Last weekend, Republicans in Texas voted on a communication that not only negates the results of the 2020 presidential election, but also rejects same-sex marriage and seeks to “protect” minors until they turn 17 against “acts of predatory sex”, such as getting queens to read stories aloud to children.
Drag queens are predators, transgender women are a threat, and same-sex marriage is a violation of the “natural order”: This is part of a growing and powerful Republican attack towards LGBTQ people and culture after the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges guarantee a right gay marriage.
The ruling was heralded by civil rights advocates as a major civil rights victory, but many gay rights opponents see it as a loss in a war, not a loss. of the war. For them, same-sex marriage is too big a development to simply accept.
Dennis Prager, writing in the National Review, Debate that the ruling completes “the secularization of America” and seals “the end of America as the Founding Fathers envisioned.”
Mitch McConnell, then majority leader in the Senate, was a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage. He was one of six Republican senators to sign the amicus brief trying to convince the court to dismiss it. But after the ruling, even he acknowledged that Congress could do more. “The courts have spoken quite well,” he said.
But opponents of gay rights won’t stop there. There are other avenues of oppression: the presidency, the states, and the composition of the courts themselves.
In 2016, Donald Trump was elected. Although he denied violence at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, promise to protect LGBTQ community from “violence and oppression”, flirting with openly gay people to donate like Peter Thiel and then refer to same-sex marriage as settled legislation, he will continue to take unprecedented steps “to undermine and eliminate the rights that protect LGBTQ people,” as Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in 2020.
Among Trump’s exhaustive list of violations of homosexuality, his administration has tried to literally erase them by trying to block new questions of sexual orientation from the investigation. take the census and try to identify trans people that don’t exist, propose “Gender identification is male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals a person was born with,” according to The New York Times.
Then there’s the Supreme Court. Not long after it sanctioned same-sex marriage, said Mike Huckabee, a 2016 presidential candidate. Fuming that “the Supreme Court cannot annul the laws of nature and the God of nature about marriage rather than the law of gravity.” He warned, “The only outcome worse than this faulty, failed decision is for the president and Congress, two vital branches of government, to surrender in the face of unconstitutional, private tyranny.” law beyond this control.”
Obviously the war is on.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, put it this way: The “idea of the Constitution” was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, placing them out of reach of the majority and bureaucrats and establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts,” said former Attorney General Robert Jackson.
Opponents of gay rights see it as judicial extremes. And now, Kennedy has been replaced by Brett Kavanaugh, who declined during his confirmation hearing to say whether he thought the same-sex marriage case was decided correctly. Amy Coney Barrett has also joined the court, replacing another justice with a gay marriage majority: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In one Lectures in 2016Barrett appeared to defend dissenting judges in the same-sex marriage case and questioned whether the court would decide on issues such as which bathrooms transgender people are allowed to use.
Around that time, Republican lawmakers introduced several bathroom bills, a first step in an effort to suppress gay people. Later, a series of state laws prevented transgender women and girls from participating in girls’ school sports.
These attacks will never focus solely on transgender people. (Even if they did, it would still be a horrifying attack on human rights.) Now, we’re seeing the inevitable outcome, as Republican lawmakers expand attacks to the weirdness itself.
Just this year, we’ve seen Florida pass the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Make no mistake, this is part of a new, wide-ranging attack on gay rights and gay culture, aimed at stemming the rise of young people coming out. And if you think a right established by the court cannot be revoked by the court, look no further than the expected ruling from the court on abortion.
There is no end in the battle for citizenship. Win does not stay won. They must be defended and can sometimes be reversed.
Republicans may not be able to push people back into the closet, but they can try to re-establish some of the stigma to prevent them from showing up in the first place and build them – we – community housing complexes. masculinity if we do.
