The G.O.P. Tries to Build a Gay Ghetto

Link to tweet

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/opinion/republican-attack-gay-rights. html


No paywall
https://archive.ph/mjjdI

This past weekend, the Republican Party in Texas voted on an outrageous platform that not only denies the results of the 2020 presidential election, but also rejects gay marriage and seeks to “protect” minors until they turn 17 against “predatory sexual behaviors,” such as drag queens reading stories aloud to children.

Drag queens are predators, trans women are a threat and gay marriage is a violation of the “natural order”: This is all part of the widening and re-energized attack by Republicans on L.G.B.T.Q. people and culture in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges guaranteeing a right to same-sex marriage.

The ruling was heralded as a major civil rights victory by its proponents, but many opponents of gay rights saw it as a lost battle in a war, not the loss of the war. For them, gay marriage is too big a development to simply accept.

Dennis Prager, writing in National Review, argued that the ruling completed “the secularization of America” and sealed “the end of America as the Founders envisioned it.”

Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, was a staunch opponent of gay marriage. He was one of six Republican senators to sign an amicus brief trying to convince the court to reject it. But after the ruling, even he acknowledged that there was little more that Congress could do. “The courts have pretty well spoken,” he said.

*snip*