I'm looking to establish a society where discrimination of any kind isn't accepted.
I think we can all agree that this is a lofty and worthy goal. There are a number of flaws in your arguments however, most of which hinge around the fact that this isn't the society we live, and in fact has never been the society we live in.
Of course it matters. This is saying that the culture of the hobby is divorced from the mainstream. This is very much not true. Arguing that you can change the hobby in spite of broad cultural norms is barking up the wrong tree. It's a hobby -- ie, something people do for entertainment. It's not a closed culture, but one where the members spend most of their time in the mainstream and then visit the gaming culture. Very, very few people can actually engage in gaming culture full time. The ones that do are usually the ones the rest of us avoid already.
So, I think your argument here (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that it's not worthwhile to confront this issue within gaming culture, because the issue is part of the broader culture as a whole. The issue with this line of thought is twofold:
1) The issue
routinely comes up within our hobby, and thus we do have the obligation to address it those spaces. Just because a thing is a problem
everywhere doesn't absolve us of any responsibility to attend to it in the spaces where we most frequent
2) Cultural change is not some broad, monolithic, easily definable event. It doesn't happen from the top down; it happens from the bottom up. Cultural change starts at dinner tables and classrooms and restaurants and bars and the internet and, yes, at the gaming table (and conventions, and stores, and VTT's, etc.)
I disagree on 'repairing' and prefer 'ending the causes of the damage they do.' I'm all for safe spaces for women. I'm all for inclusive art. I'm not for affirmative action (outside of a short-lived effort to correct for unfair practices already accomplished) -- it's not shown to have a positive long-term effect on minority being compensated. We all have to deal with the past -- it won't change. Insisting that future effort must account for and correct for the past is silly -- future action should be towards a goal of mutual respect and accommodation without regard to the basis for the -isms (race, sex, etc.).
This is the fundamental difference in approach we seem to have.
This is correct in the fundamental difference in approach; you seek equality, I seek equity. The former is certainly more ideologically pure; the latter is more messy, more chaotic, but also more practical. The thing about equity is that it takes the world, our nation, our states, our communities are they are, warts and all. Real life, as it turns out, is also messy and chaotic. Equity, as an approach, recognizes that the playing field has never been level, and it turns a blind eye neither towards the causes of that imbalance nor towards its current impacts.
Affirmative action is a key example, and your parenthetical regarding the "short-lived effort to correct" hints to me that I think you might be more amenable to the concept of equity than you might think. One might argue, and I myself used to argue, that affirmative action is a pretty bad bandage that does little to address the underlying illness. This is still pretty true, in fact, from a purely theoretical perspective. But the trouble comes from the fact that pure theory doesn't put food on the table; it doesn't lift millions of lives out of abject poverty.
"Insisting that future effort must account for and correct for the past" is not silly; and to argue that we should abandon this effort is to meet Einstein's definition of insanity. This is what we've
been doing since at least probably the end of Reconstruction. This was the failure of Post-Reconstruction. This was the failure of the Civil Rights movement. Hell, this was the failure of
Brown v. Board of Education; after all schools are more segregated now than they were at any point past 1970, and are getting worse. You can't just end legalized discrimination and call it a day. That discrimination has existed for centuries, and its impacts have left a lasting impact that still contributes to inequality to this day. "Mutual respect and accommodation" is great in theory but it doesn't help the kids who are stuck in underperforming, segregated schools today because their parents never got a chance to go to college because their grandparents didn't own a home they could mortgage to pay for it because their great-grandparents didn't meet the skin-color requirements for a housing loan for a home they could pass down.
We've made some pretty great strides, as a country, in enabling everyone a chance to race on the same track. The problem is we haven't fixed all of the problems that are putting some people farther away from the starting line than others.