Yes, They Are Coming For You
I am not unaware that, as I write quite often in this space about the intersections and conflicts between religion, primarily evangelical religion, specifically politically active white evangelicals that lust for, pursue and all too often achieve political power in our country and the reality of being trans and accepting yourself as such – that many readers identify themselves both as Trans and also as evangelicals.
If you are in this crowd, this wake-up call is for you. You might be under a false apprehension and it’s past time for you to be disabused of it.
Today, AG Jeff Sessions followed through on a pledge that he and the Golden Calf he answers to on one of the payoffs they had been promising to the Dominionist segment of their base. He announced the creation of what they are deceptively describing as a “Religious Liberty Task Force.” Make no mistake, however, the only ones here with actual complete religious liberty are the same folks who are already the most privileged segment of our culture – those same conservative white evangelicals. Oh, they will decorate their monument to theocracy with gestures toward Catholics, Mormons, even black believers – so long as the occasion aligns with the political goals of those White Evan Dominionists (i.e. legislating anything anyone does which can be in any way related to sex and gender). But let their be a conflict between any of these and what Tony Perkins wants and watch to see which comes out on top.
Beyond those “allies” the rest of us don’t have a literal prayer with this bunch. If you are trans and/or gay and think that being a co-religionist will exempt you from third class citizen status then you are, in a very real sense, playing the role of “useful idiot” every bit as much as saps like Star Parker, David Clarke, and Jesse Petereson allow obvious racists to cover their bigotry by pointing to the token blacks who shill for them.
(Continued below...)Be very clear here – they ARE coming for your rights.
Of course, many of us already have very few legally protected rights anyway. I live in a state where they literally passed legislation announcing that trans (and gay) people were not entitled to equal protection under the law and SCOTUS declined to address it by ducking behind the cover of “standing” and the truth is that at the state level, the majority of states implicitly have the same policy even when it is not explicitly described because where discrimination is not legally barred, it WILL occur. In 30 states, other than local municipal laws and ordinances scattered over the landscape (in states that have not specifically made it illegal to have even those) the only legal recourse LGB/T people have at all is the Federal courts and that is both not consistently reliable and trending in the wrong direction thanks to a wave of Trump-appointed judges. Under Obama, the Justice Department defended civil rights when they were challenged in court, and on occasion initiated cases to do so. Immediately upon Trump’s inauguration, the DoJ switched sides on all the existing cases relevant to LGB/T equality and particularly those involving claims of “religious liberty.”
During the campaign, as I have previously noted, many white male gay men and white trans women (almost exclusively these two categories of people) of my acquaintance insisted loudly that Trump would be a great friend to gay and trans people and it was nothing but baseless fear-mongering to claim our rights were at any risk at all. Very few of them, inasmuch as I have been able to see their comments, have had the scales fall from their eyes even yet. There’s some good theorizing by really smart people that Trumpsters have so invested themselves in his cult of personality that nothing can separate them from the faith because they would hollow out their own sense of self to admit that they had been so very wrong about such a very important thing. One of those men that I know and once had great respect for would, I am convinced, still be wearing his MAGA hat even as the brownshirts were marching him off to the camps. He doesn’t know how to be anything other than a member of the cult.
It won’t save him. It won’t save any of those redhat transwomen I know. It won’t save you if you are among them. That privileged white gay man is already married and is completely oblivious to the reality that a Trump-poisoned SCOTUS might well take that from him and will surely, at a minimum, reduce it to a pale shadow of the marriage that his hetero peer enjoy. He’s a lawyer. He literally once worked for AFA and will happily describe to you, as he did in his memoir, what a scam that Pharisee outfit is, and yet, he marches in lockstep with them still, supporting the same cons they do and pretending that in the end it won’t be he and people like him who lose. I won’t do a 500 word tangent on why that is, but I’ll give you a one sentence explanation. Like so many other conservatives he’s brainwashed by the Buckleyite “movement conservative” ideology that has taken over the GOP and indoctrinated millions of Americans to believe that no other right is more important that the right to accumulate wealth.
Wealth won’t save him either. They ARE coming. What will YOU do about that?
Image by Dale Cruse