Paul Waldman recently wrote, The right is done retreating in the culture war. It’s time to roll back rights.
Republicans revealed a great deal about themselves during the confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court, little of it flattering. If you were paying close attention, you might have caught the signs of a significant change in their ambitions, not only for the Supreme Court but also for the broad culture war that animates their party.
After years of cultural retreat — on abortion, on gay rights, on race — right-wingers are now convinced that the moment is right for what they’ve dreamed of but could never hope to bring about: rollback.
They are no longer content to limit their losses, find remote hills where they can make a principled stand, and cultivate a sense of victimization. More than they have in decades, they now believe they can undo what has been done. They’re already showing signs of success, and this might turn out to be the most important feature of the Biden-era right-wing backlash.
The most obvious victory they’ll achieve is on abortion. With a 6-to-3 conservative supermajority, the Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade in months. Republican-run states are not waiting; one after another is moving to outlaw most abortions, as Texas has and Idaho just did.
The GOP senators questioning Jackson barely bothered discussing abortion, as though Roe’s demise was already a done deal. But a few did show that their ambitions go beyond that.
Before the hearings, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) released a videoin which she said that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that said states cannot ban contraception, was “constitutionally unsound.” Not long after, Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) illustrated his devotion to states’ rights by saying that he even opposed Loving v. Virginia, which outlawed state bans on interracial marriage. (He later attempted to walk the statement back.)
Overturning Griswold and Loving might be unlikely, but consider a less outlandish conservative goal. During the hearings, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) used some of his time questioning Jackson to go after the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that guaranteed marriage equality.
You might have thought that was a settled argument, especially considering how Republicans have treated the issue in recent years. While they haven’t changed their position on it, for the most part they just stopped talking about it. It ceased to be an effective mobilizing tool, and trumpeting their opposition to marriage equality brought with it too much political danger.
But they don’t seem to think so anymore. We don’t know whether the court majority would reconsider Obergefell as it goes on what will be a rampage across the legal landscape, but it might. That case was decided 5 to 4 — and two of those five justices are gone, replaced by two conservatives.
Meanwhile, nothing less than a sweeping anti-LBGTQ offensive is underway in state after state, supported by congressional Republicans and reinforced every day in conservative media. Sometimes it takes the form of an impossibly cruel targeting of transgender kids and their families, and sometimes it involves legislation like the “don’t say gay” bill recently passed in Florida.
It’s happening on race as well, especially when it comes to schools. Republicans are moving to snatch books out of school libraries and mandate a teaching of history that amounts to a new Lost Cause narrative: Racism was little more than a momentary lapse in our national judgment and something that no longer meaningfully exists — which means all attempts to address it must be dismantled.
This new aggressiveness reflects not a change in substantive beliefs but a change in perspective. It’s not that Republicans today hate trans kids, or women who need abortions, any more than they did 10 or 15 years ago. What has changed is what they think they can do about it.
It’s true that the GOP as a whole has shifted to the right since then, but that’s only part of the story. Polarization and the effective strategies Republicans have deployed to entrench minority rule have led them to conclude that they don’t really need to persuade many people in the middle of the ideological spectrum, let alone any Democrats.
Once you decide that, it alters your entire approach to politics. You can be more forthright, more bold and more ambitious. And it helps if the other party is a bunch of timid milquetoasts who are constantly terrified that someone might criticize them, which is exactly what Democrats are.
That isn’t to say that over the long run, Republicans aren’t losing these arguments, because for the most part they are. They can’t stop the ever-increasing acceptance of LGBTQ Americans. They can’t stop America from growing more diverse.
But for the moment, they’re done with retreat. It’s time for a rollback. And they’ll keep going until Democrats find a way to stop them.
Paul Waldman earlier wrote, Republicans have a reimagined view of state power — one without constraint:
If you thought the antiabortion vigilante law Texas Republicans passed last year was the most appalling abuse of legislative power you’d ever seen, I have some bad news for you.
That law was a wake-up call, not to Democrats — who seem to have done almost nothing in response — but to Republicans across the country. It said to them, We don’t have to hold back anymore. We can do anything we want.
And that’s just what they’re doing.
We’re witnessing a new phase not only in the culture wars but in U.S. politics generally. Republicans are arriving at a reimagined view of power, one without limit or restraint.
* * *
Something has changed, and it isn’t that a wave of extremist Republicans got elected at the state level and pushed out their “reasonable” predecessors. That may be part of the story, but it didn’t all happen at once, like the tea party wave of 2010.
Instead, extreme Republicans have gotten elected to state legislatures over the course of the past few elections and have worked their way up the ranks. You’re familiar with trolls in Congress, such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), but there are dozens or even hundreds like them in state legislatures around the country.
Even Republicans who have been in office for many years are going along with this new radicalism. The extremists are working with their party’s leadership. Whether out of fear of being primaried or because they finally feel free to indulge their darkest fantasies, the longer-serving members seem nearly as enthusiastic about this new lack of restraint as anyone. And the bills have support from Republican governors who are hardly insurgents within their party.
A number of factors set the stage for the emergence of this new authoritarianism. The most obvious is Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP, which took all the party’s worst attributes — its reliance on anger
and resentment as mobilizing tools, its contempt for democratic norms, its loathing for Americans it disagrees with — and supercharged them.
Conservative media has also grown more radical; the most popular conservative media figure in the country is an anti-vaccine crusader whose show is a forum for race-baiting, conspiracy theories, and pro-Putin propaganda. That poison is spread to both Republican voters and officeholders, pushing them to be more extreme in their tactics and demands.
Then you have the way power is divided in the country at the moment. Democrats control Washington, which creates a visible target for right-wing anger, while Republicans dominate at the state level, which gives them the ability to express that anger in legislation. It’s all enabled by gerrymandering and other means of eliminating democratic accountability that assure Republicans that nothing they do will threaten their hold on power.
Central to the enterprise is the idea that Democrats are the ones promoting an insane agenda, which serves as the justification for almost anything Republicans want to do. Since Democrats are so horrifying, say Republicans, no tactic is too immoral to utilize, no Republican candidate too dangerous to support, and no proposal too offensive to pass in opposing them.
It’s why former attorney general William P. Barr describes in detail how Trump tried to stage a coup against U.S. democracy — then says that if Trump is the 2024 Republican nominee he’ll vote for him to combat the “threat” from the left. It’s why the hateful Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers can speak at white supremacist rallies and the state’s governor will respond to questions about her by saying, “She’s still better than her opponent.”
And it’s why almost no Republican officeholders anywhere will speak out against their party’s authoritarian radicalism. The further they push, the more they’re convinced they can get away with. It’s only going to get worse.
Jennifer Rubin explained, Fringe Republicans are not the problem. It’s the party’s mainstream. (excerpt):
Far from a fringe position or one limited to the House, the GOP continues to have a Putin problem — in no small part because it has a Trump problem. I have no doubt that McConnell, like virtually every elected Republican who has been asked, would gladly throw Ukraine to the wolves if the alternative was breaking with Trump.
Beyond Russia, the excuse that the right’s real problem is a small fringe in the GOP is preposterous. Frankly, the GOP’s “mainstream” is a lot closer to the MAGA mob than it is to Romney, the Bush family or the late John McCain. For proof, one need look no further than Hawley, the 2024 wannabe who fist-pumped the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 and voted to disenfranchise millions of voters. Now, Hawley argues that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has already been confirmed by the Senate three or times, is soft on child porn. The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler, ABC News and the Associated Press have debunked the scurrilous attack.
[T]he “fringe” has plenty of company. This is a party that overwhelmingly refused to set up an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack. It also refused to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act (that previously passed the Senate unanimously) and twice refused to impeach Trump. The party also brought the United States to the brink of defaulting on the debt. The GOP’s “mainstream,” including House leadership, has tolerated violent rhetoric and grotesque anti-Semitism among its members.
It’s just as bad at the state level. Prominent Republican governors have spread covid disinformation. They are also seeking to erect obstacles to voting and make it easier for partisan pols to politicize and overturn election results, all in service of the “big lie” of a stolen election. Red-state governors, including presidential aspirants Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, spend their time designing cruel measures to harass and marginalize LGBTQ youth. Abbott and other red-state Republicans now offer bounties to those who “turn in” women seeking abortions six weeks after becoming pregnant. Even worse, a law in Idaho would force rape victims to endure nine months of pregnancy — while allowing their rapists to collect a bounty for turning them in if they seek an abortion.
McConnell has made his deal with the devil — first with Trump and now with the MAGA cult. McConnell has condoned their radical, anti-democratic crusades for the sake of tax cuts and seeding the Supreme Court with partisan hacks. Sadly, it’s the party’s small reasonable faction, including Romney, Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), who are the “fringe.”
Rubin continues, The GOP is increasingly viewing politics with the zeal of religious absolutism (excerpt):
There is no point at which Republicans will show deference to the victorious opposition.
That’s a problem that goes way beyond the Supreme Court. Democracy functions only with restraint, good-faith application of procedural rules and devotion to the principle that the other side gets to govern when it wins. That concept is now an anathema to the GOP. As Thomas Zimmer has written for the Guardian, “Many Republicans agree that the Democratic Party is a fundamentally illegitimate political faction — and that any election outcome that would lead to Democratic governance must be rejected as illegitimate as well.”
That view of illegitimacy often stems from Christian nationalism. As Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, explains, “A worldview that claims God as a political partisan and dehumanizes one’s political opponents as evil is fundamentally antidemocratic.” He tells me, “A mind-set that believes that our nation was divinely ordained to be a promised land for Christians of European descent is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion and equality of all.”
Such thinking is evident in the recently revealed texts between then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, after the 2020 election. When Ginni Thomas urged Meadows to pursue tactics to overturn the election, Meadows responded by explaining that “the King of Kings” was on their side, casting their political opponents as “evil.” Such logic, Jones explains, “dissolves the restraint of moral principle, cultural norms and even the law.”
If one is convinced God wants only one side to govern, then democracy falls by the wayside. That’s not even the subtext of the Meadows and Thomas messages; it’s out in the open. This outlook, Zimmer writes, comes from “mixture of deeply held ideological convictions of white Christian patriarchal dominance, of what ‘real America’ is supposed to be and who gets to rule there, and the cynical opportunism with which these beliefs are enforced.”
Christian nationalism cannot be separated from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection or the absolutist politics of today’s GOP. As David French, the evangelical Christian writer and former Republican, candidly acknowledges in the Atlantic:
One of the most dangerous aspects of the effort to overturn the election was the extent to which it was an explicitly religious cause. January 6 insurrectionists stampeded into the Senate chamber with prayers on their lips. Prominent religious leaders and leading Christian lawyers threw themselves into the effort to delay election certification or throw out the election results entirely. In the House and Senate, the congressional leaders of the effort to overturn the election included many of Congress’s most public evangelicals.
They didn’t just approach the election fight with religious zeal; they approached it with an absolute conviction that they enjoyed divine sanction. The merger of faith and partisanship was damaging enough, but the merger of faith with lawlessness and even outright delusion represented a profound perversion of the role of the Christian in the public square.
Jones recalls that, according to PRRI’s August 2021 survey, “compared to those who do not hold a White Christian nationalist view of the country, White Christian nationalists are more than three times as likely to say the election was stolen from Trump, more than three times to believe they may have to resort to violence to save the country, and are four times as likely to be QAnon believers.” An astounding 25 percent of Republicans subscribe to the insane QAnon conspiracy theories. (No wonder pedophilia played such a prominent role in Jackson’s confirmation hearings.)
Republicans have replaced the give-and-take of politics with religious zeal — the politics of absolutism. If God is on your side and the other side represents an existential threat, surely you wouldn’t let truth, comity, fairness or decency slow you down. In the grand scheme of things, what’s a little character assassination of a trailblazing Black female judge?
The greatest threat to American democracy is the white Christian Nationalism of a radicalized authoritarian Republican Party which has convinced itself that GOP is an acronym for “God’s Own Party,” and sees all non-believers in their MAGA/QAnon cult as an enemy to be smited.
UPDATE: The New York Times reports, “The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right: ‘This Is a Jesus Movement’”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/christian-right-wing-politics.html
(excerpt)
This was not a church service. It was worship for a new kind of congregation: a right-wing political movement powered by divine purpose, whose adherents find spiritual sustenance in political action.
The Christian right has been intertwined with American conservatism for decades, culminating in the Trump era. And elements of Christian culture have long been present at political rallies. But worship, a sacred act showing devotion to God expressed through movement, song or prayer, was largely reserved for church. Now, many believers are importing their worship of God, with all its intensity, emotion and ambitions, to their political life.
At events across the United States, it is not unusual for participants to describe encountering the divine and feel they are doing their part to install God’s kingdom on earth. For them, right-wing political activity itself is becoming a holy act.
These Christians are joining secular members of the right wing, including media-savvy opportunists and those touting disinformation. They represent a wide array of discontent, from opposing vaccine mandates to promoting election conspiracy theories. For many, pandemic restrictions that temporarily closed houses of worship accelerated their distrust of government and made churchgoing political.
[T]he infusion of explicitly religious fervor — much of it rooted in the charismatic tradition, which emphasizes the power of the Holy Spirit — into the right-wing movement is changing the atmosphere of events and rallies, many of which feature Christian symbols and rituals, especially praise music.
With spiritual mission driving political ideals, the stakes of any conflict, whether over masks or school curriculums, can feel that much larger, and compromise can be even more difficult to achieve. Political ambitions come to be about defending God, pointing to a desire to build a nation that actively promotes a particular set of Christian beliefs.
“What is refreshing for me is, this isn’t at all related to church, but we are talking about God,” said Patty Castillo Porter, who attended the Phoenix event. She is an accountant and officer with a local Republican committee to represent “the voice of the Grassroots/America First posse,” and said she loved meeting so many Christians at the rallies she attends to protest election results, border policy or Covid mandates.
“Now God is relevant,” she said. “You name it, God is there, because people know you can’t trust your politicians, you can’t trust your sheriffs, you can’t trust law enforcement. The only one you can trust is God right now.”
The parking-lot vigil was sponsored by a right-wing voter mobilization effort focused on dismantling election policy. Not everyone there knew the words to “Way Maker,” the contemporary Christian megahit. A few men, armed with guns and accompanied by a German shepherd, stood at the edge of the gathering, smoking and talking about what they were seeing on Infowars, a website that traffics in conspiracy theories. Others, many of whom attended charismatic or evangelical churches, sang along.
[A] growing belief among conservative Christians is that the United States is on the cusp of a revival, one where spiritual and political change are bound together.
“We are seeing a spiritual awakening taking place,” said Ché Ahn, the pastor of Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, who became a hero to many when his church successfully sued Gov. Gavin Newsom of California for banning indoor worship during the pandemic. “Christians are becoming more involved, becoming activists. I think that is a good thing, because the church has been slumbering.”
[S]ince the fall, rallies and protests against Covid restrictions have expanded to include other conservative causes. On the San Diego waterfront in January, local activists who opposed vaccine and mask mandates held a worship protest called “Freedom Revival,” which combined Christian music with conservative speakers and booths promoting gun ownership and ballot initiatives that opposed medical mandates.
Shaun Frederickson, one of the organizers, who has resisted the San Diego municipal government’s Covid response and called it “propaganda,” said it was wrong to understand the event simply as protesting Covid-related mandates. It was about something deeper, he said in an interview: the idea that Christian morality is the necessary foundation for governance in a free republic.
[At] the revival, as worship music played gently, Mr. Frederickson, in a cardigan and cuffed skinny jeans, urged the crowd to not believe “the lie” of the separation of church and state.
[Mr.] Ahn, the pastor, who also spoke at the event, said he did not see it simply as a worship service or a political rally. “It is both,” he said. “My understanding of Jesus’ kingdom is that he is Lord, not just over the church, but every aspect of society. That means family, education, arts, entertainment, business for sure, and government.”
Worship is increasingly becoming a central feature of right-wing events not aimed at exclusively Christian audiences.
ReAwaken America events, hosted by an Oklahoma talk-show personality and entrepreneur, are touted as gatherings of “truth-seekers” who oppose pandemic precautions, believe that the 2020 election was stolen, distrust Black Lives Matter and want to explore “what really happened” on Jan. 6. Most of the events are hosted by large churches, and the primary sponsor is Charisma News, a media outlet serving charismatic Christians.
[C]ompared with 2016, Trump rallies are taking on the feel of worship events, from the stage to the audience. When Mr. Trump held his first rally of the year in Florence, Ariz., in January, he descended via helicopter into a jubilant crowd.
“I lay the key of David upon you,” Anthony Kern, a candidate for the Arizona State Senate who was photographed on the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, 2021, proclaimed to the crowd from the stage, paraphrasing a biblical passage about power given by God. “That means the governmental authority is upon you, men and women.”
[S]tanding in the crowd, Tami Jackson, [who] had come from Shasta County, Calif., with a group of Christian women involved in the Shasta County Freedom Coalition, a collection of right-wing groups that has included a militia, according to its website … said she wanted to be a part of “staking claim” to what God was doing. “This is a Jesus movement,” Ms. Jackson said. “I believe God removed Donald for a time, so the church would wake up and have confidence in itself again to take our country back.”
If Americans would repent of Covid policies and critical race theory and abortion, Ms. Stainbrook said, God would bless future generations for good. She recalled lyrics in a song by Kari Jobe, “The Blessing”: “May his favor be upon you, and a thousand generations.”
“How did Paul and Barnabas escape jail?” Ms. Stainbrook said, referring to an account in the Acts of the Apostles. “They just worshiped, and chains fell off and the doors fell open.”
Her words were drowned out by shouts of “Hallelujah” around her.
The GQP is in thrall to the QAnon conspiracy cult (an “end times” phenomenon common to fundamentalist religions). “‘Grooming’: Republicans’ vile new attack on any who criticize them”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/31/grooming-repugnant-gop-attack-anti-gay-anti-trans/
What’s the most repulsive accusation you could make about a person? It’s hard to think of anything worse than calling them a pedophile. Which is what conservatives are now doing to anyone who criticizes the anti-gay and anti-trans legislation they’re promoting in state after state.
If you pay close attention to politics, you may suddenly be hearing the word “grooming” a lot. That’s because we’re at an essential transition point, where an idea or a trope moves from the fringe to the mainstream.
Much of the debate revolves around a bill just signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) meant to shut down discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. Dubbed by opponents the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the practical implications of its vaguely worded provisions are less than clear. But its intentions are not: DeSantis is at the vanguard of a right-wing movement to create a new moral panic around schools, to convince parents that their children are being indoctrinated with bizarre and threatening ideas.
What has changed in recent days is that as liberals have become more vocal in opposition to laws like these, conservatives have developed a response: Anyone who opposes these laws supports pedophilia and may be a pedophile themselves.
This point is made via the invocation of “grooming” when discussing these laws. It’s not a new idea, shocking as it is. But the universe of who’s saying it and whom the charge is being hurled at is rapidly expanding.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, the term refers to pedophiles winning the trust of children to prepare them for being sexually abused. On far-right websites, the Florida law has for some time been described almost exclusively as the “Anti-Grooming Bill”[.]
Earlier this month, DeSantis’s spokesperson tweeted that anyone who opposes the Florida bill “is probably a groomer.” While DeSantis has not used the word, he has repeated the idea. When he signed the bill this week, he said those who opposed it “support sexualizing kids in kindergarten.”
The “grooming” idea then exploded on Fox News. One after another, hosts and guests accused opponents of the bill, and in particular the Disney corporation (which has come out against it), of wanting to “sexualize our children” and get “your kindergartner talking about sex.”
The network’s stars knew a hot moment when they saw one. Referring to the idea that Disney might include LGBTQ characters in its entertainment, Tucker Carlson said “Well, it sounds like the behavior of a sex offender. Normal people do not sexualize underage children, period.” Laura Ingraham accused the company of spreading “propaganda for grooming,” and said, “Why not just name the roller coaster ‘Sex Mountain’? C’mon kids, it’ll be a blast.”
To be clear, the only ones who have even contemplated “sexualizing” small children are conservatives themselves. They relentlessly conflate acknowledgment of sexual orientation with sex itself, seemingly because they can’t lay eyes on a gay couple without immediately thinking of them having sex.
And while they obsess over fantasies of child sexual abuse, they seem utterly unconcerned about actual child sexual abuse.
Because the “grooming” trope has now made the jump from the far right to Fox, within days you’ll start to hear it from Republican politicians, who are always monitoring what their base is eager to hear and where the acceptable limits of political rhetoric lie. Before you know it, the idea that any opponent of anti-gay legislation is a pedophile or an enabler of pedophiles will be just another thing Republicans say every day.
The connection to QAnon, whose adherents make up a substantial portion of the conservative base, is hard to ignore. But unlike QAnon, which posits a highly organized conspiracy of satanic pedophiles who drink children’s blood, the “grooming” mongers are trying to convince people that half of all Americans are either pedophiles or promoters of pedophilia.
Like so many moral panics, this one started organically but is being seized on by powerful forces who see a vehicle for their own ambitions. It is also one more branch of a toxic tree with deep roots, moving from Newt Gingrich advising Republicans to describe Democrats with words like “sick” and “traitor,” through Republicans convincing themselves Barack Obama was a foreign terrorist agent whose entire life was geared toward the destruction of America, to what we see today.
The common theme is that liberals are not ordinary human beings with whom one can engage in political contest and debate, but instead are profoundly, fundamentally, horrifyingly evil in their actions and motivations. Once they believe that, there is nothing, not even a grotesque accusation of pedophilia, that conservatives will consider out of bounds.
Which is why we’re going to hear a lot about “grooming” in the coming days. Until they decide it isn’t working, and move on to some other repellent lie.
Mark Joseph Stern writes at Slate, “How the War on Critical Race Theory Revived Anti-Gay Activism in Schools”, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/critical-race-theory-dont-say-gay-florida-lgbtq.html
For decades, anti-gay activists have pushed their agenda by masking their homophobia in a concern for children’s innocence. But as gay Americans have demanded equal rights and gained greater visibility, these anti-gay sentiments have fallen out of favor in polite society. As a result, the bigots began cloaking their hatred of homosexuality in terms of religious liberty and “natural law.” Now, the anti-gay lobby has found a tantalizing new opportunity to continue their crusade: The right’s war against critical race theory. Suddenly, Republican lawmakers are establishing speech codes for public schools, censoring students and teachers, and banning diverse educational materials. Homophobic activists have piggybacked off this campaign by reframing LGBTQ-related school speech as dangerous liberal propaganda.
In multiple states run by Republicans, the anti-gay crusaders are on the brink of success, reviving a pernicious strain of hate that seemed to be fading just a few years ago.
The most notorious of these anti-gay gag orders is Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” measure.
H.B. 1557 outlaws “classroom instruction” about “sexual orientation or gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade, then bans such “instruction” in grades 4-12 if it “is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate.”
These terms are not clearly defined, and this ambiguity is by design. As my colleague Christina Cauterucci explained, their intent is “to create a chilling effect, such that teachers and school administrators are too afraid to teach LGBTQ history, discuss relevant current events, or offer support to queer and trans students, lest they run afoul of a vaguely written law.” H.B. 1557 empowers parents to file a lawsuit against schools that don’t comply and win damages—that is, a cash payout—as well as attorneys’ fees if they prevail. Like Texas’ abortion ban, it creates a vigilante enforcement scheme, relying on the threat of ruinous lawsuits to bring its targets into line.
[M]any of these anti-LGBTQ bills are framed as “parents’ rights” or “curriculum transparency” measures. The reason is obvious. As PEN America has reported, such measures represent “a convergence between two distinct but related sets of actors: First, anti-LGBTQ+ activists, well-established but with limited success in penetrating public schools; and second, the ‘anti-Critical Race Theory’ movement.” This anti-CRT campaign “has primed the public to support sweeping censorship of classroom speech. For anti-LGBTQ+ activists, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, a chance to ram through bills that are far more restrictive than anything the public would normally accept.”
The groups pushing these bills view speech about race and LGBTQ people as part of the same broader evil. [Confederate] Heritage Foundation, the conservative D.C. think tank, lobbies against both CRT (defined as virtually any discussion of race) and LGBTQ acceptance (which it labels “sexual orientation and gender identity ideology”) in schools. Family Policy Alliance, the lobbying arm of Focus on the Family, advocates against education about race and LGBTQ identities under the umbrella of protecting “parental rights.” So does its Florida chapter, which has mobilized in support of Florida’s gag rule.
One registered lobbyist for H.B. 1557, Moms for Liberty, formed just two years ago. The group’s trajectory illustrates how these causes have melted together. Moms for Liberty first came on the scene to lobby against mask mandates in school in 2020. It quickly morphed into a “parents’ rights” organization and set its sights on educational censorship, demanding that schools ban books depicting interracial marriage, Martin Luther King, Jr., and civil rights protests (allegedly for depicting police in a negative light). Naturally, the group then took aim at LGBTQ-themed books, equating sensitive depictions of gay youth with pornography. It even objected to a book about seahorses because it explained that males carry the eggs.
The interests of anti-LGBTQ activists and anti-CRT activists overlap where it matters: Both groups want to control what information their children are exposed to at school by gagging educators and students. Our current moral panic is rooted in the fear—carefully cultivated by Republican lawmakers and conservative media—that schools are indoctrinating students with a dangerous, un-American “ideology.” They seize on ambient parental concerns that cultural currents are drawing their children further out to sea and away from the shores of traditional morality. Just as some parents don’t want their kids to learn about same-sex marriage, others don’t want them to discover structural racism, Jim Crow, and slavery. Already, this movement is shifting toward the censorship of all ideas that offend them, including the existence of communism, sexism, and atheism.
[Conservative provacatuer] Ben Shapiro declared that he would always “passionately defend protecting small children from the predations of adults who wish to talk about controversial social issues with children.” This word—“predations,” which Shapiro deployed repeatedly—is the skeleton key to this entire debate. It reflects an angst that gay people who do not conceal their sexuality are attempting to brainwash and molest children.
This outlandish and bigoted notion has deep roots. You see this assumption in the infamous 1961 short film Boys Beware, which warned schoolchildren against predatory homosexuals and was produced in part by (of course) a school district. You see it in the failed 1978 campaign to ban gay teachers from California schools. You see it in Board of Education v. National Gay Task Force, a 1985 case in which the Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law barring teachers from “encouraging or promoting” homosexuality. (The state cited a need to protect “student morality” and “traditional cultural values,” worrying about student “imitation” of gay teachers.) You see it in many ads supporting Proposition 8, which asserted that legal same-sex marriage would force educators to indoctrinate kids. (Tagline: “It has everything to do with schools.”) Now we see it in Florida, Tennessee, Kansas, Oklahoma—it’s a safe bet that a “Don’t Say Gay” bill will gain traction in every state legislature controlled by Republicans.
Whenever there is a moral panic involving children, homophobes see an opportunity. The CRT fracas presented them with a chance to shoehorn their cause into a much larger and more successful movement, giving it a huge boost of attention, money, and political support. But there is nothing new about its underlying demands, or the bigotry that motivates them. We are still trapped in the same argument over the humanity of gay people. And as usual, it is the youngest and most vulnerable among us who will pay the greatest price.