@RickiTarr I grew up a right winger in a right wing household. My parents were blasting Rush Limbaugh from the late 80's onward. In the early 90s we moved from the semi-rural Midwest to a city with a population of a few hundred thousand. We were in one of the poorer suburbs.
That's when I started realizing that all this "Welfare Queen" stuff was utter nonsense and started questioning everything else I was being told.
That got me in trouble with Pastors when I would point out where we, as a church body, were blatantly violating scripture and they were doing worse than that by not calling it out themselves in their leadership role.
Then I turned 18 and quit going because it was clear they were complacent and the status quo was more important than what they professed to believe.
It took a long time to unravel all of the BS I was force-fed as a result of being home-schooled, and I'm still finding bits of casual bigotry that were sprinkled on my formulating brain, but I spent most of my 20's and 30's working within myself to locate the last vestiges of that outlook on life in order to rid myself of it and the more of my own indoctrination I dug up, the more liberal I became.
Now, in my late 40's, having spent most of the Clinton era thinking we were going to get better as a species and maybe start approaching the acceptance levels of Star Trek TNG, I find myself continually unable to understand how someone can maintain a bigoted mindset in an information age like this.
I guess paying attention to reality made me liberal. Looking at actions instead of just listening to words helped, too.
