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After Roe, Republicans Sharpen Attacks on Gay and Transgender Rights

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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Days after the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion, Michigan’s Republican candidates for governor were asked if it was also time to roll back constitutional protections for gay rights.
None of the five candidates came to the defense of same-sex marriage.
“They need to revisit it all,” one candidate, Garrett Soldano, said at the debate, in Warren, Mich.
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“Michigan’s constitution,” said another candidate, Ralph Rebandt, “says that for the betterment of society, marriage is between a man and a woman.”

Since the Supreme Court decision last month overturning Roe v. Wade, anti-gay rhetoric and calls to roll back established L.G.B.T.Q. protections have grown bolder. And while Republicans in Congress appear deeply divided about same-sex marriage — nearly 50 House Republicans on Tuesday joined Democrats in supporting a bill that would recognize same-sex marriages at the federal level — many Republican officials and candidates across the country have made attacking gay and transgender rights a party norm this midterm season.


In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton said after the Roe reversal that he would be “willing and able” to defend at the Supreme Court any law criminalizing sodomy enacted by the Legislature. Before that, the Republican Party of Texas adopted a platform that calls homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice.”

In Utah, the Republican president of the State Senate, Stuart Adams, said he would support his state’s joining with others to press the Supreme Court to reverse the right of same-sex couples to wed. In Arizona, Kari Lake, a candidate for governor endorsed by Donald J. Trump, affirmed in a June 29 debate her support for a bill barring children from drag shows — the latest target of supercharged rhetoric on the right.

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And in Michigan’s governor’s race, Mr. Soldano released an ad belittling the use of specific pronouns by those who do not conform to traditional gender roles (“My pronouns: Conservative/Patriot”) and accusing “the woke groomer mafia” of wanting to indoctrinate children.

Some Democrats and advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. communities say the Republican attacks have deepened their concerns that the overturning of Roe could undermine other cases built on the same legal foundation — the right to privacy provided in the Fourteenth Amendment — and lead to increases in hate crimes as well as suicides of L.G.B.T.Q. youth.
“The dominoes have started to fall, and they won’t just stop at one,” said Attorney General Dana Nessel of Michigan, a Democrat who was the first openly gay person elected to statewide office there. “People should see the connection between reproductive rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, women’s rights, interracial marriage — these things are all connected legally.”
This year, Republican-led states have already passed numerous restrictions on transgender young people and on school discussions of sexual orientation and gender.
In June, Louisiana became the 18th state, all with G.O.P.-led legislatures, to ban transgender students from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity. Laws to prohibit transitioning medical treatments to people under 18, such as puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries — which advocates call gender-affirming care — have been enacted by four states. And after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law in March banning classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades, more than a dozen other states moved to imitate it.
In all, over 300 bills to restrict L.G.B.T.Q. rights have been introduced this year in 23 states, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization.
The bills under consideration focus not on same-sex marriage but on transgender youth, on restricting school curriculums and on allowing groups to refuse services to L.G.B.T.Q. people based on religious faith. Most of the measures have no chance of passage because of opposition from Democrats and moderate Republicans.




Still, the Human Rights Campaign had characterized 2021 as the worst year in recent history for anti-L.G.B.T.Q. laws after states passed seven measures banning transgender athletes from sports teams that match their gender identity. So far in 2022, those numbers are already higher.

Officials and television commentators on the right have accused opponents of some of those new restrictions of seeking to “sexualize” or “groom” children. Grooming refers to the tactics used by sexual predators to manipulate their victims, but it has become deployed widely on the right to brand gay and transgender people as child molesters, evoking an earlier era of homophobia.
Some conservative advocacy groups that poured resources into transgender restrictions insist that they are not focused on challenging the 2015 Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. But many L.G.B.T.Q. advocates say they believe their hard-won rights are under attack.
“The far right is emboldened in a way they have not been in five decades,” said State Representative Daniel Hernandez Jr. of Arizona, a Democrat and a co-founder of the Legislature’s L.G.B.T.Q. caucus. “In addition to trying to create even more restrictions on abortion, they are going after the L.G.B.T.Q. community even more.”
Republicans say the laws focused on transgender youth are not transphobic — as the left sees them — but protect girls’ sports and put the brakes on irreversible medical treatments.

IThey said the issues have the power to peel away centrist voters, who polling shows are less committed to transgender rights than to same-sex marriage. A Washington Post-University of Maryland survey in May found 55 percent of Americans oppose letting transgender girls compete on girls’ high school teams. In a Gallup poll last year, 51 percent of Americans said changing one’s gender is “morally wrong.”


“I believe these are enormous issues for swing voters and moderates,” said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a group that opposes civil rights protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people and plans to spend up to $12 million on ads before November.

One of the group’s ads goes after Representative Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican facing a primary challenge next month, for co-sponsoring a House bill that pairs anti-discrimination protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people with exemptions for religious groups. Saying the bill “would put men in girls’ locker rooms,” the ad asks, “Would you trust Meijer with your daughter?”



 
For anybody questioning the hatred we experience:

"mauricehawki said:

You lazy mother ****ing cheeto eating SOB government teat sucking fagggot go play with your queer friends.. not everything is rainbows and unicorn farts you just can't take it when you're proved wrong. Didn't your parents kick your ass enough when you were a child so you didn't turn out to be such a queer SOB."
 
Stay the **** out of other peoples business Republicans. Why do you care? I don't get it. If they move on this, I am not sure I can ever consider voting for a republican again.
 
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For anybody questioning the hatred we experience:

"mauricehawki said:

You lazy mother ****ing cheeto eating SOB government teat sucking fagggot go play with your queer friends.. not everything is rainbows and unicorn farts you just can't take it when you're proved wrong. Didn't your parents kick your ass enough when you were a child so you didn't turn out to be such a queer SOB."

Not surprising from him. Big time Lindsey Graham vibes going on with that guy. Maybe we should start calling him "Lady M."
 
This is the kind of garbage that has me voting GOP less and less over the last decade or so. If they pass sodomy laws, I hope the prosecute straight couples for oral and anal.
 
Stupid post of the day winner.
Maybe, but if they follow up overturning Roe by going after all the cases Justice Thomas mentioned in his opinion, then rolling back interracial marriage may very well be on the table. That’s not the same as putting people in chains, but it does start rolling us back to the 1950s.
 
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Awful lot to unpack there and lumping truly separate issues together is done deliberately to justify the editorial stance.

Drag shows for kids, men identifying as women to play sports and sodomy - all in in one article - weakens the overall point. Each deserves its own discussion.

As for Meijer if I lived in Michigan I’d likely boycott his family’s business.
 
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Maybe, but if they follow up overturning Roe by going after all the cases Justice Thomas mentioned in his opinion, then rolling back interracial marriage may very well be on the table. That’s not the same as putting people in chains, but it does start rolling us back to the 1950s.

Just so hyper frantic. Jeebus some of you think that this is a serious thing.
You’re being used to gin up panic as a desperate attempt to stave off a Dem wipeout in November.
 
Just so hyper frantic. Jeebus some of you think that this is a serious thing.
You’re being used to gin up panic as a desperate attempt to stave off a Dem wipeout in November.
I’m not panicking, I’m just pointing out where this could go. I didn’t bring up revisiting Obergefell and others, Clarence Thomas did. Is he trying to stir up panic?
 
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I’m not panicking, I’m just pointing out where this could go. I didn’t bring up revisiting Obergefell and others, Clarence Thomas did. Is he trying to stir up panic?
Thomas was not specifically calling for overturning gay marriage and he certainly has never raised interracial marriage.
 
I’m not panicking, I’m just pointing out where this could go. I didn’t bring up revisiting Obergefell and others, Clarence Thomas did. Is he trying to stir up panic?
I wouldn't be surprised to see a host of warrant rulings overturned, stop and frisks made legal under any circumstances, and a reversal of decades worth of court rulings which deemed the explicit banning of black people to live in certain communities unconstitutional.
 
Just so hyper frantic. Jeebus some of you think that this is a serious thing.
You’re being used to gin up panic as a desperate attempt to stave off a Dem wipeout in November.
That’s what you all said about Roe. Then when that fell you said it about gay marriage. Now that’s clearly under threat and you continue to whistle past the graveyard. But what do you care, right- none of these issues affect you directly anymore. Not even birth control. So fuq the rest of us.
 
Thomas was not specifically calling for overturning gay marriage and he certainly has never raised interracial marriage.
Of course he hasn’t, because he’s in one, but the logic would follow. See below. This is copied from the Supreme Court’s website from Thomas’ concurring opinion.
  • He says “we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell”
  • He says “after overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights…..”
  • ”We would need to decide important antecedent questions, including whether privileges or immunities clause protects any rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution”
If the court were to rule that no rights are federally protected unless enumerated in the Constitution, then that opens the door for states to do things like ban gay marriage, interracial marriage, etc.

Citation:
——————
For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, includ- ing Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any sub- stantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 7), we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents, Gamble v. United States, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (THOMAS, J., con- curring) (slip op., at 9). After overruling these demonstra- bly erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myr- iad rights that our substantive due process cases have gen- erated. For example, we could consider whether any of the rights announced in this Court’s substantive due process cases are “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Amdt.

To answer that question, we would need to decide im- portant antecedent questions, including whether the Privi- leges or Immunities Clause protects any rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution and, if so, how to identify those rights. See id., at 854. That said, even if the Clause does protect unenumerated rights, the Court conclusively demonstrates that abortion is not one of them under any plausible interpretive approach. See ante, at 15, n. 22.
———————
 
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Our culture is doing our children a huge injustice by
pushing for transgender discussion with them in
elementary school. Puberty blockers should not be
encouraged for our young children. Schools should
not replace the authority of our children's parents.
 
marriage is protected under a Constitutional amendment, as cited in the SCOTUS opinion. Nothing solid such as that was in the basis of Roe. All of this is on both sides is pandering because there is absolutely nothing that can/will be done
 
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