Good example of changes in public beliefs
“The Seismic Shift in Irish Values, and One Reason It Happened” Huffington Post 5/24/2015 James Peron
Historically, the more market-oriented the economy, the more the well-being of LGBT people increases. Politicized markets require political power, something sexual minorities rarely have, but depoliticized economies only need an entrepreneur willing to cater to a minority. Soviet-style, top-down economies would never allocate paper for books on gay issues, let alone for a thriving gay media. That required a bottom-up, depoliticized or less-politicized economy, where entrepreneurs only had to buy the paper and find a profit-seeking printer. Even in the McCarthy-dominated 1950s, the United States had publications for gay men and lesbians. In Europe these publications existed since the late 1800s, something not possible in Comstockian America at the time, mainly because postal regulations were used to close down any publication that Comstock deemed obscene, such as information on birth control.