Instead, the epilogue has been a violent wrenching backward of the arc of a moral universe. Hodges ruling, it felt to many like the final chapter in an American feel-good story of increasing tolerance that would only get better with the ascension of open-minded new generations. When the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage the law of the land with its 2015 Obergefell v. This story is understandably shocking to many Americans. It was jarring to see Pennsylvania’s GOP-led legislature - immediately after the mass shooting in Uvalde, the all-too-real “national security threat” to our kids - squelch any meaningful debate on gun control while the state Senate was instead passing a blanket ban on transgender youth in school sports.
Instead, Republican lawmakers are working overtime to figure out how to channel this alarming new far-right zeitgeist into the fake respectability of law - and not just in the blood-red states of the old Confederacy. In a healthy democracy truly committed to liberty and human rights, our elected leaders would be condemning these shocking calls for violence. In Idaho, where that Pride parade violence was narrowly averted, Pastor Joe Jones of Shield of Faith Baptist Church in Boise kicked things up a notch by declaring in a video that subsequently went viral: “God told the nation that he ruled: Put them to death. The increasingly dangerous, violent rhetoric has been amplified to “11″ by the likes of Mark Burns, a prominent South Carolina televangelist and Donald Trump enthusiast who just ran for Congress (and lost, thankfully) and who said this month that LGBTQ-friendly schoolteachers are “a national security threat” guilty of treason, which should be punishable by execution. In chat rooms and militia training sessions, the soldiers of extremism are on the brink of taking all of this to the next blood-drenched level. In America’s statehouses, Republican lawmakers who claim to be worried about real-life problems like inflation are instead spending all of their time translating hate speech into proposed laws that would make societal pariahs out of transgender kids. We are now seeing a dangerous loop in which the most extreme voices on the far right - led, ironically, by so-called pastors - are making genocidal comments about our brothers and sisters in the LBGTQ community. To the contrary, it’s only getting worse by the day. 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.” Republicans and their allies in right-wing media are going on the attack.
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. 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. 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.
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. Literally as I hit the “send” button on a note to my editors about this column, it was reported that police in Baltimore are investigating multiple fires on a city street as a possible hate crime - which sent three people to the hospital - in which a Pride flag celebrating LGBTQ rights was reportedly set ablaze. 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. 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.