A lesson to learn about all this is that if we had slavery today, as much as they'd deny it, most 'conservatives' would oppose ending it IMO.
At any given time, society has people who defend the 'norms' and people who want change for improvement (sometimes right, sometimes wrong).
People wrongly think 'they must have bee monsters' when most of the country was fine with slavery. They weren't. They were people just like today, in 'different times'.
We can watch the similar evolution today on gay equal rights. It's remarkable how similar the thinking is for both issues.
We look back at Nazi Germany and wonder how could they have had the Holocaust.
But talk to conservatives about Muslims today and it's a lot easier, sadly, to understand. We have people here who have seriously advocated 'nuke the middle east' and similar.
It takes decades and centuries, it seems, to change a lot of underlying views.
Part of that was the idea of democracy - that was 'liberal and radical' earlier, the conservative view was to oppose the 'mobs' taking power from a set of leaders.
The enfranchisement of women, same thing, on and on.
Just this month, Republicans opposed the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act... Can't be applying it to Lesbian couples!
It's good to understand that. Thinking 'no one would support slavery today' is wrong and misleads people about how people are on issues.
Think about our 'consideration' of illegal immigrants who work horribly hard for very little money - people 'don't like to think about them' except for some hate.
They're not all that different from the issue of slaves in a lot of ways.
It was a lot more disruptive to the south to end slavery than it is to legalize the illegal immigrants.
It was only in recent decades, for example, that 'spousal rape' was recognized as a crime. Before that, people would say there was no such thing - it was a man's 'right'.
In 1993 the last state in the US made it a crime. In 1999, 33 of 50 states had spousal rape treated as a lesser crime.
In dozens of countries now, spousal rape is not a crime.
Recognizing how these changes are not that easy is a good lesson.
