Florida's Doomed-to-Fail Attempts to Erase LGBTQ+ People From Public Spaces
Once again, LGBTQ+ people are under assault by parent movements in Florida
It’s time we stop bending over backward to appease the overly fragile members of our society who’ve drifted into a state of paranoid delusions to such an alarming degree they’re hellbent on stripping others’ rights to exist.
There’s political talk, and then there’s hate.
The two aren’t the same, although some Americans would like to convince you they are. Conversations about tax rates, education policy, and building zoning are political conversations. Trying to erase an entire group of people from all media, and effectively from history, is hate.
We cannot continue to conflate the two.
It’s an unfortunate byproduct of the United States that our election season lasts years. When I worked in politics, it was great for my income because it meant I only had a few months off per year, which was the political off-season. But it also means we’re bombarded with attack ads and political propaganda approximately two out of every four years.
We’re halfway through 2023, and the election season is already heating up. The two main political parties are raising the temperature on their messaging and firmly making their cases for why you should vote for them at the end of 2024.
I’ve worked in politics long enough to know what the Republican Party’s campaign strategy will be in 2024. They’ve already hinted at it in their rallies. They will rally their voters behind an anti-LGBTQ message with a dash of anti-sex to sweeten the deal.
I’ve covered this here:
Conservatives have a long, horrific history of attacking LGBTQ people under the banner of “family values,” touting hate that they masquerade as wholesome concern for children.
When someone mentions the organization Save Our Children Inc., you probably imagine a non-profit that feeds hungry kids or provides housing for homeless children. It’s far more sinister than that.
The organization was started to ensure that businesses could fire LGBTQ people just because they’re LGBTQ.
In the 1970s, LGBTQ people slowly gained legal protections around the United States. In 1977, Miami-Dade County, Florida, became the 14th county in America to pass a law that banned firing someone for being LGBTQ.
Upset by this, a pop star named Anita Bryant decided to fight back against the law. She formed the innocuous-sounding Save Our Children Inc. to challenge the law, drumming up support from the local community in and around Miami. It worked.
Eventually, Bryant overturned the law, making it perfectly legal to fire people for being LGBTQ again. But it wouldn’t last. Finally, necessity took its course, and the law was reinstated. But a playbook was written.
What does firing LGBTQ people have to do with children?
Absolutely nothing.
The point was to play on the fear that if LGBTQ people existed in public places, it would somehow be bad for kids. It also solidified the conservative stance that homosexuality is a choice that strays from Christianity.
To them, LGBTQ people aren’t LGBTQ because they’re born with predispositions like fraternal birth order (the probability that boys will be gay increases with each child someone has) or genetics. They’re LGBTQ because they choose to live in sin.
A few years later, in 1981, Evangelical televangelist Jerry Falwell would echo this sentiment when he told his flock:
Please remember, homosexuals don’t reproduce! They recruit! And they are out after my children and your children.
Thenceforth, the Republican Party in America would continuously doeverything in its power to frame LGBTQ status as antithetical to family values and would push propaganda linking non-heteronormative sexuality with pedophilia.
That messaging continues today, almost half a century later.
Today, many more battles over LGBTQ rights are unfolding. There was the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that Governor DeSantis signed last year, which prompted the entertainment giant Disney to criticize the bill. That led to a protracted contest of wills and a series of legal battles that still haven’t concluded.
This month, Seminole County Public Schools is telling parents they’ll reprint the yearbooks for a high school because they contained two pages with LGBTQ material. This upset delicate parents who can’t even come into contact with something remotely LGBTQ without becoming fearful or enraged.
This is textbook homophobia.
The Orlando Sentinel reports:
The pages highlight the school’s LGBTQ+ community and provide definitions of terms such as genderfluid and pansexual.
A few parents and students found those pages “inappropriate,” and now the district is offering refunds or reprinted yearbooks with the pages in question removed, according to a memo Superintendent Serita Beamon sent to parents on Wednesday. The yearbook is undergoing further review at the district level, Beamon wrote.
Danielle Pomeranz, who served as Lyman High School’s faculty yearbook adviser, said she disagrees with the district’s offer to scrub LGBTQ+ content. The 256-page yearbook features all aspects of the school’s diverse student body, including Latinos in Action, Black History Month and even the Dungeons & Dragons Club, she said.
Parent movements with innocuous-sounding names once again spearhead the anti-LGBTQ crusade.
Jessica Tillman, the Moms for Liberty chapter chair for Seminole County, spoke to the Orlando Sentinel, saying she was upset about the yearbook.
She worries that the school is teaching children “sex” before they reach the age of adulthood:
They shouldn’t have any sexual definitions in a yearbook. This is a yearbook that goes to every student as young as 14.
First, I and nearly everyone I know had our first sexual encounters in high school. Pretending that people aren’t having sex in their teens is to live in denial of reality.
Next, we talk about sex every single day in schools from Kindergarten onward. We separate boys and girls by sex. We have sex-segregated bathrooms. And kids have hopefully taken a sex education course in elementary school before they hit their teenage years when they’ll need them most.
It’s a misrepresentation to conflate sex and sexuality with sexual activity or behavior. I’m a cis-gendered male, and saying so tells you literally nothing about my sexual activity (or lack thereof).
Ultimately, these attempts to erase LGBTQ people from the annals of history are doomed to fail. Discussions bout sex and gender are all over the internet, so parents can try as they might to keep kids from encountering such discussions, but it’s futile.
Just like Anita Bryant in the 1970s, they can’t stop the force of historical necessity, no matter how hard they try. They’re a small minority, and the rest of us have moved far past this foul flavor of pointless hate.
thanks for your informative article. The anti-LGBTQ laws in Florida and other states are a disgusting example of outright human bigotry. There is a war on transgenderism in our country, and it would be silly and ridiculous if it where not so pernicious. But in the long run, love will triumph over hate.
Thank you!!