“They’ve stopped trying to pretend that they’re doing anything other than coming after LGBTQ people because they don’t like us.”
In state legislatures across the US, Republicans have been pushing a suite of anti-LGBTQ laws with concerted speed in recent months. From Texas to Florida, Alabama to Utah, lawmakers have targeted trans people in youth sports, medical care for trans children, and LGBTQ discussion in classrooms.
But these LGBTQ advocates are also clear-eyed when it comes to the political strategy they’re up against — one that centers on classrooms. Schools have been the subject of intense political fights since the start of the pandemic as angry parents vented about masks or vaccines at once sleepy school board meetings. Conservative strategists then weaponized that anger in nonsense fights over critical race theory, leading to school board elections that were suddenly fiercely partisan. Now, LGBTQ activists say, the same playbook is being used yet again.
“Folks have learned about what was most effective from previous cycles,” said Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, a national group advocating for LGBTQ students. “They’ve taken those little bits of what had been successful and gained traction, and they’ve pumped it full of steroids and they’ve unleashed it on all of us.”
In at least one state, the link between CRT and anti-LGBTQ policies is quite literal. Ohio House Bill 616 is overwhelmingly concerned with banning CRT and the 1619 Project in schools, but also sandwiches in restrictions on teachings about sexual orientation and gender identity.
“[Republicans] have been, as a strategic matter, pretty good at tying this all together, and having it support that broader message that they’re looking at protecting kids. It’s preposterous, but I think that message is working,” Miller said. “And I think that’s why the gays just kind of got sucked up in this.”
As part of this recent legislative push, transgender Americans have come under the most intense assault — and the pace is quickening. In 2020, there were 79 bills introduced in state houses that targeted trans people, according to Cathryn Oakley, state legislative director and senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign. Last year, that number jumped to 150 bills.
What feels different for Oakley now is that she thinks her opponents have abandoned any pretense that their laws are designed to protect people, as they did by spreading the myth about trans women being predators in bathrooms.
“They crossed a line several years ago, but they have just crossed another line somehow,” Oakley said. “They’re no longer trying to mask the cruelty that is motivating them. They’ve stopped trying to pretend that they’re doing anything other than coming after LGBTQ people because they don’t like us.”
The suggestion that gay people prey on children in order to “convert” them is not only a false claim but also a tired one that stretches back decades. The New York Times has dubbed it “vintage homophobia.” But much as the classroom strategy has been replicated and repackaged, so too have old anti-gay slurs.
“These are words that were used in the ’70s that were effective in messaging back then. I’m not surprised they’re being used now because a lot of the strategy is being replicated,” said Martinez, the Equality Texas CEO. “It’s meant to scare people. It’s meant to go back to the message of protection. You’re protecting someone from some scary bogeyman. It’s another fictitious moral emergency. It’s used to make people more afraid than they are right now.”
All of this is happening at a time when Americans’ support for LGBTQ people is at historic highs, but that context is important for understanding the aim behind this “nasty, drive-by homophobia,” Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern has argued.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/anti-lgbtq-legislation-agenda