I personally feel there is a difference between supporting and agreeing with. There needs to be clarification about what this means.
For example, if a company openly supported Nazi or fascist ideology, I would NEVER buy their products. I cannot just ignore this and "focus on the product".
So it confuses me when people RAGE against Pride (and Apple's support of it) but still buy Apple products when Apple's position on Pride has been transparent forever.
Yeah, I think that line gets easily blurred. I
support Apple's position on Pride. I support the company's right to have that position, I support the fact that this is an issue that's very important to many of its customers, and I even respect them for taking a stand on the issue. I also support and respect that in a free society, Apple should be free to do whatever it thinks is most appropriate for its business and customer base. Similarly, customers who can't support this are free to buy their luxury consumer electronics somewhere else.
I don't
agree with Apple's position because it doesn't line up with my ideology, for a number of reasons. However, as I said, I also respect them for taking a stand, and my heart does break for the number of LGBTQ+ people who have suffered abuse at the hands of the self-righteous and homophobic zealots.
In fact, I actually do fully agree with and support Apple's involvement with Encircle (
which it announced earlier this year). Nobody should have to suffer from the kind of hatred and abuse that's been cast upon the LGBTQ+ community.
To paraphrase the quote most often attributed to Voltaire, I may disagree what what you do, but I will also defend to the death your right to do it.
We would have a much kinder and gentler society if more people understood this way of thinking.
Unfortunately, in my experience a lot of (American) conservatives (that feel like you do) try to impose their beliefs where it impacts others in a real sense: the law.
So they SAY they love their neighbor, go to church every Sunday, but supported legislators who passed laws that criminalized homosexuality, interracial marriage, etc., and/or vote for and worship obvious white supremacists like Donald Trump in HUGE numbers. American history is consistent in this.
What's particularly unfortunate about this is that so many people who claim to be Christians are either not reading their Bibles at all, of they're very seriously cherry-picking from it.
For instance, I can't find anything in my Bible where Jesus said, "Go ye into all the world and create a Christian nation, forcing people to obey all that I have commanded."
In fact, the Bible is full of counter-examples of this idea. Daniel in Babylon only opposed the laws where it affected him personally (such as individual prayer and dietary habits) — he didn't campaign to change the laws for everybody else. Similarly, the Apostle Paul clearly wrote in his letters that people were to respect authority, as it all comes from God — and he wrote that when Nero was feeding Christians to lions and burning them at the stake for sport.
Unfortunately, modern conservative ideology seems to fall along the lines of assuming the entire nation is ancient Israel, and should therefore be under the same kind of Old Testament law.
It's also important to note that the only people Jesus ever got truly mad at were the Pharisees, and that's because they claimed to know God and be representing His laws.
Morality is a PERSONAL thing, and ANY that comes from religious sources should be vetted against secular rationale before being IMPOSED onto everyone by the law.
Yup, that's what this thing called "democracy" is ultimately all about.
It's just as irrational to except people who don't believe in God to act like they do as it is to expect people who never served in the army to act like soldiers. Granted, as an ex-military man myself, I know a few people who have this mentality — in the very least they like to complain about "kids these days" and how "some military service would smarten them up" but even they're not going around on recruitment drives and trying to force schools to make kids get haircuts and hold marching drills.
There's no way everybody is ever going to agree on everything, but fortunately nobody important has ever said we have to. It's these kinds of differences that make society so fun and colourful at the end of the day — at least when people are spending more time loving each other and celebrating their differences and diversities than they are hating each other and lobbying self-righteous judgements around like the destructive little grenades they are.
