Conservatives are afraid.

pemay wrote: »

Yeah that makes sense.

I'm sure your comprehension of the world was the same at age 4, 9, 18, 23 etc

You didn't learn anything, for sure, its the world that changes, and not the person. Yep!!

It does make sense, thanks! You seem to have drawn a conclusion that I said nobody changes, which wasn't what I was getting at - you have also made the error of only bringing it up to age 23, at which point people are still far more likely to be on the liberal side of things. On top of that, at four I had no political opinion, did I?

But given that when I was four it was illegal for out current Taoiseach to practice his sexuality, well let's run with that all the same...

When I was four in 1990; it was still legal to rape your wife in Ireland by the word of all, homosexuality was in many ways illegal, women weren't allowed in some of the local pubs around where I lived (which was in Dublin), divorce was not an option in Ireland, we were one of the most homogenous nations in all of Europe, and Ireland was both very religious and a poor nation.

Fast forward to when I was nine in 1995, raping your wife was now illegal, homosexual acts as best I know were all legalised/decriminalised, divorce had just been voted on in favour of (by the narrowest of margins), the country was looking much better on the economic front but had yet to really start booming, and we were in the midst of a torrent of church sex abuse scandals that were doing massive damage to their reputation and standing in society. We had seen a few Balkan migrants and were seeing numbers increase a bit across the board if I am correct, but there were just three black kids in my whole school - and that was more than in any of my friends other primary schools around the neighbourhood.

Now we fast forward to 2004 when I was 18 - religion had become barely an afterthought for most younger people at this time, we were in the middle of an economic boom we were sure would never end, homosexuality was far, far more normalised than it had been before but there were still issues with a small spate of attacks on gay people/gay bars around that time *though the pride parades, which didn't even exist in 1990 and were only made official in 1995, were not attracting thousands), and gay marriage wasn't even an afterthought nor was abortion. We had had a large influx of immigrants from the continent, Asia and Africa primarily but it was still very rare to see children of colour with Irish accents.

Jump ahead again to 2018 and we're back in a boom of sorts after an insanely huge struggle in the meantime, many Irish people my age no longer live in the country in no small part due to that (though a good few are returning lately), we have become the first country in the world to democratically vote in favour of gay marriage (if you could tell that to someone in the early 90s, and that it would pass in all but one district, and would only lose there by 2%...), pride weekend it treated more as a general festival of sorts that all ages and genders get involved in, and if I'm correct gay bars are even struggling to keep afloat in more recent times due to their patrons not feeling so uncomfortable in 'straight' establishments with each other. I walk back through the park from work near a few schools and quite regularly see groups of 4-5 of them without a single white child amongst them, with the kids being brown/black/Asian. A taxi man randomly told me a funny story about how he used to be able to go into any pub or club in the country and pick up almost any woman he wanted as the exotic black foreigner... whereas today he's barely able to get a taxi afterwards himself. And now we're a few months off facing a referendum on abortion.

So yeah, I think it's fair to say the world around us in Ireland has changed an awful, awful lot since I was four. And I would wager it has changed more than the average person's view who was 30 in 1990 and is 57/58 today would have. And by 2045 I'm quite sure it will have changed more than I will between now at 31 and then at the end of my 50s.

seenitall wrote: »

Conservatives are always afraid. Isn't that the whole point of being a conservative?

Who wants thing banned because they might hurt someone's feelings? Newsflash it ain't Conservatives.