I come from the Midwest. Nothing the GP described is inaccurate. It's not a strange priority to want to live some place that society doesn't try to enforce rules from a 2000 year old religious text.
There's a little hyperbole there. Religious folk like the decalogue near courthouses (but generally lose lawsuits about those); they don't think Moses received the rules of the road in stone. And I can't imagine anti-sharia laws "burning through tax dollars" any faster than other window-dressing-type bills in liberal legislatures. Red and Blue legislators gonna bloviate and introduce useless bills, but no one "funds" them.
But, it does seem striking to say you can't live in even the watered-down religious culture of the Midwest (which is no deep South). Like, Lake Wobegone Lutherans are too much anymore.
I won't gainsay that either way, but recognize you're no longer talking about tech as a search for profit or talent, but an aspirational social structure.
It wasn't inaccurate 10 years ago. I get the feeling the OP hasn't lived in the midwest for quite some time.
Generally, no one cares. Yes, there are still some bad laws in place, and there are some assholes, and you'll get old farts who want the commandments in front of courthouses. But predominately, no one cares. Live and let live.
Going to grandstand for a second: For some reason people have this sense that if you don't support something, you must hate it. There's no middleground in left-leaning politics. I'm not gay. Frankly, I seriously cannot put into words how little I care about your sexual orientation. So, that surfaces in the fact that I'm not out at LGBT rallies supporting new laws. That's called "live and let live". This idea that everyone has to stand on some side of an issue is pervasive in our culture, I believe fueled in-part by machines like Facebook for engagement and likes. Its impossible to give a fuck about everything; I let the people who actually give a fuck fight those battles, and I'll fight my battles.
Because discrimination doesn't affect you you don't care about it. That isn't "live and let live", that's "I've got mine so who cares about anyone else". It's one thing to not be able to put effort into every issue, but it's another to try and claim those issues don't exist and discount the experiences of people who have actually been affected by it.
What I'm saying is that there shouldn't be an expectation that everyone has an opinion on every controversial topic, and your lack of an opinion on it shouldn't make you a bad person in the eyes of one side or the other (or both). Not having an opinion on a topic does not mean I ignore its existence.
Oh wow. Exactly when did it become someone's constitutional right to marry whoever they want in the United States? I must have missed that amendment.
I'll make a deal though; if the democrats who are generally out at rallies campaigning for LGBT "rights" want to attend a few NRA rallies in support of an actual constitutional right to bear arms that is under constant attack by their own party, I'll believe that you care about about rights. Doubtful. What you actually care about is your personal values, and sometimes that conveniently lines up with the rights you think are granted to you by your government.
In 1868 with the ratification of the 14th amendment (specifically the Equal Protection Clause). It doesn't specifically guarantee that everyone has the right to get married to anyone that they want, just that everyone must have an equal right to marry anyone that anyone else does. So a state could get rid of marriage altogether, but if it allows it at all it must allow everyone the same choices of who to marry that it allows anyone else.
Left-leaning politics consists largely of a collage of special-interests that band together to increase their political power. Essentially, everyone has agreed to take a stand for all the members of that collage in order to hold it together. Hence the lack of middleground.
