[quote=@Penny]
[@The Harbinger of Ferocity]

Perhaps the world will never be just. Perhaps hoping for universal rights and tolerance for everyone is a foolish notion that can never be attained.

So What? What if we can make the world 50% more just, 10%. What if all I can hope to achieve in the world is to make life better for one person. I'll take it. Just for who? I'll look for people suffering from injustice and start at the top of the list.

So what if there places in the world where people have it far worse than they do in the United States? In Africa they have forced genital mutilation, why are we wasting time on this whole woman's suffrage thing! It doesn't absolve us of the responsibility to act locally. We CAN have progress on multiple fronts, we must in fact. I don't live in Rwanda, or Chechnya or Iraq, I have to try to make what difference I can, where I can. 

I hope that the world can be made better, and I'll work at it. I'd kinda like to leave the place better than I found it.

[/quote]

Now I agree in that we should all work to make the world a better place when we can, but you must also ask the question of when your 'better' is actually making it worse for others.  Respect goes both ways and [i]forced[/i] tolerance quickly morphs into oppression at its finest.  Is making people, like religious folks who have strong beliefs that homosexual acts are bad, or simply people who believe in the traditional nuclear family of a mother and father as the best model of society, accept non-traditional relationships or [i]genders[/i] as normal really a good thing?

Trying to force a certain set of moral codes on someone is an absolute recipe for disaster.  As society knows, certain rules need to be put in place or society will fall apart, but anytime you go into moral territory that has little to do the basic functions of society you will find most people will not let you just tell them what you think is right or wrong.  Is it ever right to force someone to do something they believe they should never do, like celebrate a homosexual wedding when they believe it is between a man and a woman only?  Is that person who decided not to celebrate something they don't believe in a bad person, even though they would never think of harming a homosexual in the first place?  Most of you would probably say no.

Prejudice and discrimination, of course they take place and on a wide variety of subject matters.  When such things are seen, people should point it out, but that is so very different from people literally shoving the subject matter into some person's face and demanding they accept whatever it is or face the consequences, it has gone way too far.  Let's say we have an evolutionary scientist who claims homosexual behavior will eventually die out so there is no reason to encourage the behavior in society?  The scientist has a right to their opinion and should not be forced to write a retraction of any of their writings on the subject.

[quote=@NightinGem]
[@The Harbinger of Ferocity]
http://outandequal.org/2017-workplace-equality-fact-sheet/ This is already in draft, but in 28 states, one can be fired for being gay or trans.

South Dakota [url=http://www.sdlegislature.gov/Legislative_Session/Bills/Bill.aspx?Bill=149&Session=2017]passed a law allowing foster and adoption agencies that receive state funding to reject LGBT parents in grounds of religious objection.[/url]

http://www.hrc.org/blog/100-anti-lgbtq-bills-introduced-in-2017 Here's a neatly compiled list with sources and explanation~
[/quote]

The workplace one was a bit out of my depth so I'll skirt that one, but the law about adoption agencies hits very close to home.  This is the common hot button topic, for does the government have the right to tell a religiously run organization what to do because they give funds to it?  This is a seriously big issue for Catholic adoption agencies in particular who have had to wrestle with this one.  These adoption agencies want the best for the kids which is why they decided to try and find as many nuclear family homes as possible, which statistically is the best environment for children.  Add on to the fact that most Catholics believe homosexual behavior to be a sin and now you have the state forcing these religious groups to give up these children, they have been caring for, to someone they believe is not a good fit for the child, talk about a heart breaker.

I tried looking at those bills and found most of them dealing with gender identity politics, some with the above issue, and others I really could not figure out since they gave little to no information.  Gender identity stuff is way too easily abused, [url=http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/us/texas-transgender-wrestler-trnd-hold/index.html]such as a boy becoming a woman to win the women's wrestling championship in Texas[/url].  I think a lot of parents have the right to be worried about people using gender identity to their own ends as examples of such have already been popping up.

That being said...can we just keep laws out of the bathroom?  Never needed them before so let's just stop...

[hr]
Blast it everyone is too fast at posting, keep writing and more stuff pops up XD.