2021 has been the year of massive proposed and passed anti-LGBTQ legislation, heavily focused on transgender and non-binary individuals. Already, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee and West Virginia have passed anti-trans laws under the guise of “protecting children,” with comparable legislation now pending in Texas, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri and Arizona. These laws address public restrooms, the right to participate in school and college sports, access to medical treatment and gender designations on official documents. Aside from the harsh reality of “being different” in a world that constantly pushes individuals into a level of uniformity that lives in denial of the reality of diversity, this negation of an individual’s status is a slam to self-esteem that leads a surprising number of such individuals to thoughts of suicide, all too frequently realized.
Rejection, marginalization and denigrating designation, often over traits that individuals have no control over and that have no real negative impact on the society at large, is a mental health nightmare. What’s even more puzzling is how individual legislators’ purportedly practicing fundamental Christianity, seem to find the New Testament’s prohibitions on not sitting in judgement of others, practicing loving and respecting others and mandating tolerance – core evangelical values – somehow suspended or non-applicable when it comes to persons that such legislators (and their constituency) find objectionable on any basis. Racial. Religious. Ethnic. Gender designations. My reading of the New Testament does not provide the kinds of hypocritical exceptions that such legislators believe to be “gospel.”
For some reason, even beyond suspending those aspects of the Bible that some social conservatives simply do not like, there has been a growing trend to legitimize, even create legal mandates against, human beings for non-threatening personality and biological traits, which are mostly a reflection of genetic realities. It seems that it is now acceptable knowingly to castigate and discriminate against people who offer no threat to society just because the party in power does not like them. As the Asian/Pacific Islander anti-hate bill becomes law and as the DOJ is taking increasing interest in police actions, political movements and escalating overt hatred against stated minorities, red state legislators are working overtime to pass new laws to discriminate against helpless minorities, as well as to contain and defeat voters whose ballots would likely be cast against conservative incumbents and their values.
MSNBC reported on May 20th that “In a survey of young LGBTQ people, 42% reported seriously considering suicide in 2020, and a larger percentage [94%] reported struggling with their mental health [because of recent political efforts against them], according to The [LGBTQ-support group] Trevor Project. The group’s executive director says this is a public health crisis, as states debate laws that will affect LGBTQ youth.” That 42% rises to 52% for trans and non-binary youth. As more states contemplate restrictions against and posting law negating the realities of being LGBTQ, the mental health crisis among such individuals is rising very fast. Parental attitudes about their own children can make bad self-esteem that much worse. If even one adult in the family sympathizes with, supports and loves that LGBTQ child, there is a major upbeat in that self-esteem.
Oddly, the use of the right pronoun by those who purportedly care for such LGBTQ persons has a wildly positive impact on mental health. Migrating away from gender specific pronouns (e.g., his, her, him, he, she, etc.) to a more neutral “them, they, their,” etc. has a hugely positive impact on an LGBTQ individual. Nikita Shepard, a Columbia University researcher who is exploring the social and psychological aspect of the world of LGBTQ, points out how the “justification” for anti-LGBTQ legislation relies on a profoundly false narrative (in the May 10th Washington Post):
“In March, the Arkansas legislature passed a bill banning gender-confirming medical treatment for transgender youths. The bill marked just one instance of a wave of recent anti-transgender legislation across the country that would restrict trans people’s access to athletic participation, health care, sex education and other accommodations. As Arkansas state Sen. Alan Clark (R) declared: ‘This bill sets out to protect children in an area where they very much need protection.’
“It might seem strange that a politician with no medical training could justify a bill denying certain children medical treatment — without which, advocates note, they will suffer horrifying consequences — on the basis of ‘protecting children.’… Yet history shows that political discourse about protecting children since the mid-20th century has never really been about improving their health. Instead, it has a lot to do with race.
“The roots of ‘protecting children’ in U.S. political rhetoric lie in efforts to defend white supremacy. While the groups targeted as threats to children — African Americans in the South, unmarried mothers, abortion rights activists, lesbians and gay men, and, more recently, transgender people — have changed over time, the underlying political logic has proved enduring and successful.
“Children’s well-being first became a political issue as industrialization and urban growth accelerated toward the end of the 19th century. Debates over child labor, education and immigration catalyzed a broad Progressive Era ‘child-saving’ movement. Then, in the mid-20th century, postwar prosperity and Cold War tensions contributed to a renewed focus on children as symbols of the American future.
“But in the South, the politics of ‘protection’ did not at first focus on children. After Reconstruction, White elites in the states of the former Confederacy consolidated their rule through a combination of political exclusion and violence, with White vigilantes committing thousands of racial terror lynchings between 1880 and the 1950s. Though their violence aimed to suppress labor disputes, breaches of racial etiquette and Black political organizing, lynchers nearly always justified their actions as necessary to protect White womanhood…
“[In] the South, the politics of ‘protection’ did not at first focus on children. After Reconstruction, White elites in the states of the former Confederacy consolidated their rule through a combination of political exclusion and violence, with White vigilantes committing thousands of racial terror lynchings between 1880 and the 1950s. Though their violence aimed to suppress labor disputes, breaches of racial etiquette and Black political organizing, lynchers nearly always justified their actions as necessary to protect White womanhood… But as the civil rights movement gained strength, racist violence that targeted Black children discredited White men’s claims to be justly protecting women… By the time of the 1963 Birmingham, Ala., church bombing, which killed four children, the Jim Crow regime had lost all moral legitimacy to national observers.
“However, backlash against the civil rights movement gave rise to a new, more successful strategy of appropriating the rhetoric of child protection. After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision mandated public school desegregation, “massive resistance” to impede integration took shape across the South. While male politicians signing the “Southern Manifesto” against Brown emphasized ‘states’ rights,’ the women who formed the movement’s grass-roots base mobilized as White mothers to argue that school segregation was necessary to protect their children and white supremacy. Integrated schools, they claimed, would lower educational standards, expose White children to disease and violence, and lead to interracial dating and, eventually, marriage.”
Indeed, using “protecting children” is the rubric relied upon by right-wing conservatives desiring to appear being responsible and protective. But what exactly are our general population children being protected from? Being seduced by those in the LGBTQ lifestyle, folks being attacked with a much greater proclivity to contemplate and commit suicide? No possible connection to genetics, right? Talk to those “impressionable” American youth to see how they feel. Unlike many of their parents, kids seem to have continued to develop a notion of increased tolerance of diversity. LGBTQ people just are… people. Most Americans have come to understand this basic reality, whether or not they embrace New Testament mandates of tolerance and brotherly love. This isn’t just a “Christian” value; it’s pretty universal across most faiths. But targeting people with discriminatory legislation because either you do not personally like them or because your intolerant constituency demands “their way or the highway” flies in the face of American democracy, which in the most simplistic expression is “majority rule within a nexus of minority rights.”
I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time send a clear message to those hell-bent on dictating total social control over everybody: stop the steal!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment