And what anything of this has to do with homophobia?
That's implying interstate travel. Are you claiming ICE has authority to stop someone going from Georgia to Tennessee? The analogy was EU countries to US states, and specifically did not include international US borders.
And I disagree about you saying the EU just wishes to become the United States of Europe. In almost no sense does anyone give up their "sovereignty" by joining the EU. Every country still creates it's own laws, governs how it wishes to and has full control over what happens to itself. The EU only allows free travel and trade between each of the countries within it and also a standard currency and standard regulations (to enable the free travel and trade to happen in a safe environment).
But about European countries creating their own laws, the federalist movement so prevalent in Brussels these days certainly doesn't see it that way. What you describe was the EEC or the EEA. What the EU is about is different: it is not just free trade; it's about accepting laws, devised in Brussels, regulating many aspects of life - from how taxation must be organised, how economic activity may be encouraged, whether a nation may allow its subjects to chew tobacco, how wind power must or must not be subsidized, whether and what kind of hunting is permitted and whether people may own firearms... everything. Not just trade.
Also, creating a EU army is a recurring topic.
See how the Brussels is so wound up now that Britain dared to say "no thank you" to ever closer political and monetary union. There's a huge disconnect between Brussels (and European Parliament members) and the nations they are supposed to represent.
I'd be in favour of the kind of EU you imagine it is. Unfortunately that's not what we're getting, and that's why EU is disintegrating.
Not true. certainly not "undoubtedly".
> for the country to be voting for him, to an extent a proportion of them must agree.
Even less true. Even if Trump were homophobic - which is most likely not true - that does not mean somebody who voted for him supports him in that. Elections concern a wide array of issues, and people choosing between the two (or four, but let's not pretend anybody but the two had any chance) candidates necessarily compromise and vote for the person who may hold different views in many areas.
It is true that some homophobic people voted for him - as, it is certainly true, some also voted against him - but we know exactly nothing about how many and in what proportion. It is not the base for saying US is a homophobic country because of that, and it is most certainly not true.
> In almost no sense does anyone give up their "sovereignty" by joining the EU
Not true, please read about laws and policy harmonization in EU. Also, US does have wide areas in which state and not federal laws are used. One can argue US states have less sovereignty than EU member states, that's probably true, but the large amount of similarity is still there.
> The EU only allows free travel and trade between each of the countries within it and also a standard currency and standard regulations
This is impossible without EU members surrendering part of their sovereignty - unless you want to pretend that so many countries having same laws (or, as you call it, "regulations"), same migration rules, same currency policy, same trade rules, etc. all happened because by chance they all independently passed exactly the same laws.
He's self-serving and contradictory (see Pence), but it's not nearly as open and shut as suggested.
Do you have any specific reasons he's homophobic?
Yes, actually. He's said very homophobic things and done some very transphobic things.
1. He's on record saying "marriage is between a man and a woman."
2. He's on record saying he supports Pence's "FADA" which makes it legal to discriminate against LGBT people in any way imaginable (including denying social services such as basic policing or health care services) if a person claims a sincere belief that their religion condones such discrimination. You can read more of it here, this draft is well-circulated: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2802 (fun fact, this law also makes it illegal for the States or any Corporation to have any rules that might curtial these actions, so as a business owner a manager could fire a gay person and you couldn't punish them for it).
And then this week, we saw Trump's admin immediately pull back protections put in place to keep trans children safe and provide them life-saving medical interventions.
The White House hasn't been this overtly homophobic since Reagan's pressec and the press pit laughed at gay men dying of AIDS.
I'm not sure why the guy waves a rainbow flag once and suddenly we're all supposed to ignore his policy promises. He said he'd sign FADA and unless something dramatic changes, he's going to get the opportunity to. Claims of an anti-LGBT stance and homophobia seem fairly well founded at this point.
Not to nitpick, but the UK opted out of the EU entirely, not just the Schengen Zone.
There was a brief blip in the 19th century, as railways started to cross Europe and passport checks seemed pointless [2], but that aside, passports seem to have been more common than not.
Given how much was controlled by monarchy-issued licenses and charters, I doubt it was that easy to rock up and enter a foreign country without any papers, but I'd certainly be interested to learn more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport#History
[2] http://www.wanderlust.co.uk/magazine/articles/destinations/a...
Customs duties were a bigger source of revenue. Ships didn't just travel freely.
People were less of a problem, as most people didn't stray more than a few miles from where they were born.
In practice they may not always exist, but I think Schengen member states have the authority to perform border controls in all cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area#Border_checks does not talk about distinctions depending on the mode of entry). In the current political climate, even as a citizen of a Schengen country, I would not cross borders within Schengen space without ID: I would not be surprised if states decided to perform border checks, and they would probably have the right to deny me passage if I do not have suitable ID.
This ended up in a huge mess, but as far as I know very few were actually turned away. Mostly people ended up being fined for not being able to provide a valid ID and let back in after a manual verification. There were some controversy around this, as citizens are not legally required to carry IDs.
I'm really having difficulty to understand how the United States got from the cradle of freedom (let's say after the civil war, the colonization was not so prestigious) to the capricious and homophobic entity that it is shaping up to be.