At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the culture war reigned supreme.
“When our schools teach kids to be ashamed of America, when they teach the 1619 Project instead of our founding, we’re at risk,” said former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a potential 2024 presidential candidate.
“All this woke, transgender athletes, CRT, 1619, they don’t teach reading, writing or arithmetic,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said, perhaps less artfully.
Gender-related care for minors is “a demonic assault on the innocence of our children,” according to Tom Fitton, the head of the right-wing group Judicial Watch.
The most incendiary comments came from Daily Wire podcast host Michael Knowles, who called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated from public life entirely.”
The list of terrors did not end there. Speakers warned of gay and transgender “groomers” preying on children to recruit them for sexual acts or to increase their own ranks. According to various presenters, men are terrorizing women in the bathroom by pretending to be women themselves; the very concept of the family is being upended as children change their gender behind their parents’ backs; and social unrest is brewing because some history teachers don’t emphasize patriotism to the exclusion of everything else.
The GOP appears to be pinning its hopes for the next election on this new culture war. But there’s nothing “new” about the fears they’re expressing, or the dire outcomes they claim are imminent.
Beginning in the 1970s, conservatives also organized a new political coalition following a wave of social and cultural change that saw successes for the civil rights and women’s and gay rights movements. Black people were finally to be treated as equal citizens with protections in elections, employment and housing. Women were moving out of the home and into the workplace. And gays and lesbians were asserting their right to exist in the public sphere.
Traditional hierarchies of power were being upset, and men ― particularly white men ― were being forced into economic competition with Black people and women just as the long period of post-war growth was coming to an end.
The conservative reaction to this was to slander gay people as pedophiles, warn of men in women’s bathrooms, decry the subversion of family authority and protest the inclusion of history that highlighted the country’s shortcomings, specifically on matters of race, as destructive to national unity.
We’ve heard this all before.
Singer-turned-political activist Anita Bryant called gays “human garbage” in her campaign against a Miami-Dade anti-discrimination ordinance.
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Sex, Gender And Sexuality
“The homosexual recruiters of Dade County already have begun their campaign! Homosexual acts are not only illegal, they are immoral. And through the power of the ballot box, I believe the parents and the straight-thinking normal majority will soundly reject the attempt to legitimize homosexuals and their recruitment plans for our children.”
That’s what Anita Bryant, a famous Christian pop star, said in 1977, upon announcing her campaign to repeal an ordinance passed by Florida’s Miami-Dade County Council that banned discrimination against gays and lesbians in hiring and housing.
Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign featured all of the tropes that have become common in today’s attacks on the LGBTQ community, including the confusion of parents, the alleged subversion of the family and the supposed sexual predation of minors, particularly by teachers.
“When word came that there was an ordinance in Miami that would allow known homosexuals to teach my children, God help us as a nation to stand in these dark days,” Bryant said in speeches.
One Save Our Children ad warned that many “confused” parents mistakenly thought of gay people as “being gentle, non-aggressive types.”
“The other side of the homosexual coin is a hair-raising pattern of recruitment and outright seduction and molestation, a growing pattern that predictably will intensify if society approves laws granting legitimacy to the sexually perverted,” the ad warned.
“Only parents can reproduce,” Bryant would say. “In order to survive and sustain their lifestyle [gays and lesbians] are going to have to recruit.”
In other statements, Bryant called gay people “human garbage.”
These same sentiments can be heard today among those who attack the LGBTQ community as “groomers” or accuse them of harboring a secret agenda ― such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who attacked opponents of his “Don’t Say Gay” law as “support[ing] sexualizing kids in kindergarten” and trying to “camouflage their true intentions.”
In an interview with the liberal Washington Post columnist William Raspberry, Bryant said she was trying to protect “our children” from “flaunting homosexuals” employed as teachers who, as role models, could “be able to stand up and say ‘I’m homosexual and I’m proud of it,’ implying to our children that they have another legitimate choice open to them.”
What Bryant didn’t want was homosexuality expressed “out in the open.” She wanted it eradicated from public life.
Raspberry, like a number of liberal columnists at elite publications today, was persuaded, at least in part, by Bryant’s arguments. “Anyone who tells you the question is easy is not to be trusted,” he wrote, musing whether it was “ignorance or bigotry at work” in the anti-gay cause or “mere prudence.”
Bryant wasn’t alone in warning about the subversion of the family and gender roles by movements for equal treatment. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, fresh off a failed congressional run, came out in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972.
The effort to enshrine women’s equality in the Constitution, supported by broad majorities and leaders of both political parties, was really an “attack on marriage, the family, the homemaker, the role of motherhood, the whole concept of different roles for men and women,” Schlafly argued.
Women would be drafted into the military, Schlafly claimed. They would lose long-sought protections that were secured in the 1963 Equal Pay Act and the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act, and the right to alimony payments. Gay marriage would be legalized. Mothers would be forced to send their children to day care. And it would mean the end of sex segregation in sports, prisons, schools and bathrooms.
Phyllis Schlafly, national chair of the “Stop ERA” campaign, claimed that the Equal Rights Amendment would lead to men in women’s bathrooms.
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A pamphlet from Schlafly’s Eagle Forum distributed in the South warned of “the sexes fully integrated like the races,” including in bathrooms, as recorded in historian Rick Perlstein’s book “Reaganland.”
Today, the fear of men in women’s bathrooms has become a common trope in campaigns against the transgender community. At CPAC, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) highlighted the story of a teenage boy raping a girl in a Virginia high school bathroom. Gaetz falsely claimed that the boy identified as female. The story became a flashpoint in the 2021 Virginia governor’s race. The only problem with it was that the boy was not transgender.
The far-right John Birch Society also warned that the “Marxist pressures and abuses inherent in the ERA” would lead to “co-sexual penal institutions” and “the legalization of rape,” Perlstein writes. At the time, marital rape was legal in every state. It wasn’t until Susan Brownmiller’s book “Against Our Will” came out in 1975 that the concept was even discussed in those terms. The first conviction for marital rape would not occur until 1978.
“In desperation, the nation’s ownership has now gone back to the tried-and-true hot buttons: save our children, our fetuses, our ladies’ rooms from the godless enemy,” author Gore Vidal wrote in 1979. “As usual, the sex buttons have proved satisfyingly hot.”
The campaigns by Bryant and Schlafly both won. Anti-gay copycat campaigns followed across the country; most succeeded. In California, GOP gubernatorial candidate John Briggs put a referendum on the 1978 ballot to allow schools to fire teachers for the “advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging or promoting of private or public homosexual activity directed at, or likely to come to the attention of, schoolchildren and/or other employees.”
The initiative would effectively make it possible to purge any openly gay teacher, along with any straight teacher who discussed homosexuality or gay rights in any kind of positive way. This same drive to ban the supposed promotion of homosexuality (“no promo homo”) is expressed today in conservative efforts like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.
But the so-called Briggs Initiative lost. Gay rights activists in California organized to defeat it as a government-backed invasion of privacy. They even won the support of Ronald Reagan, former governor and future president.
“Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like measles,” Reagan wrote in opposition to the initiative. “Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.”
Conservatives today disagree.
Periods, Question Marks And Race
Just like the fight over sexuality and gender today echoes the battles of the 1970s, so too does the fight over the treatment of race in history and education. Today, conservatives back legislation to stop “woke indoctrination” by limiting the way race can be discussed in schools, colleges and universities. In the 1970s, conservative activists railed against secular humanism and multiculturalism. They all warned of the same horrors: the collapse of national unity and the end of American innocence.
The author James Baldwin recognized Americans’ desire for innocence and a sanitized version of their past. “The Americans have never even heard of history, they still believe that legend created about the Far West, and cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers, and black and white, and good and evil,” Baldwin said at a 1965 debate with conservative William F. Buckley. “If the Europeans are afflicted by history, Americans are afflicted by innocence.”
The loss of innocence was on display in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, after the school board approved new curricula and textbooks that aimed to pro vide “multi-ethnic, multicultural balance.”
The textbooks in question made secular comparisons of Aesop’s Fables to Biblical tales; included mention of negative incidents in American history; and included more Black, Hispanic and Indigenous figures. One book featured a white girl handing a bouquet of flowers to a Black boy. “This is what it is all about,” the historian Perlstein recounts one protester saying in his book “The Invisible Bridge.”
“You are making an insidious attempt to replace our periods with your question marks,” one Kanawha County protester told a reporter for The Village Voice.
The protesters linked up with Texas textbook activists Mel and Norma Gabler, who began in the 1960s to review school textbooks for anything that would undermine the conservative Christian worldview, like the teaching of evolution. The Gablers also scoured for what they deemed problematic approaches in teaching American history, including deviations from “lost cause” Confederate mythology.
Norma Gabler at a press conference, July 20, 1977.
ANTONY MATHEUS LINSEN/FAIRFAX MEDIA VIA GETTY IMAGES
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They also received support from the Heritage Foundation, a then-new conservative think tank that sent two staffers to help coordinate the protesters and provide communications and legal help. The Heritage faction saw the protesters as part of an emerging majority political coalition opposed to recent social and cultural changes concerning race, gender, sexuality and secularism.
“Picking your fight is important. If you pick the right fight at the right time, it can be profitable,” James McKenna, one of the Heritage staffers, said in a PBS documentary about the protests.
After parents began a boycott of the schools, the demonstrations turned violent. Protesters attacked school buses, shooting them with shotguns, to prevent children from participating in the boycott by going to school. An elementary school was blown up with dynamite.
Controversies over school textbooks and the teaching of history continued for decades after. Congress gutted funding in 1975 for certain science textbooks after they were derided as promoting “cultural relativism.” One GOP congressman said the texts served as “cultural shock techniques” designed to teach children to reject the “national loyalties of their parents and American society generally.”
Similar controversies erupted in the 1990s when the federally funded National Council for History Standards released new standards for history teaching that expanded the range of people, events and organizations in American history considered worthy of attention.
Lynne Cheney, the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities under George H.W. Bush, which funded the new history standards project, denounced it as “grim and gloomy.” It did not focus enough on the great men and great moments of American history, opponents argued ― and when it did, it failed to cast them in an entirely positive light. Instead, the standards only gave “unqualified admiration” to “people, places, and events that are politically correct,” which is to say, they were Black or female or Indigenous. Today’s conservatives would probably call them “woke.”
“From the arrival of English-speaking colonists in 1607 until 1965, there was one continuous civilization built around a set of commonly accepted legal and cultural principles,” Newt Gingrich wrote in 1995, in response to the standards. “Since 1965, however, there has been a calculated effort by cultural elites to discredit this civilization.”
Alabama state troopers are seen with Black youths who were arrested during civil rights demonstrations.
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The Voting Rights Act became law in 1965, legally ending the Jim Crow exclusion of Black people from the American political community. But further efforts toward their inclusion, and the inclusion of their stories, remained contested.
This same conflict erupted again in 2019 with the publication of the 1619 Project in The New York Times Magazine. This project of historians, journalists and columnists provided a historical perspective from the point of view of Black America, beginning with the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1619. In the ensuing years, further attacks on history education ― especially anything focused on slavery and civil rights ― unfurled over the teaching of so-called critical race theory.
In response, conservatives pushed legislation, like DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE Act,” banning the teaching of certain concepts concerning race. The result is a purge of books, classes, teachers and subject matter that focuses on Black history and the Black experience in the U.S.
From Anti-Communism To Anti-‘Wokeness’
The culture war attacks in the 1970s worked to bring religious, social and Southern conservatives into a majority political coalition with libertarian business conservatives and anti-communist hawks. This fusion proved potent. Conservatives won control of the Republican Party, which won five out of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988.
Anti-communism served as the glue that held this coalition together. Communism, it was said, sought the subversion of traditional hierarchies, the American way of life and the American free enterprise system. Anyone who deviated from the norm, or protested the conditions of women or racial minorities, could threaten the social fabric in service of communism.
“Communists and queers … have sold 400 million Asiatic people into atheistic slavery and have the American people in a hypnotic trance, headed blindly toward the same precipice,” Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, said while denouncing gay people employed by the State Department.
In a 1952 piece by R.G. Waldeck, the right-wing publication Human Events postulated the existence of a Homintern or Homosexual International, similar to the Comintern, or Communist International.
“Members of this International constitute a world-wide conspiracy against society,” Waldeck wrote.
Fears of the Homintern did not end in the 1950s. At the 1992 GOP convention, Rev. Gene Antonio denounced the gay rights movement as both “a Homintern” and “a homosexual gestapo,” whose “goal” was to “break the back of every church.”
That was the first presidential election cycle following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. With the glue of anti-communism gone, conservatives sought a new adhesive to hold their coalition together.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) delivers remarks at the 2022 CPAC conference at the Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida, Feb. 24, 2022.
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Former Nixon aide and GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan paved the way at that same 1992 convention with his blood-and-soil call for an all-out culture war. The external threat was defeated, he warned, but the internal threat remained.
“There is a religious war going on in this country,” Buchanan said. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
As Buchanan’s heir, former President Donald Trump reoriented contemporary GOP priorities toward countering so-called subversive activities. As he said in a video posted on March 16, “the greatest threat to Western civilization today” is “probably, more than anything else, ourselves.”
“It’s the collapse of the nuclear family and fertility rates, like nobody can believe is happening. It’s the Marxists who would have us become a godless nation worshiping at the altar of race, and gender, and environment,” Trump said, in his list of the many woes supposedly caused by liberal and left-wing opponents.
But just like before the end of the Cold War, the Republican Party remains wedded to a free-market libertarian economic program of tax cuts for the rich and corporate deregulation ― one that its more downscale voters, an increasingly large part of the party, don’t think of as a priority.
During the Cold War, dissenters within the conservative coalition could be kept from bolting by the shared goal of fighting communism. This helped Republicans win a national majority.
With the GOP having lost the popular vote in eight out of the last nine presidential elections, their hope is that they can resurrect the fears of the 1970s under the brand of anti-“wokeness” to build a new majority coalition. Instead, it increasingly looks like a desperate effort to hold together the party’s divergent voting and donor bases.
“A parent in Tallahassee, Florida cost a charter school principal her job after complaining that one of the world’s most beloved artistic masterpieces was pornographic.
Hope Carrasquilla, who had just stepped into her role at Tallahassee Classical School less than a year prior, announced her resignation on Monday during an emergency board meeting, according to the Tallahassee Democrat’s reporting.
She spoke with the Tallahassee Democrat about the incident and the end to her time at the school. Ms Carrasquilla told the paper that the school board’s chair, Barney Bishop, informed her that she would either need to quit or she would be fired.
Though it appears he did not specify why the principal was asked to leave, she believes it was related to a lesson on Renaissance art.”
Montana Republican Admits Detransition Is Rare, Witness States “0 Of My Patients Regret Transition”
A Montana hearing for Senate Bill 99, a gender affirming care ban for trans youth, featured incredible moments. A therapist, when asked, said “none of my patients regret.” A Republican conceded that.
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Montana’s House Judiciary Committee met today to hear a bill that would ban gender affirming care for trans youth. Senate bill 99, which passed the Montana Senate previously, bans gender affirming care, explicitly legalizes nonconsensual intersex surgeries on intersex youth, and attacks Medicaid coverage for institutions providing such care. One of the ways that the bill is supported by proponents is through the use of detransitioners, including multiple political detransitioners. The House hearing was filled with expert witnesses, including people like Dr. Anna Peterson, who has treated transgender people for over two decades. When asked how many people she has cared for have regretted their transition, she stated that of the hundreds of patients she has seen, none have expressed regret. Ultimately, this led to Representative Jennifer Carlson (R) admitting that detransition is indeed rare, undercutting a major justification for the bill.
Montana’s bill would ban gender affirming care entirely for trans youth. It states that no person may provide gender affirming surgeries, hormone therapy, or puberty blockers to anyone under 18, in violation with widely accepted standards of care and medical evidence. It removes doctors licenses and even removes their ability to indemnify themselves using malpractice insurance for youth gender affirming care. A severability clause at the end ensures that if parts are found unconstitutional, other parts will remain in effect, indicating proponents of the bill know that it is likely the bill will indeed be found to be unconstitutional:
Severability clause in SB99
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In order to argue for this bill, people often point to and raise the fear that those who are transitioning will later come to regret it. We often hear this with respect to outlandishly high detransition rates that are often claimed by proponents of bills like this. In this hearing, they brought forward one detransitioner to make this case – he did so using religious justifications for his detransition, not that unlike the old ex-gay movement.
We know from modern studies that detransition is very rare. In the hearing, multiple witnesses in favor of the bill brought up the much-debunked “80% detransition rate.” This rate is based on decades old data and standards. Much of the data comes from a noted conversion therapist, Ken Zucker, who advised the parents of trans kids to do things such as avoiding “wrongly-gendered toys.” We know from modern studies that the actual detransition rate among trans youth is only 2.5% – and many of these who do detransition do so because of lack of acceptance rather than because they are “not trans.”
It is upon these facts that Representative Zooey Zephyr (D) asked Dr. Anna Peterson, a therapist who has worked with transgender youth for two decades, how many people she has seen who have regretted their transition. Dr. Peterson responded, “I’ve worked for many years with this population. Of the hundreds of people over many years… the incidence of regret in my practice, simply put, is zero. And I work with these kids over time, into adulthood.”
See the exchange:
The exchange was enlightening, and it seemed to throw Republican questioners off, who may have intended to rely on high detransition rates to get their point across. Later in the same hearing, Representative Jennifer Carlson (R) brought up detransitioners, but clearly had to adjust her questioning. She stated, “With respect to those who reverse course… go back… which we know is a small number…” and proceeded to ask about the reversibility of the procedures. The moment was significant as it was the first time in the hundreds of hours of legislation I have witnessed where a Republican conceded that point.
It is also notable that in this hearing, there was only a single detransitioner. Many trans people spoke against the bill. If there was an “explosion of detransitioners” as some proponents tried to claim before this exchange, where are they? You might expect that they would out in droves to testify in these hearings, especially if the number is as high as what is commonly cited and the procedures are so damaging. There continues to be no evidence that this is the case.
There were other remarkable moments of questioning, such as when Representative Durham questioned multiple doctors about the use of blood tests to determine someone’s biological sex. When both a psychiatrist and an emergency department doctor both stated that you cannot use blood tests to conclusively determine someone’s biological sex by measuring hormone levels, the Representative seemed to grow dubious, stating that he disagreed. When the crowd shouted, “you’re not a doctor!” he responded, “But I’m married…”
SB99 will come up for executive action in the coming days, and if it is voted out of the committee, it will go to the full Montana House. Should it pass, Montana will become the 10th state to ban gender affirming care fully for trans youth. It is an extreme bill that will harm trans kids in Montana and will usurp parental rights over healthcare decisions. The representatives who are on the fence on this bill should use these lines of questioning and the answers they received to help them realize that this bill does not base itself on scientific fact or any material good for the patient population they seek to legislate.
Disclosure: Representative Zooey Zephyr is the author if this article’s partner.
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This is a guest post from Randy. As most people here already know Randy is someone I admire greatly. Randy is my online brother and a member of our family. Randy is smart, funny, caring, kind, willing to reach out a hand to those in need while also willing to stand up to protect others. Randy is the kind of guy who if he knew a co-worker had no other way to get to a much needed job during a snow storm he would get up out of his warm bed and go take them to work. And not ask any for doing it. I have asked Randy if he would be a guest author as he has time. He has delighted me with the first two posts of what I hope will be many more. Thank you my brother, Hugs.
Why it Matters
In this era of Blue Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, even All Lives Matter, the defining characteristic is that the authors, the progenitors of the movement, are trying to indicate to the public that there are folks who do not see the lives of some persons either being in jeopardy, being disenfranchised, being set upon as a second class, being abused. The irreparable loses for some came too early, like the Native Americans, and for others they somehow bought in to the larger idea, others still labor under a “lesser than” status that evidences in odd circumstances when people need someone to blame.
It is easy to use extremes to make points in writing, so I’ll use one now. In the late 1930’s an individual rose to power who realized that it was far far easier to capture the public’s anger and fear through hate and destructive rhetoric. Hate is bred from fear, and Germany recovering from WW1 was reeling through poverty, inflation, low productivity, and a miasma from losing a war. This individual captured that fear with not only an ideal he espoused upon the country but a scapegoat: otherwise said is “this is the ideal, but these are the people for whom to blame for our lot.” It should be noted that an erstwhile general failure in his other pursuits, this individual honed a craft of speaking what people begged to hear in a manner that was convincing enough to overpower the very voice of decency within them.
What did that individual do? He convinced people that it was ok to place a mark of second class on another human being. He convinced people that they should be “segregated” for the good of the countrymen. In time, it went from a fringe movement to the government’s position, and men, women, children were rounded up and “quarantined” for the safety of the citizenry. Some bought into this with a passion, others were put into a position of placing their own lives in peril to not go through with this new government program as their neighbors were taken, were abused, disenfranchised and even killed. Only a sociopath would look upon the truth of this matter with anything but horror, but it’s amazing what people can justify to themselves when their own comfort is on the line, when their own well-being is on the line. That individual, after committing war upon his own land, went on to view people in other countries as “lesser than”, as not worthy of existence as neighbors, and went to war with them. The irony learned by the very public this individual used and then abandoned in his bid for power is that they were now only worse off after his blame-game and were forced to face what had been done in their name.
So, why is that relevant today? Anytime, Anytime, Every time we accept a person to be cast as a second-class citizen for no other reason than their very being, we lose. We lost when we decided that Native American Cultures were lesser than. We lost when we decided that African lives, African American lives were lesser than. We lost when we decided that whoever was in power at the moment, however that power was expressed- be it by government, wealth, violence- was the correct arbitrator of a person’s worth as a citizen.
This blog clearly speaks up for those who have felt the abuse of those in power due to their being gay, being trans, being somehow different. Some have looked upon this championing as an acceptable forum for conversation and determination of another’s rights and status when said persons have harmed no one and sought only to be genuine to themselves. The false definition of reality seems a favorite of those who seek to justify abuse, and let it be understood that abuse of power is what it is! I see no debate as warranted or even allowed when we seek to determine how another person defines himself. That is their business, and though we may find it uncomfortable for ourselves we have no right to dictate to another who he or she or they express themselves.
I would like to harken back to the very extreme example used earlier in this writing: Declaring a person to be lower class and unworthy of their own personhood, their liberty, is not American, but damn if it isn’t what Americans seem to demand. Excusing and justifying abuses and horrors in the name of being free is antithetical to the very existence of the Constitution, and yet we do it. Over and over again, we accept abuses on others. You want examples? Ok, we accept a death knell of school children for the right to sell guns to near anyone. We accept the demand that drag shows be stopped because it violates our own religious beliefs. We are demanding that people exhibit who they are defined to be at birth despite who they genuinely feel themselves to be. We demand that children starve in our public schools so that the wealthiest don’t have to pay a fair tax rate. We demand that children go to school, then declare their well-educated instructors abusing them for allowing them to have an education. We demand that the sick seek to gamble their very lives as they balance eating and health care. And, we demand that the mother give birth to her child no matter how old she is, how she became pregnant, the viability of the fetus, the physical and psychological toll it will put on the mother, the financial devastation it will inflict upon her life, even the ability to feed, clothe, educate, and love the child do we still demand she bring it into the world, then we turn our back upon her.
We as a country seem to demand the right to make these decisions for others, to define them, to restrict them, to force them to conform to what we see as comfortable and proper for them, and yet in the near past, especially, have I seen excuse upon excuse for criminal and the worst examples of abuses inflicted upon others. These so-called Christians – and I place that lowercase as they seem to refuse to follow the example of the one written as Jesus Christ – refuse to use a common reality, hold themselves accountable, hold others in their politics driven values accountable, and as I mentioned, refuse to do as Christ demands, yet stomp their feet if someone were to live in defiance of those somehow “deeply held religious beliefs”. And, again, harkening back to the earlier extreme example: 1930’s Germany was a very religious country and look at what they allowed for their politics-driven morals and values.
This is the history of black people in the US that DeathSantis and the republican racists like Marge Greene want desperately to bury and hide. They are making laws to prevent this honest teaching of history illegal while claiming it is just to make white kids feel bad of their white skin. We need to get serious before we lose our entire true history. The Daughters of the Confederacy in both the 1920s and the 1960s raced to slap up monuments to the South, to Dixie, claiming the confederate battle flag represented heritage and the civil war was about states rights. But what right did the Southern states demand, by their own writings it was the right to own black people as property like cattle to do with them as they wished including raping them or other mistreatments. Both times it was about reminding black people that they were less than whites and that whites owned them once and would always be above them. We really have to prevent the white supremist washing of the US history. The US can be the shining city on the hill but only if the people move forward socially instead of retreating into a fake mythical past. Hugs
So are the LGBTQ+ adults. DeathSantis and his maga sycophants have painted target signs on each of us and his violent gang thug enforcers along with the recharged up fundamentalist religious people who feel they have the right to oppress everyone into forcing them to live by the dictates of their religion are making the lives of queer people in Florida miserable. They keep pushing harder and harder to make their way the only way to live. What is acceptable to them is the only acceptable public expression. This is about not allowing any other social public expression than what their church allows them according to their outdated 1950s strict gender role model based on the idea that white Christian men are automatically in charge and women are subservient to them while minorities know their place and stay there. All according to the white males in charge who like it that way. And they use a set of mistranslated writings from 2,500 years ago to back up their demands. I want you to pay attention to what the student says is happening on high school campuses, where conserative right wing teachers / administrators design polices and punishments for queer kids while using those polices to protect themselves from repremand. The student says she has seen teachers mock and out gay kids to parents and laugh about it. Also kids who try to stand up for the queer kids have their own futures placed in jepardy as their transcripts get lost, documents they need lost, and even collage applications no longer approved, or loss recommendations made by the school if they don’t stop speaking out in support of queer kids. Think of that, the change from the days when kids were encouraged to be active in cuases, in socail movements. Hugs
Students who speak out for LGBTQ+ rights say they face retaliation from hostile school administrations determined to silence them.
By Jorge Martinez
Photo: Shutterstock
Under Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Florida has become a closely-watched epicenter for anti-LGBTQ+ laws – and advocates say queer youth are feeling the impact.
With the passage of sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, such as the Don’t Say Gay law, gender-affirming care bans, and bathroom restrictions, Florida has become a battleground for queer rights. DeSantis’s anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric has continued to exacerbate the issue, leading to concerns among LGBTQ+ advocates that the state is becoming increasingly unwelcoming to queer youth.
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RELATED STORIES
GOP wants to expand Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law to target teens & transgender kids
The bill would ban LGBTQ+ education up to 8th grade, ban students from changing their pronouns, and that’s not all…
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“We’re terrified,” Christina Guiriba, a transgender youth advocate, told LGBTQ Nation. “As advocates for the community, we’re very torn. We want to continue this fight.”
Guiriba is the founder of Transcending Adolescence, a Jacksonville-based nonprofit aimed at empowering trans youth.
A trans woman and Florida native who has experienced bullying and physical violence during her childhood, she leads a summer camp called Resilience Retreat for around a dozen trans youth to build their courage and resilience. She wants every participant to leave camp having defined success on their own terms, whether that be finally finding a safe space for the first time or going through with top surgery.
“Seeing a staff full of gender-diverse people that are successful and still alive gave them hope,” she said. Through the power of the outdoors and physical recreation, she hopes to continue to be a voice for “those who are afraid.”
But Guiriba said that many advocates are afraid to continue their work as they find themselves the target of right-wing hate. Transcending Adolescence, in fact, was recently the victim of a doxing attack.
As a result, the organization was forced to adopt stricter security measures such as planning escape routes and installing surveillance cameras and panic buttons. They even hired a private security officer, unable to turn to the Jacksonville police due to their transphobic reputation, such as using deadnames in official police investigations, among other reasons.
But Guiriba isn’t stopping. Her work is becoming increasingly relevant as new research shows how ongoing anti-LGBTQ+ attacks are starting to impact queer youth.
“The consequences are really more dire than even most people would imagine,” Caitlin Viccora, programs manager for healthy & supportive schools at Advocates for Youth, told LGBTQ Nation.
A recent CDC report on youth behavior over the past decade shows record-high levels of depression and suicide risk among teenagers in recent years. The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey reveals that more than half of LGBTQ+ students have recently experienced declining mental health and more than one in five had a suicide attempt within the past year. Queer female adolescents fared worse compared to males.
In Florida especially, Viccora said the priority for advocates is to set the record straight and clear the air of false information. Parents have a right to know what’s really happening in their child’s classroom without having to rely on the right-wing’s “targeted disinformation campaigns,” Viccora said.
“It’s not just Republicans who are failing to protect LGBTQ+ students,” she added, “A lot of folks are staying silent.”
She urged community members to speak publicly at local school board meetings and fight proposed regulations that impact queer youth. Submitting public comments, organizing to call local officials such as superintendents, or just showing up to the polls to vote are effective ways to protect queer youth.
Queer youth are learning to “shut up and keep their head low”
“Ron DeSantis is a terrifying man,” Iris, a high school senior in Clay County, Florida, who requested to use a different name out of fear of retaliation, told LGBTQ Nation. “[DeSantis] claims to be a Christian but at the basis of Christianity is acceptance and love. Yet he chooses violence and overall bigotry.”
Iris does not identify as queer, but her queer friends would not speak with LGBTQ Nation, citing safety concerns even if they remained anonymous. Instead, they spoke through Iris.
In her previous attempts to speak out, Iris said her school officials claimed to “lose” her documents, opening the possibility of preventing her from graduating high school. She said speaking out would even “jeopardize my college [applications].”
Iris said Gov. DeSantis has created a “hostile environment” for Florida students that enables hatred and punishes those who try speaking out. She recounts an instance where a close male friend dressed as a PowerPuff Girl for Halloween and was viciously bullied during school hours. The bully received no penalty while Iris’ friend was reprimanded for several infractions, one of them being a dress code violation.
In a second instance, she reports that her school principal outed numerous queer kids to their parents. She said the principal was even spotted laughing and mocking the list of students she outed with one of those students’ parents.
This practice is becoming increasingly common across Florida schools, with school administrators developing formal policies to punish or out queer kids to their families.
“Teachers are able to say and do things without consequence,” said Iris, noting that these types of policies serve to primarily protect conservative and right-wing educators.
She added that queer kids are learning that they need to “shut up and keep their head low” in order to survive.
Both Guiriba and Viccora emphasize the importance of remaining positive, continuing their fight to ensure a brighter future for queer youth across the country.
“It’s important for queer people to know they’re not alone,” said Guiriba, also stressing that advocates take the appropriate time to rest. “It’s not easy to find strength.”
“Living as a queer person in America is really scary when you’re looking at headlines,” Viccora said, especially when queer Americans face discrimination and violence at every corner. Despite this, Viccora urges queer youth to remember the “beauty and resiliency” in the simple fact of our existence.
This is a web site I really enjoy. Especially when I don’t feel well as it gives the facts and clear information in easy to digest segments. Randy introduced me to it years ago. Here is a sample of the author’s work. Hugs
What did that individual do? He convinced people that it was ok to place a mark of second class on another human being. He convinced people that they should be “segregated” for the good of the countrymen. In time, it went from a fringe movement to the government’s position, and men, women, children were rounded up and “quarantined” for the safety of the citizenry. Some bought into this with a passion, others were put into a position of placing their own lives in peril to not go through with this new government program as their neighbors were taken, were abused, disenfranchised and even killed. Only a sociopath would look upon the truth of this matter with anything but horror, but it’s amazing what people can justify to themselves when their own comfort is on the line, when their own well-being is on the line. That individual, after committing war 
upon his own land, went on to view people in other countries as “lesser than”, as not worthy of existence as neighbors, and went to war with them. The irony learned by the very public this individual used and then abandoned in his bid for power is that they were now only worse off after his blame-game and were forced to face what had been done in their name.
of another’s rights and status when said persons have harmed no one and sought only to be genuine to themselves. The false definition of reality seems a favorite of those who seek to justify abuse, and let it be understood that abuse of power is what it is! I see no debate as warranted or even allowed when we seek to determine how another person defines himself. That is their business, and though we may find it uncomfortable for ourselves we have no right to dictate to another who he or she or they express themselves.
Ok, we accept a death knell of school children for the right to sell guns to near anyone. We accept the demand that drag shows be stopped because it violates our own religious beliefs. We are demanding that people exhibit who they are defined to be at birth despite who they genuinely feel themselves to be. We demand that children starve in our public schools so that the wealthiest don’t have to pay a fair tax rate. We demand that children go to school, then declare their well-educated instructors abusing them for allowing them to have an education. We demand that the sick seek to gamble their very lives as they balance eating and health care. And, we demand that the mother give birth to her child no matter how old she is, 
how she became pregnant, the viability of the fetus, the physical and psychological toll it will put on the mother, the financial devastation it will inflict upon her life, even the ability to feed, clothe, educate, and love the child do we still demand she bring it into the world, then we turn our back upon her.
These so-called Christians – and I place that lowercase as they seem to refuse to follow the example of the one written as Jesus Christ – refuse to use a common reality, hold themselves accountable, hold others in their politics driven values accountable, and as I mentioned, refuse to do as Christ demands, yet stomp their feet if someone were to live in defiance of those somehow “deeply held religious beliefs”. And, again, harkening back to the earlier extreme example: 1930’s Germany was a very religious country and look at what they allowed for their politics-driven morals and values.
Scottie's Playtime 