Zappa was intelligent and capable of independent insights, so don't take this as representative of his overall worldview. He's not on the level of Penn Jillette butt-buddying it up with Gavin Newsom, or Jimmy Fallon kicking the ladder behind him after doing the man-show.
Despite reaching the 100 filtered subreddit limit on r/all, this profoundly irrelevant clip found it's way onto my feed again. Yes, the 80's Christian-right earned every ounce of disrespect tossed its way, but any learned anti-establishment figure had access to knowledge pertaining to the virility and destructiveness of cultural-Marxism. The religious busy-bodies lost the cultural war over the past 3 decades, and the airhead demand for oppressors to LARP against inversely followed.
This is by far his worst take, principally rejecting freedom of association and ignorant of the pragmatic trade-offs of permitting the state to make these decisions. Without this, this post wouldn't be worth submitting.
More lame views, taken from Wikipedia:
he also stated that he approved of national defense, social security, and other federal programs, but only if recipients of such programs are willing and able to pay for them
The actual context in the book is balanced and nuanced. Still, the government is a priori incapable of running social security, or any program that does not qualify as general welfare, at a bargain price. Macro-economics is too complicated to where costs can be accurately and concisely presented to the electorate, even if special interests don't deliberately muck the presentation.
He always encouraged his fans to register to vote on album covers, and throughout 1988, he had registration booths at his concerts
High cringe.
christian right was right about literally everything, and underestimated the degree of insanity that was coming. Just because you degenerate faggots want to be women about your degeneracy and force everyone not to be mean to you and not judge you for being lazy, drunk fuckwits doesn't mean those people that shame you for your degeneracy are wrong
And the Christian right (at least the most vainglorious of the bunch) did such a crack job at being such insufferable, hypocritical busy-bodies that they got broader society to loosen its distaste for realized debauchery. The pre 60s sentiment was what you do behind closed doors is tolerable if it never leaves the bedroom; active homophobia was isolated at best. The next generation had this collective memory erased in the 70s-90s counter-cultural blowback, supplanted by the big scary lie that there were clans of homo-hunters over the previous centuries.
the time where people were generally more racist and generally more religious were like, totally ok with the gays? You are so retarded it should be unironically illegal for you to have opinions. Faggots need to be forced to stay in the closet or be institutionalized, and you can share a cell with them
The rural deep south wasn't the entire West, and the key word I used actively homophobic. The laws went untouched since there was a valid (and since vindicated) unconscious concern that societal acceptance of buggery would risk other societal norms and institutions. There wasn't widespread fear of god reenacting Sodom and Gomorrah for overlooking a bit of vice. Note that when I say "never left the bedroom", I meant that depending on circumstances, it wasn't even an open secret that an individual(s) was homo. Here's a expounded upon case of the progressive agenda revising the public's collective memory of recent history.
Type 2 discrimination was beginning to fracture in the South until states enacted Jim Crow laws. The blowback from that era, titles II/VII of Civil Rights Act and Great Society welfare, has done an impressive job of breeding latent racism and steadily dragging American society towards collapse.