2019 marks the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. For LGBTQs, it will be a year of tempered celebration. Although one would think the strides made in the struggle for LGBTQ equality over the past half century would be “etched in stone,” as the saying goes, the outlook for LGBTQs remains difficult to predict. November’s Blue Wave and the opening of the 116th Congress, the most diverse in history, is cause for optimism. Our ruling body now includes 10 LGBTQ-identified members and more than 100 women with a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. A trans flag now hangs outside the office of Virginia Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton (D-Virginia), who is the aunt of a trans child. Arizonans elected the first bisexual member of the Senate, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. Here in Wisconsin, we ousted Governor Scott “Butinaskaya” Walker and elected Democrat Tony Evers. This may stem the tide of the last two years of setbacks, especially given Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s commitment to the Equality Act to insure LGBTQ rights.
But, hate and fear remain virulent. Advocate magazine published a list of the world’s “Top 10 homophobes” of 2018. Competing with the Brazilian, Tanzanian and Malaysian heads-of-state were a parade of Republican functionaries. With that and all the mayhem of the closing weeks of 2018, I checked the Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) social media page to see what they were saying. After all, these are the folks who helped usher in the regime with all its horrors and have since been quite chuff with themselves that they did.
I found the usual joust between LCRs and their detractors. Someone mentioned the obvious GOP threats to LGBTQ rights to which one gay regime loyalist blithely made the inevitable bitch-slap-worthy reply, “What more ‘rights’ do I need?? We have gay marriage legal across the land. I don’t get what gay activists are still asking for or even needed!”
Needless to say, that quote came without acknowledgement of the party’s inherent opposition to LGBTQ marriage, adoption, trans military members, health care, etc. A Republican-engineered rollback of civil rights in deference to religious exemptions is well underway. The ACLU lists nearly 100 bills in state legislatures intended to abridge or deny LGBTQ rights. A proposed Arizona law forbids teachers from discussing LGBTQ issues in the classroom with the threat of firing if they do. A lesbian attorney’s re-appointment to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was blocked by a single Republican senator because of her support for LGBTQ equality.
Locally, there’s Judge Gordon Giampietro, the regime’s U.S. Court nominee for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. His attitude towards the LGBTQ community has been described as “brazen contempt.” All that, plus the spike in hate crimes against LGBTQs, proves the need for gay activism now more than ever before.
Still, after the decade’s worst year for stocks and regime financial policies undoing the Obama Recovery, some of my gay Republican acquaintances have expressed second thoughts about their once-rabid regime fealty. Now that the value of their 30 pieces of silver has plummeted, they’re hanging up their brown shirts (sorry, caramel) and clutching their pearls with voter’s remorse.
Meanwhile, Canada will mint a new dollar coin in celebration of LGBTQ rights. The USA will not.
