Anti-LGBTQ+ is Anti-Citizenship
Politicians Are Stoking Fear and Hate in the Tradition of European Fascists
Demonstrators in California clashed this week over whether schools should recognize June as Pride Month — and by extension whether to publicly acknowledge the existence of LBGTQ+ teens.
The AP reported that:
Several hundred people gathered in the parking lot of the Glendale Unified School District headquarters, split between those who support or oppose exposing youngsters to LGBTQ+ issues in schools.
Some opponents wore T-shirts emblazoned with: “Leave our kids alone.”
The clash offers a clear sense of what is at stake and how gay and trans issues are playing out in local communities around the country with state governments mostly in conservative states moving to adopt new anti-LGBTQ+ bills and restrict the rights of gay and trans individuals and to erase them from public view.
CNN cited an ACLU report from April that found a minimum of “417 anti-LGBTQ bills” introduced by state legislatures around the country just this year . That’s “a new record,” and “already more than twice the number of such bills introduced all of last year.”
Education and health care-related bills, in particular, are flooding in at unprecedented levels. Along with a renewed push to ban access to gender-affirming health care for transgender youth, there has been a heavy focus on regulating curriculum in public schools, including discussions around gender identity and sexuality.
Florida has been leading the way on many of these efforts, thanks to the efforts of its governor, Ron DeSantis, who apparently sees anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry as his ticket to the White House. DeSantis, however, is only one of many conservatives who are ginning up hate and fear, attempting to paint gay and trans folk as “groomers” and pedophiles.
This is not benign and it is not about parents’ rights. The groups pushing legislation like the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida and bans on drag shows are not interested in the rights of parents, or not in rights of those parents who may have LGBTQ+ children or who wish to be supportive. They want to impose their own biases on the community, to erase any mention of issues they find “icky” or scary, or that contradict their in-grained political views.
This is not new, of course. While DeSantis and Donald Trump have made this a central strategy, it has long been central to the conservative playbook — with attacks on civil rights gains for Blacks in the 1960s bleeding into the backlash against the Equal Rights Amendment and feminist movement by organizations like the Eagle Forum and both bleeding into the George W. Bush administration’s use of anti-gay marriage referenda in 2004 to gin up conservative votes.
The press calls this a “backlash,” though I find the word inadequate to describe what has been happening. This is not just a strong and violent reaction to some social policy, but a concerted and planned out offensive designed to scapegoat marginalized communities — the LBGTQ+ community is really a set of allied communities, and this backlash also implicates issues of race, religion, and nationality — to define American citizenship as narrowly as possible.
It also calls this a “culture war,” but as the philosopher Jason Stanley has pointed out, that “framing is a dangerous falsification of reality.”
A culture war is a conflict of values between different groups. In a diverse, pluralistic democracy, one should expect frequent conflicts. Yet laws criminalizing educators’ speech are no such thing – unlike a culture war, the GOP’s recent turn has no place in a democracy.
These laws, Stanley says, are “meant to intimidate educators, to punish them for speaking freely by threatening their jobs, their teaching licenses, and more..” It is part of a “new authoritarian age in the United States,” he says, in which all of us are expected to “submit to the ideology of the dominant majority or lose their livelihoods, and even their freedom.”
Politically, the goal has long been to delegitimize opponents — not just to debate with them over policy and let the voters decide, but to break the opposition, to cow it and erase opponents and their arguments from the public discussion. To cast opponents — politicians, activists, journalists, teachers — as part of a conspiracy to undermine “America.”
Extreme? Overstated? I don’t think so. This rhetoric, the language, these are direct threats to people I love, to family and friends and colleagues. To democracy itself. What we are witnessing is an assault on citizenship and humanity, a tactic used to great success by protofascist elements — here and abroad — who frame the world as a battle of “ins” and “outs,” painting all out groups as infiltrators and invaders, as infections on the body politic.
This, as the Los Angeles LGBT Center reminds us, is fascism:
The same far-right extremists that incited violence last night are part of a movement that seeks to: ban our books, rewrite facts about the legacy of racism and slavery in this country, criminalize our healthcare providers, and restrict our bodily autonomy. It’s time we call out these attempts for what they are: Fascism. Pride, on the other hand, is about freedom.