Maybe a different religion, or especially political beliefs seems to be a big deal-breaker. Do you still find it worthwhile to keep them in your life?
I do. I have e.g. Christian Conservative friends, and Atheist Liberal ones, etc. I enjoy each one for what they are. I mean, nobody is perfect! (like me 😁)
We can disagree about pizza toppings, not that certain people don’t deserve rights. Get the fuck out of my life if you’re that type of asshole.
I hear that, yet one Christian MAGA friend I have is outright sympathetic to events (honorary almost liberal? actually a former one who turned Never-Hillary and never came back), while another STRONGLY atheist liberal I know acts pretty much identically to conservatives, just on the other side (authoritarian, gaslights people, even on matters of fact that are not known to them yet they judge readily based on their known lack of information regardless, without bothering to investigate).
It’s hard to paint people with such broad strokes: as much as it would simplify matters to do so, each person is unique.
Too bad we don’t get to vote in shades of grey. Sympathy doesn’t matter if you’re actively causing harm.
Yes, ultimately it is this 2-party system that is going to have killed our government.
Whereas religion seems nothing but various shades of grey!:-P
I live by the maxim that you choose your quality by the company you keep, but I’ve struggled to add new friends over the years.
I had a friend who went from being a Marxist to being a Trump voter who rants about Jews. He used to talk about doing a Luigi, before there was one, and I could hang with that. He rotted somehow, seems like too much 4chan. I had to cut things off. Best friend for about twenty years. Worst part is, as a kid I didn’t like that I had friends who made fun of him behind his back and I stopped talking to them entirely. I cut him off a few years ago after one day he said that my baby was a suicide risk because they were mixed race.
Now I’ve only got two or three friends, and only one in the same country. It’s no good having integrity, sometimes.
You WILL - without question - become more like the people that you surround yourself with. I am glad that you chose integrity, but also wish that the cost for that could be lower. :-|
I am mentally drafting a letter to those friends I dropped in his defense. We were like eleven years old and stupidity is par for the course at that age. I hope they found the right path in life. I should have stayed and stood up to them.
There is little use blaming yourself for much of anything you’ve done in the past - you can’t go back and change any of it, and perhaps you’ve thought about it since much more than they have even:-). The only thing to do is decide what way seems best to move forward to.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I think it’s important to immerse yourself with people who are different from you. But also if those people are giant pieces of shit then I have no problem cutting them out.
Yes, I’m a pretty right leaning guy. I have a long time friend who is a socialist, another friend who is apolitical, another who’s a gay liberal, and a wife who’s pretty centrist. Politics don’t stop people from having other interests in common.
If you’re right leaning, I don’t see how you can say you’re friends with a gay liberal that the right doesn’t think deserves to be able to marry who they love. I don’t see how you could say you love your wife when the right thinks she shouldn’t be able to divorce you or be able to get an abortion even if it results from sexual assault like in Idaho, Kentucky, or Louisiana.
I wouldn’t consider anybody a friend that “leaned” towards making my life materially worse. Just because you cheer for the side that hates them just a little is no excuse. I think the people in your life deserve better friends.
First, I’m not religious. So I don’t have some sort of “moral” opposition to homosexuality. Follow laws, pay your taxes and have at the “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
I’m sorry that a bunch of Christian radicals have soured your idea of a political thought process that valued personal freedoms and lowered governmental interference in its citizens lives. Marriage isn’t something the government should be involved in the first place. The government shouldn’t have a voice in whether or not people get divorced.
Fiscal responsibility, lowered government involvement with citizens day-to-day lives, and a focus on supporting your own citizenry in your own infrastructure are not things that care about who you love, what gender you identify as, or what sort of religion or not you want to practice. These things were added after the fact.
If you think your friends give a shit about when things were added or whose fault it is compared to you voting for the party that wants to strip them of their rights, I dare you to ask them if they think you made the right choice to put fiscal responsibility ahead of their rights, if they think putting Nazis in power is the right move to get smaller government, if there should be more or less rapists on the supreme court or in the white house. Let us know how those conversations go. I, for one, think blaming others is a cop out to make you feel better about being shitty to the people in your life and being ok with others being shitty to them as well. Don’t care what else you have to say, I think how you voted makes you a bad friend to them and a bad person generally.
And who said I voted for Trump? I wouldn’t vote for someone who wants to dismantle the country and and destroy the democracy that it’s built on. You are making a fuck ton of assumptions that you have no real link for based on someone else you don’t like. Pocket your biases and try to actually listen to people before you start pounding the table.
Who did you vote for then? Pretty right leaning generally means you voted for the Republican Candidate.
This time around I voted Harris. Didn’t actually think she’d win but at least she wasn’t going to take a shit all over the things my Grandfather fought his way out of Poland for.
OK then fair play. Seems everyone jumped to assumptions to quick.
I am very liberal, most of my friends are very conservative. We have great discussions from our varying perspectives and beliefs. I have found what matters most in relationships, is a willingness for both sides to genuinely engage in respectful dialogue. Our beliefs might differ, but we respect eachother enough to look past these differences, and see eachother as human beings, doing the best we can to figure out life, and how to make it work for everyone. Deep down, we all want the same things… Safety, freedom, and equality for ourselves and those we love and care about. If a person does not want these things, it is quickly apparent to me, and time for me to move on.
I dont understand how you can listen to them claim they support values like equality while you know they made a voting decision that proves they do not valve those things for others(and themselves in some cases).
If someone who voted for trump told me equality is one of their core beliefs I could not take that seriously.
I’m not from the US. And I don’t have friends who are Trump supporters. I have family who support Trump, and I no longer have contact with them. I get you. I guess in my case, my friends are Conservative in the traditional sense, not the bastardized Trump sense.
My dad is a right wing obsessed with American politics. I don’t consider it a deal breaker because he doesn’t vote in any elections and ultimately doesnt hurt anyone. However i have lost a lot of respect for him as a man and I think he’s stupid for believing the nonsense he does.
If this was a friend I would not remain friends with that person. The company I choose to keep reflects me and I learn and listen to those people. I expect a certain level of morals and intelligence from my close friends.
I pretty explicitly have no interest in being anywhere near Christians
I’m a boring middle aged man, so I don’t really have friends besides my D&D group, and it was a truly happy and relieving moment to find out after five years that we are at least on the same side of the 2 party system here in the US. We had all avoided any political topics studiously for five years.
I don’t have any friends and I don’t think I would want any that have incompatible political beliefs.
I hope you find a friend, someway, somehow, of whatever belief system.:-)
Thank you!
