You seem like a likeable person who’s trying to the do the right thing.

Personally, I would prefer a world where people did not feel obliged by social pressure to announce such details about the minutiae of their private lives. I would prefer that individuals saw themselves first and foremost as individuals and not as representatives of this or that group of (supposed) oppressor or (supposed) victim. This whole situation looks to me transparently like the result of overreach by an advocacy class that needed to find a problem that it could solve. IMO most people are not, and never have been, bigots. They’re usually nice folks trying to do the right thing, like you. And it feels to me like they are being manipulated.

In polls and focus groups, the voters themselves say otherwise.

With all due respect, I live in the Midwest and run with some rather blue-collar people in a completely blue, large city.

Everyone feels as though the Democrats have stopped listening to them and have been yelling at them for the last 10 years.

And just the mere fact that you are probably going to have the knee jerk reaction and call me an ignorant bigot is part of the problem.