Many have said things hurtful about the LGBTQ community in the past. We need an amnesty. We, the straight people of the world, promise to be better today if the LGBT community agrees to let our dated LGBT insults die in the past.

Christian Schneider | Opinion columnist

As a child, my friends and I would often kill time playing a game called “Smear the Queer.” One kid — dubbed the “queer” — would hold a ball, only then to be chased down and thrown to the ground while all the other kids piled on top of him. In the 1980s, kids’ cardiovascular fitness was often proportional the robustness of their homophobia.

It has only been in the past few years that large swaths of society have begun to realize how horrifying our attitudes towards gays and lesbians were for all of human history. People with different sexual orientations were one of the last groups it was socially acceptable to mock — I think I first learned the anti-gay slur that begins with the word “F” from listening to Eddie Murphy comedy albums. Soon, I heard it casually used in the John Hughes movie Sixteen Candles. The Beastie Boys famously wanted to name their first major-label rap album “Don’t Be a F----t.” And so on.

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All these examples seem painfully archaic, given public opinion’s drastic shift over the past handful of years. According to the Pew tracking poll, support for gay marriage jumped from 37% in 2007 to 62% in 2017, with Democrats and Republican support increasing in tandem during that time.

Unfortunately, in the internet era, there will always be easily accessible evidence of who we were before this positive societal shift. Take MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, who has spent a week trying to distance herself from a series of “hateful” (her word) posts about the lesbian, gay, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) community dating back to 2009 that appeared on her blog. At first, Reid cooked up a preposterous conspiracy theory that someone had hacked an off-site archive of her blog to make her look bad, even asking the FBI to look into the matter. Yet her theory wasn't backed up by cybersecurity experts, as it was less plausible than a Nicolas Cage movie in which he tries to steal the U.S. Constitution.

Despite her lack of evidence, Reid dug in and maintained she hadn’t written the posts, nonetheless apologizing for some similar posts she confessed to have written. Despite her ridiculous and almost certainly dishonest machinations, Reid’s coworkers and fans universally supported her, and she is evidently now allowed back on the air to continue demagoguing conservatives for being culturally insensitive.

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But Reid should have been spared this humiliation in the first place. As she said herself, “the person I am now is not the person I was then.” And that goes for those on the right just as much as it does for those on the left.

I would propose, then, that the straight people of the world throw ourselves on the mercy of the LGBTQ community and ask for an amnesty of sorts. We promise to be better today if they agree to ignore anything said by any straight person before 2012, the year which former president Barack Obama finally announced his support of same-sex marriage.

In order to make progress, society has to molt, shedding its old skin in favor of a new one. Problem is, Google always gives us access to the old skin, which can be used to further drive us apart as we try to move forward. It’s important to remember where were once were, but equally important to recognize that we’ve all changed a great deal in a very short amount of time.

Importantly, the amnesty agreement would not cover current homophobic remarks made by liberals who think they can get away with it because they’re on the “right team.” When late night host Jimmy Kimmel tries to embarrass Fox host Sean Hannity by accusing him of being gay, it shouldn’t get a pass because Kimmel wants expanded health care and gun control. When The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert says President Trump’s mouth is Vladimir Putin’s “c—k holster,” it should draw just as much criticism as if a conservative columnist had written it in an opinion piece.

Such a hypothetical agreement would, of course, take something in short supply these days — common sense and empathy. But the only way forward is for a lot of us to own up to what we once thought, apologize, and vow to be better.

As I’ve written before, many of us spent decades wondering how we could make society better by being more “forgiving” of gays and lesbians. Instead, we should have been asking forgiveness from the LGBTQ community all along.

Christian Schneider is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @Schneider_CM.