[coldtea]

Whether gay people are opressed or not has little or nothing to do with the success or failure of representative democracy.

There have been entire eras without democracy when being gay was acceptable or even consider just fine (at different city-states in ancient Greece for one). And there have been democracies were gays have been repressed.

All the examples you gave are about small minorities too, which is not the thing that democracy focuses on in the first place. Those more about changing cultural norms and morals, which can then be encoded into policy, with or without a democratic vote. The same things can happen under any sham democracy or even dictatorship. In the latter it can also just be a official decree. For example, as for "access to gender reassignment surgery" you know that has been a thing in Iran for decades, for example, right?

A lot of these policy changes can also be used as a cultural side show (the "culture wars") to mask the lack of democratic policy in areas that affect everybody, and were those in power have actual interests, such as the economy, foreign policy, surveillance, police brutality, jobs, and so on.

[panragon]

>A lot of these policy changes can also be used as a cultural side show (the "culture wars") to mask the lack of democratic policy in areas that affect everybody, and were those in power have actual interests, such as the economy, foreign policy, surveillance, police brutality, jobs, and so on.

I agree with you here. But do you really want to reach for the economy and police systems to justify how ineffective representative democracies have been since their mass adoption over a century ago?

[coldtea]

I think the boost to the economy was orthogonal to them being democracies or no - and has more to do with the industrial revolution and other technological advances (most of which happened before democracy or with "democracy" with voting confined to rich land-owning men - no women, and no poor/middle class folks allowed, no POC either of course).

And in many ways we're in a more police-heavy system today than over a century ago.