… get it? Because it’s March?
But also because the coordinated attacks by GOP state lawmakers on everything from gay and transgender kids and women who need abortion services to democracy itself are being carried out across the country with, if not military precision, military relentlessness.
A lot of big, bad things have been hitting headlines in recent weeks—the Don’t Say Gay bill in Florida, outrageous new anti-abortion proposals in Missouri, a new surge of measures targeting transgender youth for discrimination, bullying, and mistreatment, just to name a few—and it can be hard to take in all the horrible things happening on our own country when an actual war has broken out on another continent.
But the bad things happening Over There don’t obviate the bad things happening Right Here (and vice versa, of course), and it’s essential that GOP statehouse antics don’t get lost in the larger news narrative.
In fact, that’s part of Republicans’ strategy.
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- Take advantage of an electorate distracted and exhausted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, rising gas and food prices, and a pandemic that’s still definitely not over? Check.
- Look back at past attempts to pass bigoted and otherwise reprehensible legislation and realize that gerrymandering ensures that Republicans won’t face negative consequences at the ballot box? Check.
Take, for instance, a new spate of bills that would criminalize gender-affirming medical treatment for transgender youth, prohibit transgender students from competing in gendered sports reflecting their identity, and otherwise discriminate against transgender kids.
- Six years ago (to the month!), the GOP-controlled North Carolina legislature passed the notorious HB 2, a drastic and discriminatory response to a local ordinance in Charlotte that permitted transgender folks to use the bathroom corresponding with their gender identity (and also established nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community).
- National backlash was swift and broad.
- Famous musicians, the NBA, and the NCAA all refused to hold or rescheduled massive events in the state.
- Several large corporations that had been considering expansions in North Carolina abandoned their plans.
- Over a dozen states banned taxpayer-funded travel there.
- Correspondingly, the economic toll of HB 2 was enormous.
- The Tar Heel State lost out on more than 2,900 jobs that went elsewhere.
- Cancelled events alone cost the state over $196 million.
- By the end of 2017, lost business was estimated to cost the state $525 million.
- Eight months after signing the bill, McCrory lost reelection to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, but Republicans still dominated the legislature.
- The GOP was anxious about all that lost money but was only willing to walk HB 2 back but so far.
- In March 2017, Republicans passed a lousy compromise bill that sought to “appease” LGBTQ advocates on the bathroom issue but included a provision that prohibited localities from passing their own anti-discrimination ordinances until just over a year ago.
- Opponents of transgender rights took a little bit of a breather during the Trump administration, which was sympathetic to their brand of oppression.
- Republicans also faced a long string of Democratic electoral successes during this period, which made “culture war” issues like LGBTQ+ rights less appealing targets as they fought to protect and shore up majorities in various states.
- But the advent of the Biden administration (plus another mostly GOP-controlled round of state legislative redistricting) resulted in … let’s call it an “experimental” round of anti-transgender legislation last year.
- The vast majority of these measures took the form of “athletic bans”—that is, legislation prohibiting anyone not assigned female at birth from playing women’s sports.
… which was literally the first time any of these GOP lawmakers gave two shits about women’s sports
But that was last year—i.e., a political eternity ago.
- A fair number of transgender sports bans got signed into law last year (specifically in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, plus a nasty executive order in South Dakota), but that was just the warm-up act.
Don’t get me wrong—transgender sports bans are moving through the GOP-controlled legislatures in Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah even as I type this.
But those measures were just the beginning.
A testing of the waters, if you will.
- Now multiple states are moving to criminalize gender-affirming medical treatment for anyone under 18, usually by characterizing it as some kind of “child abuse” (NB: IT’S NOT).
- And because it’s just so au courant these days for Republican legislatures to dictate that public schools only teach white, hetero, cisgender propaganda in place of actual history, some states are trying to prohibit the mere mention of anything LGBTQ-related.
- You’ve probably heard about Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which forces teachers of grades K-3 to pretend that homosexuality doesn’t exist and creates nebulous restrictions of “age-appropriate” instruction on such matters for higher grade levels.
- The bill is fully in line with other anti-education legislation in Florida, specifically House Bill 7, which would outlaw teaching and training that includes “divisive concepts” like “racism is bad.”
- Whether these measures are meant to be tandem attempts at indoctrinating our kids with bigotry and prejudice or sprouted totally separately is a question only the GOP lawmakers who introduced them can answer, but I have to wonder:
- Is the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as legitimately outrageous as it is, intended to distract from the pro-white supremacy propaganda bill that passed the Florida House last month and is currently quietly creeping through the state Senate?
- Also, this proposal isn’t new.
- But when same-sex marriage became legal nationwide, homophobic legislation died down a smidge, however briefly.
But the GOP struggles to succeed electorally if they can’t convince their voters that there’s something to be afraid of—something that only elected Republicans can protect them from.
And Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race convinced them that targeting kids and schools was their best path to continued political power.
Hence the spate of bills designed to terrorize transgender kids, and now the return of So Don’t Say Gay bills—and not just in Florida.
- A measure in Tennessee would ban textbook and instructional materials that “promote, normalize, support, or address lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) lifestyles” in schools.
- A bill in Kansas would amend the state’s obscenity law to make using classroom materials depicting “homosexuality” an actual crime (specifically, a Class B misdemeanor).
- A proposal in Indiana would bar educators from discussing “sexual orientation,” “transgenderism” or “gender identity” without permission from parents.
- Two bills in Oklahoma would prohibit teachers and librarians from distributing materials on or discussing “any form of non-procreative sex,” gender identity, and “lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender issues.”
- Another would ban public schools from employing anyone who “promotes positions in the classroom or at any function of the public school that is in opposition to closely held religious beliefs of students.”
Republicans in legislatures across the country are actively working to undo decades of progress on civil and LGBTQ+ rights.
And who’s going to stop them?
A GOP-majority state supreme court?
The conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court?
Maybe backlash from corporate interests will give them pause, a la the quaint North Carolina “bathroom bill” days.
For the good of the nation, I hope so, but how fucking sad is that? Relying on Disney and Amazon to preserve the rights of marginalized Americans is … problematic, to say the least.
- Speaking of the U.S. Supreme Court, the prospect of Roe v. Wade being overturned this summer has Republican lawmakers across the country positively drooling to enact as many corresponding abortion restrictions as legislatively possible.
- Florida Republicans, not content to bully gay and transgender kids, also attacked women’s health by passing a 15-week abortion ban, which Gov. DeSantis is expected to sign into law.
- In Missouri, Republican lawmakers have been inspired by Texas to consider a bill that would outlaw all abortions for Missouri residents, even if they were to travel to a neighboring state where the procedure is legal to obtain one.
- Like the horrendous Texas law, private citizens would be used as enforcers (through lawsuits filed against alleged offenders) instead of actual state agents.
- Another Missouri bill would outlaw measures used to end ectopic pregnancies, which occur when a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus (often in a fallopian tube).
- Fertilized eggs can’t develop outside of a uterus (meaning there’s no chance that it will become a fetus, must less an actual baby), and ectopic pregnancies are, at best, incredibly dangerous for women—and they’re often deadly if not terminated.
- Both the bill and its sponsor demonstrate a terrifying lack of knowledge of how pregnancies of any kind actually work, reminding us all that maybe people who practice lawmaking instead of medicine should leave the medicine to actual doctors.
But beware of the Texas-style bill passing the Missouri legislature while we’re distracted by the profoundly stupid ectopic pregnancy bill. They both pose incredible dangers to women.
- Meanwhile, the more-or-less imminent demise of the rights protected in Roe leads Some People to think that this, THIS, is what will get Democrats to finally focus on (and fund!) state legislative elections to the extent that Republicans have been for decades.
To which I say: Bless their hearts.
Maybe after Roe falls, Democratic electoral priorities will finally shift downballot.
Maybe.
Frankly, it would be the only positive consequence of such a SCOTUS decision.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Abortions are already functionally unobtainable in most of the GOP-controlled states that would automatically ban it entirely post-Roe (26 of them, specifically).
And that hasn’t been enough to move Democrats to focus on the races for the offices that directly decide these matters in states.
And we can’t forget the existential threat to democracy itself still posed by GOP-controlled state legislatures.
And if the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent move to not do Republicans’ bidding in overturning fair (read: non-GOP gerrymandered) maps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania brought you comfort … well, it shouldn’t.
- At issue here is something known as the “independent state legislature doctrine,” which I’ll probably just abbreviate as ISLD henceforth because OY is that full thing a mouthful.
- Moore v. Harper and Toth v. Chapman are the redistricting cases Republicans petitioned SCOTUS to intervene in.
- In Moore, the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down gerrymandered congressional maps drawn by the state’s Republican legislature.
- In Toth, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court chose its own congressional map after the state’s Republican legislature and Democratic governor deadlocked.
- Republicans had hoped that SCOTUS would toss both maps based on the ISLD, which claims that state lawmakers—and only state lawmakers—have the authority to determine how states conduct federal elections.
- I won’t bore you with legalistic semantics, but the short version is that this VERY convenient and simplistic interpretation of a specific provision of the U.S. Constitution that has been rejected by over a century’s worth of past SCOTUS decisions on related matters.
- But in 2020, four conservative Supreme Court justices signaled that they were … ISLD-curious, at least.
- The North Carolina and Pennsylvania challenges appear to have only failed because tossing the maps would totally upend the 2022 election process already well under way in both states—and outright election interference is a bridge too far (… for the moment) for even the current conservative-majority Court.
- But with the addition of conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Court, all eyes will be on her when Republicans again turn to SCOTUS to help preserve the artificial power they hold because of GOP gerrymandering.
Because they will.
- The North Carolina and Pennsylvania cases were emergency applications almost a quarter of the way into an election year—a pretty inopportune moment.
- But the right moment for conservative on the Supreme Court to establish this doctrine of radical state power could be coming soon.
And the consequences of SCOTUS adopting the ISLD really cannot be overstated.
- The authority of (currently mostly GOP-controlled) state legislatures would be expanded to remove almost any judicial check on partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, and election subversion.
- The power of state courts, state constitutions, and state ballot initiatives to protect and expand fair elections and other electoral reforms (like independent redistricting commissions) would be thoroughly undermined.
So yeah, we’ll take those redistricting victories now, but we need to be ready for a disaster just a little ways down the road.
Fun!
Welp, I dunno about you, but that’s about all the March madness I can stomach this week.
Take a breath. Take a break from the news. Play with a dog. Watch a bird. Find a cool tree. Read a trash book. Tell your crush how you feel. Give your sworn enemy a hug (if only just to confuse them).
The fight continues, but we can’t be at it all the time.
So take care of yourself.
You’re important.
We need you.