LGBT tolerance slumps in the Netherlands as debate turns vicious

LGBT tolerance slumps in the Netherlands as debate turns vicious(dutchnews.nl)

9 points by latexr 3 hours ago | 13 comments

julianeon 42 minutes ago |

I think we tend to forget about the importance of reversion to the mean, socially.

We think: Germans are like this, the French are like this, the Dutch are like this... without thinking that, when one moves out of sync w/the others, its likely, statistically, to move back into line w/the others.

This has nothing to do with left or right specifically. It means that, whatever the mean is, if a country is not there, it's likely to move in that direction over time. It's more likely to move closer to that than away from that, measured over years.

The Dutch were very liberal and still are in many ways, but in such a situation, they are more likely to move in the "less" than "more" direction. And this is probably such a case.

wvbdmp 58 minutes ago |

What does it mean to have “a positive view of homosexuality”? Did they ask them to rate homosexuality out of 10? This is one of those infuriating articles that is worth almost nothing without the specifics of the survey, which, inexplicably, are never given.

Edit: This seems to have the questions on p. 93: https://www.trimbos.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/TRI-52-007... J is boys and M is girls, and the questions are things like “I could be friends with gay kids”, “It’s gross when two boys kiss each other” and “I can talk about homosexuality at school”, so a drop is indeed concerning.

add-sub-mul-div 1 hour ago |

Morality aside, living as an intolerant is such a bad value prop. You're really just signing up to be mad your whole life, because the toothpaste does not go back in the tube. Gays are not going back in the closet. Just like interracial marriage is not going away, and women's suffrage is not going away. If you're mad about these things you're like a social footnote that people fifty years from now won't really understand because the things you're mad about will have inevitably become so normalized.

anon291 1 hour ago | |

I mean, will it be normalized? By the way rates are going it seems quite the opposite.

And your other examples don't quite work. Interracial marriage has been allowed in many places (if not most places) throughout history, and even female suffrage was a thing in some polities. Homosexual marriage is not a something that's ever really been practiced in its current form until basically the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage

lunchbucket 1 hour ago | | |

> Interracial marriage has been allowed in many places (if not most places) throughout history, and even female suffrage was a thing in some polities.

You do understand that they were referring to the places it was disallowed? LGTBQ people and same sex marriage have also been tolerated in some times and places (even before the 70s).

wyre 1 hour ago | | |

What do you mean the way rates are going? Homosexuality has existed for as long as there have been humans.

0xbadcafebee 1 hour ago | | |

And the church and its conservative patriarchal misogynist homophobic dogma ruled all our lives for centuries. But it turns out you can beat the church, if you prove to people that there's no invisible man in the sky watching everything you do, dinosaur bones weren't planted here 6,000 years ago, and gay people are actually normal people that are just slightly different. Conservatives may be depending on hate to keep their numbers up, but that's all they have now.