LGBTQ+ community’s Pride won’t be dimmed by Republican bullying

Sunday, June 25, 2023 | 2 a.m.

June 2022 marked the first time since the women’s suffrage movement began that women’s rights in the United States took a definitive step backward. Now, as June 2023 enters its final week, we’re marking a similar milestone for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) people and their allies: the first Pride Month celebrations in history in which LGBTQ+ people are further from equality than the year before.

Yet, Pride Month celebrations persist.

On May 24, the Department of Homeland Security issued a National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin that warned that LGBTQ+ people and groups were among the several “likely targets” for “domestic violent extremists.” But the threat of violence is not new to LGBTQ+ people.

From the murder of Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena to the shootings at LGBTQ+ businesses in Orlando and Aurora, LGBTQ+ people have for decades learned to live, love and celebrate Pride under the threat of violence.

What is new is the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ laws washing over the United States that target not just legal recognition of same-sex couples but the basic civil rights and existence of lesbian, gay, bisexual and, especially, transgender people.

According to the ACLU, nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been introduced in statehouses across the country since the 2022 Pride Month celebrations. More than 75 of them, spread across 21 red states, have passed into law. Another 200 are still alive and moving through the legislative process.

Much of that legislation targets transgender youths in a disgusting display of government-sponsored bullying designed to silence the voices of young people who demand nothing more than to be seen for who they are, heard in their own voices and treated with decency.

Florida Gov. Ron Desantis and his posse of legislative thugs seem to take particular joy in tormenting LGBTQ+ people. In May, they added to the legacy of last year’s “don’t say gay” attacks on free speech and expression by passing a series of laws now known as “the slate of hate.”

It’s an appropriate description for what are unquestionably targeted attacks on LGBTQ+ people.

How else can they explain a law that makes it a fireable offense for a teacher to respect a student who politely asks to be addressed as “she” instead of “he?”

How else can they explain special fines for businesses that allow children to attend drag shows in a state that already has a general law on the books that prohibits exposing minors to sexually explicit or harmful adult content?

How else can they explain a ban on gender-affirming health care that was marketed as protecting minors but actually restricts all Floridians, adults included, from accessing gender-affirming care?

How else can they explain the expansion of “don’t say gay,” which was sold as preventing discussions of gender and sexuality in elementary school classrooms, to include high schools and even public colleges in the Sunshine State?

In response to these and other laws, the NAACP issued a formal travel advisory for Florida, saying the state has become “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”

Despite the fallout, dozens of other states, including our neighbors in Idaho, Utah and Arizona, are now considering legislation modeled on Florida’s “slate of hate.”

Other GOP presidential candidates are getting in on the action too. Nikki Haley recently told a crowd at a CNN town hall that the primary reason so many teenage girls are contemplating suicide is because transgender athletes are allowed to compete in high school sports. Haley’s preposterous fearmongering demonstrates that she is cut from the same cloth as the paranoid, misinformation-spewing extremists in her party.

The flurry of anti-LGBTQ+ activity prompted the nation’s most prominent LGBTQ+ rights advocacy organization, the Human Rights Campaign, to declare a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people across the country. It marks the first time in the organization’s 40-year history that it has taken such an action.

The HRC’s warning was accompanied by a guidebook for staying safe in hostile communities, including health and safety information, summaries of state laws that restrict the rights and liberties of LGBTQ+ people and links to state-specific information on supportive organizations and resources. The guidebook harkens to the era of the Green Book used by Black travelers in the Jim Crow South to find lodging, businesses and gas stations that would serve them along the road.

And yet, despite all the violence, vitriol and hatred being directed at LGBTQ+ people, Republican hatemongers could not cancel Pride Month celebrations in all but a handful of places this year. Try as they might, they never will. That’s because they fundamentally misunderstand what Pride Month celebrations are about.

Anti-gay bigots paint Pride Month celebrations as nothing but drunken sex-crazed parties. This is nonsense. For many LGBTQ+ people, Pride Month is a time of community reflection. It is a look back at the history of adversity that LGBTQ+ people have been forced to navigate to survive, and a look forward at the work that still needs to be done to thrive. Pride Month also has become important to the families and friends of LGBTQ+ people as a time for them to publicly support their family members and explain to the larger community that there is nothing scary about LGBTQ+ people.

Today’s GOP seeks to turn back the clock on progress by engaging in a coordinated and intentional campaign of hate that defies reality and paints the LGBTQ+ community as child-grooming predators. The campaign isn’t subtle and anyone who still supports the GOP leaders engaged in it is complicit. They enjoy having an easy target of a minority community to use panic to rally their supporters. Manufactured outrage at a manufactured villain is the GOP’s agenda.

But this isn’t the first time that anti-gay hatemongers have used this strategy, and we believe that LGBTQ+ people haven’t forgotten the lessons of the past.

Through hard work, difficult conversations and vigilance, Pride Month celebrations of tomorrow will celebrate victories over bigotry and hatred today just as Pride Month celebrations today celebrate victories in the past. And we will proudly celebrate with them.

Happy Pride Month.