with each other and treat each other with dignity, only reveals new issues and complexities. Every time we solve one problem, we expose another that had previously gone unnoticed. Developing new norms takes generations, and phasing out old ones that were not working, in their erstwhile forms, takes generations. Ethics are always considered to be open to improvement and discussion.
Whenever somebody declares, "Wait, we are not really allowed to discuss that. That has been settled. Everybody agrees that that is despicable. No serious person is really defending that. The subject is closed," then they are moralizing. Morality is static. Morality is a mummy. It is arrested development. It is intellectual living death. No good can ever come of moralizing.
When you see society engaged in moralizing, then that is an opportunity to stop moralizing and start thinking ethically.