The whole “pretending to be LGBTQ-friendly” accusation with such conviction made absolutely no sense to me until I think it kind of clicked for me where they might be coming from. I think the origin of that belief isn’t really actual ignorance but instead a partial understanding of their own liberal politics projected onto us.

Imagine you’re a lib and you genuinely want queer people to have somewhat better lives in a world that is largely hostile to them. Liberal democracy only allows the continued existence of capitalism and the order that hurts LGBTQ people in the first place. So your only actual option within that system is to put your support behind a political entity that acts like it’s the protector of marginalized people when it’s convenient and reinforces systems and narratives of oppression when it’s not. No matter how much you make LGBTQ rights a personal value of yours or how often you consume media that tells you how important the issue is to your chosen political entity, there will always be a rift between what you think is right and important and what the people you support actually bother doing about it.

On the other hand, imagine you’re a lib who doesn’t actually care about LGBTQ issues but you’re also not frothing at the mouth thinking about two dudes making out. To you the whole issue has always been nothing but a cultural signifier of other values or if your brainworms are powerful enough it’s a tribal team sports thing. Either way, if you have any self awareness you also at least partially understand that queer people are just the ball in a game of liberal politics.

For both of those hypothetical libs it’s not a big step at all to see someone opposing their own politics and assume that our support for queer people is fake, because if you take the liberal world view for granted that’s the only thing that DOES make sense. In conclusion, this comment was mostly me trying to call people libs twice