That's my mom. She doesn't really think about stuff like that at all. I still get bullied by my dad whenever I date black people or any POC and I'm well into my 20's.
My mom pretty much had an existential crisis over this when she made a friend at work and her husband turned out to be Trump supporter. And this is in Canada. It makes you wonder where girls like that even find guys like that.
When you've been conditioned all your life by society (and conservatives) to believe that your primary function is to be a baby factory, and you know you only have a finite amount of time to be a baby factory before you're old and busted and cast aside, you do whatever you can to land someone stable enough to marry, regardless of their politics.
This is going to come as a shock to some folks but people don't need to have the same politics to get along.
My wife is more conservative than me. We don't spend much time talking about politics and avoid being dicks to each other. When elections roll around we go to the polls and I'm sure cancel out each other's votes for a bunch of candidates.
When you and another person believe that there's more to life than politics it's easy to not get hung up on them when it comes to personal relationships. When you or the other person allow politics to dominate your life it isn't.
Neither did I. I may still not understand it. But I googled salon article and found a site with that name that publishes progressive news and opinions. So I guess they are saying a lot of couples are opposite in opinion on these things. They might be joking about the one spouse being oblivious to their partners racism or having double standards or something.
Sometimes the gal can be racist. My friends tried to hook me up with a cute lady who had an amazing accent. Turns out, she was south-african and very quickly let me know that ending apartheid was a mistake because "some people just can't prepare for modern life".
That's not the look of a bigot, it's the look of a man who's fed up with low-rent posturing clickbait. The look of someone who got a Salon article entitled What your household's toothpaste preferences say about White Fragility™ that he knows will be paygated or cookienoticed after two seconds' scrolling.
Most people were not very accepting of "different" people back then, but maybe it was just not talked about. There were a ton of "confirmed bachelors" and plenty of women had "roommates".
People in the North and South were not different. The North had a ton of racists who didn't want to fight and die for "colored people". There was a huge riot in NYC of people who didn't want to be drafted. They killed black people they found for no reason.
Salon.com has nothing to do with racism either. It's just a known progressive news website they're referencing to imply they have opposing political views.
Blunt version: straight male bad, conservative = racist
I'm actually kind of curious how you're interpreting this comic though