Toodles, March. In like a lion, out like … well, it’s out.
You know what GOP state lawmakers very much do not want out?
Any LGBTQ Americans.
As ever, Republicans are scratching away at voting rights and public education and abortion access and … well, anything their grubby little fingers can scrawl a grubby little bill to address.
But with midterm legislative elections beginning to take shape, all indications are that their main line of attack on progressives at pretty much any level of the ballot is going to reflect the GOP’s retrogressive, disgusting lie that gay, lesbian, transgender, and any other people who don’t conform with their cisgender, heteronormative worldview are trying to sexually abuse children.
It’s an ancient attack (Anita Bryant brought such spurious allegations into the mainstream in the 1970s) that was mostly retired from all but the most homophobic circles by the turn of the century.
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Naively, I hoped the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalizing same-sex marriage meant all that ugliness was, like, super behind us, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
This Fire: Rather than accept LGBTQ rights as the law of the land and govern and/or run for office on actual policy positions, Republicans in states shifted their fear-mongering from teh gays to another unfairly maligned and marginalized group: transgender Americans.
- Let’s be clear: The GOP’s temporary retreat from fighting against LGBTQ rights generally was strictly tactical; it in no way demonstrated actual acceptance of that community by Republicans.
But their focus shifted … for a while.
- One could reasonably argue that the first volley in this new front of the far-right’s war to demonize folks who seem different was North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” (HB 2) in 2016.
- A mere six years ago, 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).
- But! Republicans actually faced electoral fallout over the measure.
- … okay, just one Republican, but he was an important one.
- Eight months after signing the bill, GOP then-Gov. Pat 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 about a year ago.
- McCrory’s loss—especially coupled with Trump’s victory the same year—resulted in another one of those temporary “tactical retreats,” this time on measures targeting transgender adults.
- Republicans took a little time to lick down-ballot wounds (Democrats enjoyed a string of electoral successes during this period) and develop their messaging and model legislation infrastructure.
- But the advent of the Biden administration (plus another mostly GOP-controlled round of state legislative redistricting) resulted in last year’s Republican foray into bullying transgender kids, mostly in the form of “athletic bans”—that is, legislation prohibiting anyone not assigned female at birth from playing women’s sports.
- This year, though, with redistricting mostly sorted—removing any hope of meaningful electoral competition in many state legislatures—and another set of elections just a few months away, Republicans are going HAM on vilifying, abusing, and generally making life lousy for transgender youth.
And as an erudite consumer of this missive, you no doubt recall that nothing about this bigoted GOP stratagem is remotely organic or grassroots.
You can read a great, in-depth analysis of how this all came to be here, overview below:
- No one was asking for these bills.
- So where are the 100+ bills across more than 30 states targeting transgender Americans coming from?
- Moreover, conservatives have settled, for the time being, on a divide-and-conquer strategy when it comes to LGBTQ rights.
- As demonstrated by this glut of anti-trans legislation over the past two years, Republicans clearly are aware of polls showing incredibly strong support for things like same-sex marriage (a recent survey had it at nearly 70%) and nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ Americans (79%; hell, even 65% of Republicans support it).
- So far-right activists and their allies in GOP-controlled legislatures decided to target a part of the acronym that polls less well and is less likely (statistically) to affect someone their voters actually know and/or are comfortable with: transgender folks.
- Even better (for these bigots), targeting transgender kids takes advantage of a whole host of exploitable things, like:
- Parents who may be scared or confused about what their kids are going through.
- More likely, though, Republicans are taking advantage of those parents’ friends, who are maybe also parents and don’t understand what kids who aren’t their own are going through but know they don’t want to deal with it.
- An already-beleaguered public education system
- Teachers who are already struggling from GOP lawmakers’ years of work to undermine public school resources.
- Republican voters who are actually scared by the past two years of pandemic upheaval but would rather be angry at something they can target (… with something other than a vaccine).
It’s no accident that the GOP push to basically erase transgender youth dovetails with the party’s work to outlaw the teaching of supposedly “divisive” concepts like Racism Is Bad and cull books—especially those featuring non-heteronormative relationships—from library shelves.
Bill(y) Goodbye: This confluence is best demonstrated by Florida’s terrible new law, dubbed the Don’t Say Gay bill (regrettably, I think, because it undermines the diabolical inhumanity of the measure), which was signed by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis this week.
- Supporters of this malicious law tried to convince the world that the measure was simply intended to keep young schoolchildren from learning about sex.
- As the bill was making its way through the state House and Senate, GOP legislators claimed in floor debates that the bill would merely expand parents’ rights (be suspicious any time you hear this term) and limit young kids’ exposure to any teachings that are graphically sexual in nature.
This is a lie.
This is how we know it’s a lie:
- When their fellow lawmakers tried to turn the measure into a straightforward ban on sex education in early grades, Republicans refused.
Also, there’s the actual text of the bill.
- The law formerly known as House Bill 1557 uses intentionally vague language to outlaw a huge swath of speech about LGBTQ people and issues—not just sex—in every grade.
You see, this bill doesn’t just prohibit discussion of anything LGBTQ-related up through third grade.
- It also includes incredibly vague language prohibiting discussing sexual orientation or gender identity “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Also note that this law doesn’t actually mention sex ed anywhere.
- Rather, it bans “instruction … on sexual orientation or gender identity.”
ON.
Obviously, any overt mention of sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom is just fully illegal now.
But “on” encompasses, like, A LOT.
Mentioning that a historical figure is gay or that a student has two mommies? Nope.
- This bill seeks to erase the awareness of LGBTQ people from kids’ lives.
- Which sets kids up to grow into adulthood not understanding gay, nonbinary, transgender, or other non-cishet folks.
- And people tend to fear what they don’t understand.
Yes, Republicans are trying to raise a generation of homophobic bigots.
Worse off, though, are the LGBTQ students forced to conform to cisgender, heterosexual norms by teachers who aren’t allowed to acknowledge them or the issues they face.
- Not to mention the kids of same-sex parents who have to pretend they … what, were born in a cabbage patch?
This law erases history, it erases children, and it erases families.
- Another truly vile aspect of this law is the enforcement mechanism.
- Taking a lesson on “citizen enforcement” from Texas (there, it’s on their abortion ban), legislators set forth a system best described as vigilantism to ensure teachers don’t run afoul of these truly shitty new policies.
- You see, parents can sue school districts if they believe one of that district’s teachers has run afoul of the law.
- That means teachers and school districts could be liable for damages and attorneys’ fees, which would easily run into hundreds of thousands of dollars—not to mention result in that teacher’s firing.
- Obviously, fear of having one’s livelihood brought to a ruinous end is going to have a chilling effect on anyone.
And that’s the point.
- If teachers are afraid to run afoul of a vague and over-broad law, they’ll likely go to great lengths to avoid the humiliation and ruination of possible investigations and lawsuits.
So, yeah, things in the Sunshine State are … less than sunny.
Always Ascending: And before you get all, “Hey, didn’t I see a headline somewhere that a federal judge ruled Florida’s election law from last year unconstitutional and racist?”
Yeah … so sorry, that shit won’t stand for long.
Even an erudite consumer of this missive can’t reasonably be expected to remember the awful details of this law from the ancient era of One Year Ago, but the three biggest bits that got bounced for specifically suppressing Black voters’ rights are:
- The requirement that third-party voter registration drives include scary warnings, like telling voters their registrations might not be done in time to vote;
- The restriction on absentee ballot drop boxes to only being available at early voting sites during early voting hours (instead of 24/7 availability, which is kind of the whole point of having a drop box) and the requirement that they be staffed (read: guarded) by election office employees.
- The criminalization of handing out water or snacks to people waiting in line to vote.
The judge (an Obama appointee, by the by) also put Florida back into pre-clearance status under the Voting Rights Act (Section 3, for all my VRA nerds out there) for the next decade because the state has “repeatedly, recently, and persistently acted to deny Black Floridians access to the franchise.”
The means that Florida will need to obtain federal approval before passing new laws related to those three voting issues.
So yeah, this is great, right?
Sorry.
This judge’s ruling, if it survives initial appeals, is likely to make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the conservative supermajority could to use it to further weaken the VRA.
Because WOW do those conservative justices hate the VRA.
Nevermind Shelby—how about that Wisconsin case from last week?
Do You Want To (gut the VRA): Through its shady “shadow docket,” SCOTUS just up and threw out Wisconsin’s state legislative maps.
- The whole shadow docket thing makes the decision tough to parse, but legal experts across the country found it “shocking” and “bizarre.”
- Basically, through an unsigned opinion, the conservative supermajority on the Court decided that that the (GOP-controlled!) Wisconsin Supreme Court had somehow violated the VRA in selecting a map for the state Assembly that increased the number of Milwaukee-area Black-majority districts from the existing six to seven.
- This Wisconsin decision (and its dissent from Justices Kagan and Sotomayor) is full of legal wonkiness and is, frankly, deeply troubling on multiple levels, but the upshot in the context of this recent Florida ruling is that SCOTUS is increasingly hostile to the provisions of the VRA designed to protect the rights of voters from Black and other historically marginalized communities.
- The Florida case, should it reach the U.S. Supreme Court, could well provide the current conservative supermajority with an avenue to further erode the VRA—or gut it for good.
- Because, as the Florida judge noted in his ruling, the state “has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters because of their propensity to favor Democratic candidates.”
- And we know this isn’t just happening in Florida.
- And the conservative justices on SCOTUS weren’t put there by Democrats.
- And they can’t preserve their power as a conservative supermajority if more of those pesky “Democratic candidates” get elected.
Because, as their actions have made Windexingly clear, conservatives don’t care about little things like “rights” and “freedoms” when it comes to building and preserving power.
pour one out for democracy, y’all
Welp, that’s quite enough savagery for one week.
Hang in there! Yes, it’s bad, but I won’t get better without you.
So take care of yourself.
You’re important.
We need you.
