Pride Month has brought shocking violence against LGBTQ+ people, egged on by GOP rhetoric, laws. It should remind you of Nazi Germany.
I’ve been meaning to write a column on the growing threat — and reality — of violence to America’s LGBTQ community posed by right-wing rhetoric and politics, but it’s proved a difficult piece to write. Not because the “culture wars” around sexuality and gender are complicated — they can be, although the notion of loving all people for who they are is pretty simple — but because new, outrageous incidents keep topping the ones I planned to write about.
Officials there had good reason to be alarmed, after this weekend’s widely reported incident in which 31 members of the white nationalist Patriot Front — the weird khaki-wearing extremists who marched through Philadelphia last July 4 — were arrested in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, after piling into a rented U-Haul truck armed with riot gear, apparently with the goal of violently disrupting the annual Pride event underway there.
This occurred right after several members of another well-known, violent extremist group, the Proud Boys — some of them wearing T-shirts with images of AK-47s — showed up at the San Lorenzo, Calif., public library to disrupt and shut down a “drag queen story time” children’s book event, shouting homophobic slurs. As the author and transgender advocate Parker Molloy wrote in a recent newsletter, both the Idaho and California events had been targeted by a social media feed called Libs of TikTok that has developed a huge following on the right — with some 1.2 million Twitter followers — and attracted much controversy.
The men who stormed into “Drag Queen Story Hour” at the San Lorenzo Library were described as members of the Proud Boys Organization. @ACSOSheriffs says an active hate crime investigation is underway.
— Stephanie Magallon (@MagallonNews) June 12, 2022
Im told this video was taken once the situation was “calmer.” pic.twitter.com/5lJYXWZZkS
Wrote Molloy: “Things are getting really bad for LGBTQ people out there, and I just don’t see how it’ll get any better, especially in the short term. Republicans and their allies in right-wing media are going on the attack. Their goal is to create reasonable-sounding arguments (“No, you see, I just really care about fairness in women’s sports!”), and then use that to wipe out LGBTQ people.”
As I’ve written previously in this space, homophobia — especially against Pennsylvania’s transgender community — is a driving force of Mastriano’s movement and, increasingly, the Republican Party writ large. And it’s a matter of time before this gets someone killed.
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/anti-lgbtq-violence-republican-rhetoric-20220616.html