Gay Rights – Sheila Kennedy

The Crusades Of 2024

We Americans talk about theology, philosophy and ideology as if they are discrete mental categories, but of course, they aren’t. The other day, as I was mourning the political reality I inhabit, as I tried to comfort myself with reflections about the “fits and starts” of progress, I suddenly realized what I have missed about America’s current cold civil war: at its base, it’s our contemporary version of religious war.

I actually owe this insight to Micah Beckwith, who recently took to X/Twitter to declare that college students who criticised his medieval worldview are impermissibly “woke” and to threaten the existence of the Indiana Daily Student, which had published the critique.

I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that the hysteria against “wokism” is terminology for the war between religious fundamentalism and liberalism–especially religious liberalism.

Religious beliefs began as an effort to explain mysterious phenomena: why the tides go in and out, why people become diseased, why some folks prosper and others don’t. What we call secularism is really the steady expansion of human knowledge that erodes the role of supernatural beliefs. We no longer ask the priest to pray over a broken leg, we call the doctor. We no longer use prayer (or rain dances) to counteract droughts. Most of us (unfortunately, not all) reject the Calvinist belief that equates poverty with moral deficit and wealth with superior merit.

Many denominations have responded to the growth of science and empiricism by revisiting their approach to theology. Rather than seeing religious adherence as a simple issue of obedience to orders from “on high”–orders interpreted differently by the theologians of each specific denomination– many Christian, Jewish, and Islamic congregations have reinvisioned religion’s role. Rather than issuing fundamentalist decrees, these more mature theologies help parishioners wrestle with the nature of goodness and the ethical and moral obligations of humanity. Their churches, synagogues and mosques offer congregants the comfort of loving and supportive communities. My friends in the Christian clergy tend to focus on the Sermon on Mount (could anything be more woke?).

But that lack of an authoritative “bright line” drives fundamentalists crazy. Horrified religious literalists (abetted by those whose personal prospects are enhanced by biblical notions of patriarchy and America’s cultural Calvinism) fight back. Today, they are the bulk of the MAGA people supporting Trump.

One example is Pete Hegseth–the Fox News pundit who is Trump’s ridiculous and unqualified choice for Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is a self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist who has tattoos that he claims are “religious symbols.” Those symbols date back to the Crusades–the effort by the Christian west to “liberate” Jerusalem from Muslim control. One of the tattoos says, “Deus Vult.” Hegseth explained in 2020, “I’ve got Deus Vult – God Wills It – which was the cry of the Crusaders, on my bicep.”

Like Micah Beckwith and other fundamentalists, Hegseth is confident that he knows precisely what God wills. I need not spell out the dangers of putting such people in positions of power.

People like me, who tend to be critical of organized religion, have missed a central point: it isn’t “religion” that is the problem–just as it isn’t philosophy or ideology. It’s regressive religion, philosophy and ideology. It’s a primitive world-view used in the service of Othering–a religion, philosophy or ideology that is at base a rationale for the dominance of some people over others.

The danger arises from “righteous” folks who are certain they possess exclusive knowledge of “God’s will.” That isn’t just the Beckwith version of Christianity. Every religion has its contingent of fundamentalists who know exactly what their God demands and are prepared to impose that understanding on the rest of us.

In the U.S., because Christians have been in the majority, the religious fundamentalism that animates Christian Nationalism threatens not just our religious and civic liberties but allso–as my Christian friends insist — authentic Christianity.

Those of us who have rejected organized religion cannot lead the charge against this theocratic Crusade. That leadership must come from within the Christian community. There are signs that such leadership is emerging, that Christians who base their understanding on Jesus’ “wokeness” are waking up to the fact that the fundamentalists pushing for theocracy are endangering the very values and beliefs that animate their more loving and inclusive versions of their faith traditions.

I now understand the battle over “wokeness.” It’s a modern version of the Crusades–a battle of fundamentalist True Believers against contemporary religious and philosophical beliefs.

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We’re Not Going Back

The Harris catch-phrase, “We’re not going back,” isn’t aspirational–it’s factual. Even if the unthinkable happens, and Trump ekes out a victory, the MAGA folks will be disappointed, because the cultural changes that anger and motivate them are highly unlikely to reverse.

I’m hardly the only observer who has pointed out that this is not an election based on policy differences. Instead, our political divisions are responses to the cultural shifts that have generated hate and hysteria from a sizable minority of the population. The Dobbs decision, the anti-woke fury, the authoritarian prescriptions in Project 2025…all are reactions to cultural shifts that anger and terrify that very vocal, regressive cohort.

An excellent illustration of that primal motivation is the eruption of anti-trans political ads in the last days of the election season. The number–and viciousness–of those ads tells us two things: first, it’s politically effective to focus on the smallest and least-understood sliver of the”different” people who symbolize unacceptable social change; and second, widespread acceptance of previously favored targets–like LGBTQ+ folks generally– is now baked into the culture.

The MAGA focus on trans people was the subject of a New York Times essay by a trans author, who put the attacks in cultural context. She began by noting that approximately half of today’s Americans consider gender transition immoral–or at least, not normal. But then she reminded readers that definitions of “normal” are subject to change–and in fact, have undergone considerable change over time.

And yet most notions of “normal” have rarely been fixed, even as there have always been those who insist they are immutable. Certainly gender may be one of the most fundamental — dare I say natural — ways we have organized societies. But history reminds us that all assumptions should always be questioned. Every significant challenge to the existing order, from the vote for women to interracial unions to marriage equality, has provoked strong reactions and, not uncommonly, hand-wringing about the downfall of civilization.

She pointed to interracial and same-sex marriages.

Race isn’t gender, and the comparisons aren’t perfect. And yet the arguments made against interracial unions like the Lovings’ in the 1950s and ’60s are eerily similar to those made against marriage equality a decade or two ago and against trans people today: We hear appeals to God, science, the well-being of children and the natural order, in efforts made to write out of existence trans people, our care and our place in public life. Those arguments resonated back then, as perhaps they do for some people now. In the 1960s a vast majority of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages (a majority didn’t approve until the 1990s), even if now few question whether people of different races should be allowed to marry….

The transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, mused during his stint onstage at the Democratic National Convention about the mundane and chaotic — and yet miraculous — daily routine of raising children with his husband: “This kind of life went from impossible to possible, from possible to real, from real to almost ordinary in less than half a lifetime.”

How did support for same-sex marriage go from just over a quarter of Americans near the end of President Bill Clinton’s first term to nearly 70 percent this May?

The author noted research showing that large numbers of people who changed their minds about marriage equality did so because they knew someone who was gay or lesbian. That means that acceptance of trans folks will be more difficult; polling suggests that barely 30 percent of Americans have friends, relatives or colleagues who are transgender, and although that number may grow, it won’t ever be very high, since research tells us that transgender folks are a very small sliver of society.

Since there aren’t very many of them, and they remain a largely unknown, vulnerable (and purportedly “non-normal”) segment of the population, the GOP figures it’s safe to attack them–just as it used to be safe to attack women’s suffrage, interracial and same-sex marriage, and gay people generally.

As the author wrote,

I can’t help thinking it’s worth reflecting on what the trial judge in the Loving case, who argued that allowing people of different races to marry would go against God’s will, and other right-thinking people of that era might make of the current political landscape. For all the polarization, misinformation and puerile attacks on candidates, being married to someone of another race simply isn’t part of the equation at all. It is, in fact, something … ordinary. Even normal.

MAGA is too late. Win or lose, Harris is right: we aren’t going back.

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Question And Answer

In a recent column for the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson asks THE question: how on earth is this election close?

The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should not be a tough call. Harris is a former prosecutor; Trump, a felon. Harris gives campaign speeches about her civic values; Trump rants endlessly about his personal grievances, interrupting himself with asides about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has outlined a detailed set of policy proposals for the economy; Trump nonsensically offers tariffs as a panacea, describing this fantasy in terms that make it clear he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.

Also, Harris never whipped thousands of supporters into a frenzy and sent them off to the Capitol, where they smashed their way into the citadel of our democracy, injuring scores of police officers and threatening to hang the vice president, in an attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Trump did.

This is the conundrum that drives most rational people crazy. Even without January 6th, 32 felonies, multiple sexual assaults and the horrified testimonies of people who worked in Trump’s administration, who listens to the childish rants of a mentally-disturbed man with a third-grade vocabulary and thinks, “Yep, that’s the guy who should have charge of the nuclear codes.”? Who wants this ignorant name-calling bully to be a role model for America’s children?

How can this election possibly be close?

Robinson suggests some possibilities. First, Kamala Harris is a woman, and many Americans harbor a deep-seated misogyny. He notes that Trump desperately wants to have a fight over gender and race–and that Trump and Vance “are trying hard to win the votes of men who equate manhood with cartoonish machismo — men who somehow feel that their status and prospects are threatened because they are men.”

Another reason might be that the 71 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 are loathe to admit that they backed a loser, let alone an embarrassing buffoon utterly unfit for office. (Large numbers of these voters, after all, still believe the “Big Lie.”)

And Robinson notes that Trump does best among uneducated Whites–the demographic most responsive to his vicious demagoguery on immigration — “the lies he keeps telling about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, for example.” He constantly tells working-class Whites that immigration is a threat to their jobs and communities. As Robinson says, those tribal appeals aren’t likely to win over many new voters, but will likely motivate turnout of his base.

Still, though, how does any of this overcome Trump’s manifest unfitness? How does any of it erase his pathetic performance in the debate? How does it nullify the fact that he awaits sentencing by a New York judge after 34 guilty verdicts in a criminal trial? If the answer is buried somewhere in some poll, I can’t find it.

I have wrestled with the question Robinson poses, and I consistently return to one answer: the “through” line in Robinson’s analysis is bigotry. Racism. A yearning for patriarchy. A simmering hatred of the Other.

Robinson identifies anti-woman, anti-immigrant strands of what we have come to identify as White Supremacy or White Christian Nationalism, but–at least in this essay– he fails to connect the dots, fails to call out the intense White grievance that lies at the heart of the MAGA movement.

When Trump won (barely–and only in the antiquated Electoral College), a number of pundits attributed economic motives to his voters. Research has soundly debunked that assumption; numerous studies confirm the association of “racial resentment” with support for Trump and MAGA. I have previously quoted my youngest son’s observation that there are two kinds of people who vote for Trump–and only two kinds–those who share his racism, and those for whom his racism isn’t disqualifying.

Beginning with that first campaign, Trump jettisoned “dog whistles” in favor of explicitly hateful, racist rhetoric. He asserted that there are “very fine people” who chant “Jews shall not replace us.” He tried to keep Muslims from coming into the country. He said Black immigrants came from “shithole” countries (unlike those nice White folks from Norway…) His supporters want to roll back gay rights, and they persistently wage war on trans children.

This election isn’t about the economy, or national security, or other policies. It’s about culture war.

His MAGA supporters agree with the only clear message Trump has delivered: making America great again requires taking America back to a time when White Christian heterosexual males were in charge, and the rest of us were second class citizens.

This election is close because too many voters share that worldview. The rest of us had better turn out.

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Bigotry And Business

Every day, I become more convinced that racism is the foundation of MAGA Republicanism. I do give grudging kudos to MAGA’s activism on behalf of its expansive hatreds–all evidence points to the minority status of these angry White Nationalists, but they are unrelenting–and frequently successful– in their efforts to combat any movement toward civility and inclusion.

Most of us are aware of MAGA’s successful efforts last year during Pride month to cow Target for having the temerity to carry Pride merchandise and thus mortally offending the “Christian” warriors. Those pious folks also rose up to attack Bud Light for working with a transgender person. (Somewhere, there must be an office of “watchers” ready to unleash the troops whenever some business has the nerve to market to “undesirable” folks….)

The most recent example of which I’m aware is a business called Tractor Supply.

Tractor Supply (with which I am wholly unfamiliar) sells animal feed, tractor parts and power tools. It has more than 2,230 stores nationwide, and has been recognized for its inclusiveness; Bloomberg praised it for promoting gender equality, while Newsweek called it one of the best U.S. companies for diversity.

Inclusion was evidently the company’s big sin. The haters came out in force.

The company came under scrutiny this month when conservative podcast host Robby Starbuck denounced Tractor Supply’s diversity and climate policies. An employee recently had messaged him to complain that the company was supporting LGBTQ+ groups, Starbuck told The Washington Post.

Starbuck visited Tractor Supply weekly to buy provisions for his farm in Franklin, Tenn., he said, but wasn’t comfortable with the company putting money toward inclusion programs.
“Start buying what you can from other places until Tractor Supply makes REAL changes,” he wrote on X on June 6.

Other customers responded to say they would join the boycott, and the company’s share price fell by 5 percent in the past month, according to the Financial Times.

Tractor Supply backed off, announcing that it will end all “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” programs and will no longer support LGBTQ and global warming causes.

That, of course, enraged a different part of the customer base. A number of customers have indicated an intent to stop doing business with Tractor Supply, and several have issued statements indicating disappointment with the company’s willingness to buckle under. As one wrote, “Tractor Supply’s embarrassing capitulation to the petty whims of anti-LGBTQ extremists puts the company out of touch with the vast majority of Americans who support their LGBTQ friends, family, and neighbors.”

Tractor Supply is a predominantly rural enterprise, which means it faces a more formidable challenge than businesses that cater to a largely urban customer base. As a recent study has found, a growing aspect of rural identity has added to America’s political and cultural divide.

Jacobs and Shea pinpoint the 1980s as when this identity began to crystallize. In different regions, cost pressures on family farms and ranches, suburban sprawl, or water inaccessibility squeezed rural communities economically, which coincided with terrible depictions of country life in popular culture. Just as national news outlets emerged through cable and the internet, regional papers closed, and divisive national narratives enveloped local political context. Separate localized identities merged into a national common rural identity

Simultaneously, globalization shuttered small manufacturers central to communities’ economies, so younger generations moved to bigger cities, and social issues and addiction grew. For Cramer, a key component of this rural identity is a resentment from the perception of being overlooked by government. It has furthered party polarization as rural Americans increasingly vote Republican and see the world opposite from group identities associated with Democrats and vice versa.

Rural America is whiter, older, and more religious than urban America, but the researchers found that–even after controlling for those factors– living in rural America independently added to support for the Republican party.

One of the most conspicuous aspects of MAGA Republicanism has been the willingness of its adherents to “act out.” In addition to the more-or-less organized bands of truly dangerous crazies like the Proud Boys and other neo-fascist groups, members of groups like Moms for Liberty and the American Family Association have become increasingly belligerent, increasingly apt to insist that the schools, libraries and businesses they patronize privilege their particular bigotries. They are primarily active in the rural precincts where Republicanism is high and the fact that they don’t represent majority opinion even there is less obvious.

It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for the businesses caught in the middle–damned by MAGA if they stick to their purported principles, and shunned by tolerant Americans if they abandon them.

And we wonder why success in retail is so elusive…..

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Some Thoughts On Pride

The subject-matter of yesterday’s post was yet another reminder that bigotry against our LGBTQ+ neighbors still exists, and is used–together with racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry–to motivate the MAGA base. When stripped to its essentials, the reality is that our current political divide is almost completely based on the division between “live and let live” Americans and the Christian Nationalists who largely comprise the MAGA movement.

That said, it is also a reality that those harboring these racial and religious grievances are in the minority. The culture has moved on, and they know it. In fact, it is that recognition that has them so furious.

I was forcefully reminded of that cultural shift when I attended this year’s Pride parade.

I have gone to every Pride parade held in Indianapolis since my years as the Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, so I’ve had a front-row seat to the event’s explosive growth. Although a variety of Pride events were held in the 1980s, it was in 1992 (I think–I may be a year or so off), that the very first “Cadillac Barbie Pride Parade” was held. I was there with a couple hundred other onlookers to see the floats–all eight of them, as I recall–most sponsored by the city’s gay bars.

Over the years, the number of floats and the crowds of cheering onlookers have grown–exponentially. The parade’s path has been expanded by several blocks to accomodate the crowds. And this year, a parade that was supposed to take two hours took almost three. There were at least a couple hundred entries, and they represented a breathtakingly broad part of our community. It seemed as if every company doing business in Indianapolis took part. At least five banks, multiple law firms, hospitals and schools had large contingents. The Indianapolis police and fire departments participated, as did the Mayor, the prosecutor, several Democratic political candidates, and multiple nonprofits. The local gay bars were back, along with a variety of gay organizations (including–I think for the first time– an African-American gay organization) and a large number of churches and religious communities.

The huge crowds–including lots of families with children– cheered and clapped. Many waved rainbow flags or wore supportive clothing items. Where my husband and I were watching, near the end of the parade route, everyone was festive and polite.

I wonder what the two people holding large signs calling “homo sex” a sin thought about that massive show of support, and about the religious congregations marching with signs having some version of “Love all thy neighbors.” The “Christian” protestors who turned up regularly in the early days of the parade have dwindled over the years; I hadn’t seen any for the last few years, although given the enormous crowds of late, I may have missed them.

I didn’t go to the Pride festival that followed the Parade; I used to attend, but these days, I limit myself to the expanded parade. From what I hear, the festival–with its multiple booths and musical presentations–was equally well-attended.

I think we can take a lesson from events like this, and that lesson is comforting.

American culture has shifted. The majority is comfortable with inclusion–with the increased visibility and civic participation of Blacks and women and gay people. According to contemporary polls, over seventy percent of Americans approve of same-sex marriage, and majorities strongly disapprove of laws like Florida’s ‘don’t say gay” and efforts to keep books referencing LGBTQ+ folks out of public libraries.

It’s that level of acceptance that infuriates and frightens the MAGA throwbacks who currently control the GOP, and has pushed that party farther and farther to the Right. Just take a look at this year’s Texas GOP platform, which would infuse fundamentalist Christianity into the agencies of state government.

From his booth in the exhibit hall of the Texas GOP’s 2024 convention, Steve Hotze saw an army of God assembled before him.

For four decades, Hotze, an indicted election fraud conspiracy theorist, has helmed hardline anti-abortion movements and virulently homophobic campaigns against LGBTQ+ rights, comparing gay people to Nazis and helping popularize the “groomer” slur that paints them as pedophiles. Once on the fringes, Hotze said Saturday that he was pleased by the party’s growing embrace of his calls for spiritual warfare with “demonic, Satanic forces” on the left.

In Indiana, if everyone who marched in or cheered that Pride parade and the others around the state were to cast a ballot, we could easily hold off the people who see inclusion and acceptance as an attack on their right to dominate American life.

We need to get them to the polls.

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