Post Presidential opinions regarding LGBT rights in the future

[rareboy]

Don't take your eyes off the states passing bills like this...although they surely know that courts will knock some of these measures down, there is a cumulative effect, including hardening public opinion against the LGBTQ citizens of their states. This is a national disease of hatred and intolerance.

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[cityboy-stl]

^^ This is a test case that lays the groundwork for other states and to see how far they can get. Laws to suppress and control people they hate. How is this any different from the cumulative effect of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws hardening public opinion against Jews? It's just another step in normalizing marginalization of "the other" which builds the pathway down the line that leads to acceptance of extermination camps. Plant and feed the belief that suppressing them and just getting rid of them is acceptable.

Just like DeSantis and Abbott putting migrants on buses to other cities lead to normalizing, in the MAGA mind, relocating migrants to the concentration camps we have now. I said this when it was happening.

Do people still not see where this pattern leads? Apparently not.

 

[KaraBulut]

...Do people still not see where this pattern leads? Apparently not.

You should be asking yourself, "What are they distracting us from?".

The Republicans love to put stuff like this on the docket when they're busy picking our pockets and rewarding their big dollar donors.

P.S. Hopefully they banned the ugly one with all the non-rainbow colors.

 

[cityboy-stl]

Are you saying you do not believe this is a pattern....or what?

 

[KaraBulut]

Are you saying you do not believe this is a pattern....or what?

It's a game with them. They're the same snowflakes that whine all the time about "free speech" and how the left is trying to cancel them.

Some rich right-wing donor gives them money to buy a favor. To hide the favor, they have one of their right wing "think tanks" put together some ridiculous bill. They put the bill on the floor. The left wing organizations flood their mailing lists with fundraising emails. The left-wing organizations file a lawsuit and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on getting the legislation declared unlawful.

Meanwhile, the bill that the rich right-wing donor wants gets passed. No one is paying attention.

Millions of donations get spent on pursuing lawsuits that could have been spent finding Democratic candidates or running opposition ads to the idiots who for decades were crying about "free speech".

This is Charlie Brown and the football. At some point, the left needs to stop playing defense and get on offense.

 

[rareboy]

The problem is that the Dems LOVE these bills because they also fundraise off them and use them to motivate their voters to come out.

 

[KaraBulut]

The problem is that the Dems LOVE these bills because they also fundraise off them and use them to motivate their voters to come out.

And they are part of the problem and it's why they are always playing defense, wasting millions on performative legislation.

 

[cityboy-stl]

The path Trump and republicans are on, are the same patterns as Germany in the 1930s. They're doing the same things, following the same pattern. They are building the concentration camps now. If it isn't stopped, it will end the same way in extermination camps. Despite some of the bumps, the trajectory so far has been unchanged for years.

I give up trying to warn about it. Everyone is in denial and changes the subject. This is how it happened in Germany.

I will never try to warn about this again.

 

[KaraBulut]

The problem is that the Dems LOVE these bills because they also fundraise off them and use them to motivate their voters to come out.

True. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, these bills seldom made it out of committee or were laughed off the floor without a vote.

Now, they get passed by Legislatures and then signed by the executive.

One has to wonder- is that because the Democrats don't know how to kill them or because Democrats know they'll have an issue for fundraising and "energizing the base" before the courts overturn them?

I keep flashing back to a statement that Hillary Clinton made a few years back about DOMA and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". She said Bill Clinton knew that these bills were passed by the Republican Congress in hopes that Clinton would veto them, which would give the Republicans an issue to energize their evangelical base in the election.

Instead Bill Clinton signed them and said, "They're unconstitutional and the courts will overturn them", which gave left-wing and LGBT organizations a fundraising opportunity and ultimately set the stage for Obergefell and other challenges like McVeigh v. Cohen, Witt v. Department of the Air Force and the eventual bipartisan repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in 2010... after 17 years.

 

[Araucaria]

So are you saying that cityboy-stl is on the wrong track with this? Are you saying the LGBTQ+ community should just ignore it when red state legislatures pass these outrageous unconstitutional bills? The republicans have already created a hostile atmosphere with their rhetoric and shenanigans. Already it has become dangerous for trans people to walk out the door in many places. These are people that don’t like any of us. They just chose the trans issue because polls showed it to be the weakest point. And what about those huge appropriations for ICE? They’re supposedly just going after immigrants right now, though they’re really going after anyone they don’t like.

I really do hope things don’t get as bad as Nazi Germany, but things are headed in that direction, and I don’t see anything happening to stop it right now.

 

[KaraBulut]

... Are you saying the LGBTQ+ community should just ignore it when red state legislatures pass these outrageous unconstitutional bills?

I'm saying that we need to go after the source of the legislation, instead of spending time trying to chase after the cows once they have gotten out of the barn.

Ask yourself, "Who is exploiting the trans community for political gain?" This anti-trans stuff didn't come out of nowhere. It was a strategy developed in 2022-2023, along with the book banning, the Moms for Liberty showing up at school board meetings, et al.

When you have that answer, you'll know who we need to go after. They need to fear us, not the other way around.

On a slightly different note- in the past, we also enabled a lot of bad behavior on social media from some of the groups being attacked at the moment. I have to question whether some of them were being baited by Russian trolls and far right activists, but there was a point during the pandemic where in was next to impossible to question some of the extreme positions being taken on the far left and in the activist communities on places like Twitter. This doesn't excuse the backlash, but given some of the fiery rhetoric that was being dished out toward members of the gay community by members of the trans community, I'm kind of wondering where are those same trans community members now that they are being targeted by Republicans in both Washington and in States in the South?

They might have won the battle over pronouns but set all of us back on the equality issues that we fought for over the past 70 years. Instead of spending our time adding more colors to a "rainbow" flag, perhaps we should have been paying attention to what was happening with White Christian Nationalists? There needs to be some effort made to fix the fractures that identity politics created in our own coalitions.

 

[rareboy]

Another state that is heading off the likely overturn of Obergefell and the failure of Congress to really address marriage equality across the US.