A Surge in Anti-LGBT Violence
June being Pride Month, some homes on 31st Street in Baltimore displayed rainbow flags and other LGBT banners and signs. Wednesday night somebody came up and, apparently dousing the flags with gasoline, set four homes on fire, sending three people to the hospital, two in critical and one in serious condition. Two homes were completely destroyed.
A neighbor said, “We’ll double down and everybody’s gonna get Pride flags on their houses now just to show like we’re not gonna live in fear of it, but I mean, it definitely makes you a little scared. You know, you can’t just live like that.” Baltimore Sun: Three people injured in Baltimore fire; authorities investigating a burned Pride flag
But you know, you are going to "just live like that," because that's how things are now.
It was big news this week when more than thirty Patriot Front members were arrested in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. The group was planning to join with other nazi groups to beat people and break up a Pride Festival there. These are the people who organized the Charlottesville Unite the Right event in 2017, and it appears they intended extreme violence this time. Luckily the attack was broken up by police, and reports on social media suggest that the festival was a great success, the biggest crowd they'd ever had, with music, bubble machines for the kids, dancing in the park.
Drag queen story hours have been a big hit at libraries across the country, which you just know has been driving the nutty ones crazy. Why should any American be allowed to dress in nontraditional clothing and yet act like a decent human being? Last Saturday the Proud Boys stormed a Drag Queen Story Hour in San Larenzo, California, disrupting the event. I am trying to imagine how you brag about something like that later: me 'n the guys went down and hollered a bunch of cusswords at kids listening to stories and some guys in dresses at the library. It just doesn't sound that macho, y'know what I mean?
Somebody suggested that it would have been smarter for them to host a Proud Boys story hour. Man, I bet parents would love to bring their kids to that.
The oldest gay bar in Detroit burned down Tuesday, and the Fire Department is calling it a total loss.
Nearly 240 anti-LGBTQ bills filed in 2022 so far, most of them targeting trans people
If we took two steps forward, this seems to be time for one step back, as hate comes out of hiding across the country. We will have to hold the line to keep from losing more ground.
We in Montgomery County were, ironically, among the first communities to be hit by this wave of anti-gay and anti-transgender bigotry. A small group of rightwing activists tried to defeat a sex-ed curriculum that mentioned sexual orientation and gender identity, and then they tried to force a referendum on trans civil rights. This county is deeply blue, I think we had one Republican school board member fifteen years ago. Yet a group of about ten core members and maybe as many as fifty part-time supporters -- in a county of one million people -- generated national news and almost succeeded at imposing their ignorant opinions on the rest of us.
I am not sure why these sexual-identity issues set them off. Well, I have my theories. Somehow the idea that a gay person would live their life without shame makes these nuts violently angry. I used to think it was a cheap shot to suggest that these haters have personal ambivalence about their own sexual feelings, but that is definitely part of it. So many of the worst ones have fallen out of the closet.
Conservatism is the defiance of hypocrisy. You express some principles and behave exactly the opposite of them, then shrug off the contradiction.
The fact is, the Trump presidency and rise of the America First nazi movement have put gay and trans people in actual physical danger. The crazy fascists are getting more and more violent, and there is no end in sight. Conservatives cannot understand the concept of minding your own business when someone is different from yourself. They have been packing the courts with conservative judges, packing the election boards with nutty cheaters, and even though there are not very many of them we still face a steep uphill battle just to maintain our American democracy and our freedom.