Illustration by Michael Burmesch
Here’s something everyone should know that many may find hard to believe right now. Six-in-ten Americans, 61%, believe same-sex marriage is good for society and only 37% think it’s bad.
In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, that strong margin of national support for equal rights for LGBTQ Americans has remained remarkably consistent ever since the 2015 Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage supported at the time by 57% of Americans with 39% opposed.
Republican politicians have already lost their hysterical battle against equal rights for LGBTQ Americans, but it’s done nothing to stop the continuous outpouring of hatred from Republican-dominated legislatures. Republican states have passed more laws this year targeting LGBTQ rights than ever before in U.S. history.
Now Republicans supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are determined to make hatred of gays a central issue in the 2024 presidential election. DeSantis, the distant second-place challenger trailing Donald Trump, released a lurid, homophobic video with ominous music and flashing lights to attack Trump as soft on LGBTQ rights.
Proud Moments
We’ll get to that bizarre hate-off between DeSantis and Trump, but first we should simply celebrate the progress we’ve made in achieving equal rights for LGBTQ Americans. Gay people have existed throughout human history, but millions of adults today including myself grew up during all the decades when gays had no rights at all in our nation. They could be arrested and prosecuted for existing, and many were.
It's bittersweet, but many of the proudest moments in the history of our democracy come after years of struggle when Americans previously deprived of rights—everyone who wasn’t white, women and LGBTQ Americans—finally achieve citizenship in their own nation.
Republicans have fought to exclude all those Americans from achieving equality starting when President Nixon betrayed the abolitionist party of Lincoln by welcoming Southern racists into the party to oppose Democrats supporting the civil rights movement.
|
|
A half-century later, Trump pushed extreme Republicans even further to support a violent assault on American democracy itself. After lying and scheming trying to overturn his election defeat by the largest vote in history, Trump called violent, armed militias supporting him to Washington to stop Congress from certifying President Biden’s election. We all watched the deadly riot on television.
Red State Hate Laws
DeSantis will never be able to out-lie or out-hate Trump. We all remember how many times Trump carefully mouthed every memorized letter of support for L-G-B-T-Q Americans in his 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton. Republicans knew it didn’t mean a thing. It was just another of the 30,573 lies Washington Post fact checkers documented Trump telling as president. Republicans think Trump’s lies are hilarious, totally oblivious that his jokes have always been on them.
But here’s the part about the anti-LGBTQ hate laws DeSantis passed in Florida that’s not at all funny. LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers. The Trevor Project’s 2022 national survey estimates 45% of LGBTQ youth 13 and older—1.8 million kids—seriously consider attempting suicide each year including half of transgender and nonbinary youth.
That’s the potential death toll from laws like Florida’s prohibiting teachers from providing information about sexual orientation or gender identity to middle school students and making it a felony for medical professionals to provide gender-affirming health care for transgender youth.
Red states are outlawing educators from educating young people about sexuality and gender at the most confusing time in their lives when they’re trying to figure out who they are. Rightwing hate groups with fraudulent names like Moms for Liberty want to ban all the reliable resources from schools and libraries. It’s a good thing kids are better at using the internet than most adults.
Prosecuting Parents?
But don’t believe Republicans who lie that they’re fighting for parental rights. Loving parents in Florida and Texas are facing the possibility of prosecution and custody battles for supporting their own children and working with mental health and medical professionals to protect them from political ignorance.That’s a welcome improvement in parenting compared to all the horror stories we used to hear about children being thrown out on the streets homeless after telling their parents they were gay.
That’s why Republicans in their current form as a Trumped-up coalition of hatred and ignorance have lost three straight national elections beginning in 2018 two years into Trump’s presidency. It’s why college-educated, multi-racial, suburban professionals are increasingly voting Democratic.
How many more elections will Republicans have to lose behind Trump or one of his hateful clones before they take action to become a conservative American political party again? There’s nothing conservative about hatred.
The sooner Republican leaders rid their party of Trump’s most dangerous supporters he called up as an armed militia to try to stay in power after losing the election, the sooner they can stop worrying about being murdered by members of their own party.
