I think that it’s important to define what “different political views” means and what kind of differences are good and healthy. https://twitter.com/shenanigansen/status/1295387521061462016

There are lots of problems. Some of them are complicated. Some of them are even more complicated.

My different-politics friends generally agree that the problems are problems. But sometimes we disagree on which problems are the MOST urgent.

Or which solutions are the most complicated. They might think that something less urgent but with a simpler solution should be a higher priority so we can at least address something because the complicated things will take a long time.

We might also have different opinions on what caused the problems and therefore how to solve the problems.

I have a few friends who have very different political views to me. I have lots and lots of friends who have slightly different political views to me.

But I can’t be friends with people who fundamentally disagree with me about what things are problems. I think that queer people are rad. I know that trans women are women.

I think that people being harassed and discriminated against and murdered for being different is a problem

If someone thinks that the problem is people being different then I can’t be friends with them. Because I can’t be a friend and ally to queer people while also being friends with someone who wants my friends to be closeted, or ashamed, or dead.

I can’t be friends with someone who thinks that “race mixing” is a bad thing or that white women having brown babies is “white genocide”. And how could someone who genuinely believed that be friends with me, a white woman married to a brown dude?

I can have friends that I disagree with. I think some of my friends are wrong about things and that their ideas about how to solve poverty problems are not good and wouldn’t work. It might be my ideas that are wrong and won’t work! There are lots of problems I have no idea about.

But I CANNOT be friends with people who think that the problems I see in the world are actually good. Or thinks that the things I think are good are actually problems.