From Leighton Woodhouse of Public News
Pride Month is upon us. Once upon a time, that meant celebrating the struggle of an oppressed minority group whose civil rights the government was arbitrarily violating. Then, eight years ago, the Supreme Court upheld marriage equality, and gays and lesbians became legally equal — a momentous advance for American democracy.
So what does Pride Month stand for now that equality of sexual orientation has been achieved? The obvious answer is that it stands for the ongoing struggle for the equality of
trans people, whose rights have yet to be won.
But that answer only begs the question. What exactly are these unfulfilled rights? Trans people
are already legally equal. It’s against the law to discriminate against trans people in employment, housing, marriage, or anything else other people are entitled to.
So what is it, precisely, that the LGBTQIA2S+ movement is fighting for?
Judging by its rhetoric, that movement today demands much more than equal rights for people who identify as transgender — rights they already possess. It insists on privileges that other groups don’t necessarily enjoy. These are, in fact, not “rights” at all but
demands on other people. They include the demand that everyone else adjust their everyday speech to adopt new words and grammar, sometimes on pain of material penalties, like
job loss or fines. They include changes to long-standing rules governing public spaces — changes that infringe on what were hitherto perceived as the rights, sometimes hard-won, of women. And they include forfeiting profound parental authority and responsibilities over our own children.
No other civil rights movement has ever even asked for changes such as these, let alone won them. And there’s a reason for that: they are not the entitlements of a democratic society. They are the opposite.
Naturally, many people are resistant to these demands. Even people who are open to being persuaded, as they were over gay marriage, are resentful at being told not just how to act but what to believe. In a normal democratic context, we would bargain over these competing prerogatives through the prosaic mechanisms of elections and legislation. But today’s LGBT movement has ceased relying on persuasion as the means to achieve its goals, as it so brilliantly did in the fight for marriage equality. It has replaced persuasion with moral bullying.
The LGBT movement today makes demands, and you’re called upon to comply. If you don’t, you’re called a bigot, loudly and publicly. It’s really as crude and simple as that. Anyone who doesn’t enthusiastically comply with whatever the movement demands at any given moment, we’re told, must be motivated by hate. Social ostracism is the just dessert for these moral heretics.
Like most blunt instruments of authoritarianism, to a point, it works. People tend to obey, if only out of fear.
But there will always be those who refuse to bend the knee, and when activists smear them publicly as
bigots,
extremists and
MAGA white supremacists, they fight back harder. That’s what’s happening in places like Glendale, California, and Montgomery County, Maryland. People are questioning the demands of this movement, particularly when it comes to their children. And they’re being met with force. Those clashes are now erupting in violence.
There was a time when one would have expected politicians to play a de-escalatory role when these conflicts broke out, especially when the vying camps were among their own constituents. But today, political leaders are instead rushing to take sides.
The change represents an erosion that has occurred in American politics. Politicians now
govern through division because conflict yields political dividends that consensus does not. Moral grandstanding has become
a new status marker for the educated and affluent, supplanting luxury European cars and Stanford alumni bumper stickers. Thirsty to appeal to these high-propensity voters of the donor class, elected officials, most of whom belong to the same social tier themselves, pander to their sensibilities. Thus, instead of acting to reconcile these ruptures, they
pounce on them, eager to
showcase their leadership of the moral elite.
The politicians, the NGOs, the activists, the corporations, the media — the incentives align for all of them to stoke these flames and amass the moral capital that comes with being perceived as being on the right side. With this grandstanding comes votes, donations, brand loyalty, and subscriptions. Social conflict, like war, is big business.
So that’s what Pride Month means today: endless Culture War. Don’t mistake it for what it once was. The moral posturing, the victimization, the radical chic — it’s all part of the marketing.
—LW