This is the future conservatives don’t want

One of the recurrent claims of the past year has been that Republicans aren’t voting for Trump, they’re voting against all the people who judge them and criticize them and don’t accept their way of life. As I’ve mentioned before, I think that’s tommyrot: what drives them (or a great many of them) is anger that they can’t judge us without getting blowback. If they lecture us on how women who work or don’t submit to their husbands are ungodly or how rape victims have it coming, they get criticized — and that, in their eyes, is oppression and thought policing. What they’re doing is simply saying the simple truth.

But beyond that, we get things like this (which is not new, so probably many of you have seen it before). Put it by some right-wing group it’s supposed to be AAAAH Horrifying.

And to some conservatives it is. Not because they’ll be forced to approve of these people or dress like them, or because any stray Christian preacher will be forced by law to hold a Muslim gay wedding. Simply because they exist. And in the future liberals want, they exist unafraid, sitting there (at least in the future I want) without worrying about being bullied, harassed. They have the right to sit there, as much as any Republican; they have a right to co-exist. And many conservatives think having to co-exist, having to acknowledge the Other’s rights, is a violation of  conservative safe space principles. Absurd as it seems to me, I’m sure some conservatives do indeed react to it with utter horror.

Too bad for them. At this point even with Breitbart and Fox News pushing assorted right-wing themes, I don’t think they can turn attitudes back to the 1950s. However they can make it as hard to be gay, black, Muslim or independent female as possible. Give employers more rights to fire and hire based on moral judgments. Choke off access to birth control and abortion. Entitle businesses to refuse customers who offend their faith (and no-one else’s — I doubt that refusing Paul Ryan service because he does not give his cloak to the beggar or care for the orphan would find favor). In  the long run, they’ll lose, but as the saying goes, in the long run we’ll all be dead.

But looking at the photo reminds me of one thing: the side that accepts this future is better than the side that recoils from it.