A Familiar Cruelty
It’s willful blindness to pretend that this wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation and cultural outrage isn’t just a retread of religious extremists’ decades of bigotry.
I remember what it was like in 2004 when my home state of Michigan putg a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would ban same-sex marriage. It reminded me of how I felt when, in 2000, a Boy Scout leader I looked up to joked that our summer camp should print shirts reading “5–4” celebrating the Supreme Court decision allowing the organization to discriminate against gay scouts.
Even before you have the words to articulate your own identity, it shakes you. It calls into question whether the people you know would ever truly accept you.
But beyond any sense of personal rejection I felt at the time, there was a realization that I may not have been the best judge of character. Here were people whose approval I wanted, whose morals and personalities I thought were worth replicating, reveling in casual cruelty toward others.
It was immediately clear to me that this cruelty had nothing to do with reasoned concerns about policy or safety or any of the other pretexts they would give to justify their choices. It was about signaling disapproval for people who challenged existing social—and often religious—norms. It was about signaling who was part of the in-group and worthy of full membership in our society, and who wasn’t. It was about battering back an emergent segment of society who was just starting to make inroads in the quest to live their lives free from harassment, legal persecution, and social stigma.
Most of the people I knew hadn’t thought deeply about why these policies were supposedly necessary. They hadn’t gotten that far. It was enough for them that their political and religious leaders, often seizing on the opportunity to solidify wavering support, told them that gay and lesbian people were a threat. To children, to marriage, to the very existence of their institutions.
And when they’re told that children are at risk, time and time again people are willing to go to extreme lengths to act.
We’re seeing it today. Opportunists are seizing on what can best be called a moral panic to “protect the children” from the supposed dangers of the existence of trans people. Banning drag performances by declaring them to be inherently obscene. Supplanting the medical judgment of physicians with their own political judgment. Conflating surgical intervention with other forms of gender-affirming care. Claiming that women’s sports are at risk because of a handful of trans athletes who simply want to participate in extracurricular activities with their friends.
According to the Trans Legislation Tracker, this year alone, 560 bills have been introduced in 49 states with the primary purpose of attacking trans people. These bills not only attack those who offer gender-affirming medical care—including threatening felony penalties to physicians who provide transition care for anyone under the age of 26 (Oklahoma’s SB129). They also fuse this present moral panic with traditional extreme Religious Right priorities like undermining public education by subjecting teachers to potentially ruinous civil lawsuits if a parent discovers an “objectionable book” in their classroom.
As much as some people will pretend that this is some mere academic debate and discussion about which reasonable people can disagree, the rhetoric of the advocates behind these bills make their true intentions crystal clear. Their statements are often dehumanizing, inflammatory, and one step short of actual calls to violence. The same tired tropes from the past 50 years are being reused: painting all LGBTQ people as “groomers” and “pedophiles” who are coming after our children; accusing teachers who put up a rainbow in their classrooms or even acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ people of “sexualizing” young people; and claiming that doctors who provide gender-affirming care are “mutilating” children.
And running parallel to this extreme language are explicit invocations of religion. The organizations driving this current moral panic are the very same organizations we’ve been fighting against for decades because of their advocacy for Christian supremacy Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, Liberty Counsel, and other far-right religious groups are the backbone of this movement.
To be clear, our opposition to these bills and to the cultural rhetoric that is justifying them isn’t rooted in a reflexive opposition to the positions of our traditional opponents. It’s not the case that because they’re for it, we must be against it. Rather, these attacks on the humanity and dignity of our fellow Americans are deeply rooted in religious disapproval.
During debate over a Florida bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors and prohibit all trans people from using bathrooms that align with their gender, Rep. Webster Barnaby said, “This is the planet Earth, where God created men male and women female! … The Lord rebuke you, Satan, and all of your demons and all of your imps who come and parade before us.” An Ohio state representative, Gary Click, denied that his bill banning similar treatment was religiously motivated. But in a sermon he delivered four years ago, Click claimed that homosexuality and the idea that someone could be trans are the work of Satan, being used to undermine the family.
But lastly, and perhaps most importantly, our advocacy around these issues and our willingness to speak out is because of our commitment to each other as a community. Atheists, including our members and supporters, are far more likely than the average American to be supportive of, and indeed members of, the LGBTQ community.
That isn’t to say that the support is universal. There are unquestionably atheists who want to believe that the advocates of these laws are merely concerned that young people are making potentially life-altering decisions about their medical care too quickly or too easily, and that there is some wide-ranging campaign by “political correctness” stifling important debates.
But that presumption of good faith is not warranted when the legislative “fix” they propose is criminalization—not just of incredibly rare medical interventions but also social transition, books involving LGBTQ characters, drag shows, and bathroom usage—and when the rhetorical justification includes comparisons to Nazi medical experimentation and pedophilic “grooming.” Pretending that their purported concerns are merely policy disagreements is to miss the forest for the trees and borders on willful blindness.
That’s not a discussion, and it isn’t a good-faith policy debate. Rather, it’s the same dehumanizing and religiously motivated pushback directed at a tiny and vulnerable minority that we’ve seen for years anytime LGBTQ people gain more mainstream acceptance. It’s the same frantic calls to “protect the children!” from imagined threats that have been used for decades to justify overly broad and far-reaching legislative solutions to problems that don’t actually exist.
And it should give us all pause when people who we thought shared our values instead embrace—or, at the very least, excuse—the cruelty of extreme Christian nationalists who make no secret of their motivations and justifications for their actions.
