Anti-LGBTQ+ politics is the not-so-new McCarthyism.
I know something about McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the fifties.
My parents were victims. In fact our whole family were victims.
This anti-woke shit and Ron DeSantis’ don’t say gay campaign smells all too familiar to me.
So do the other political opportunist like DeSantis.
While not as well known to the general public, at the same time as McCarthy and his followers were engaging in their witch hunt for Reds, there was the Lavender Scare as it was known.
Now, over 50 years since Stonewall, anti-LGBTQ+ political and violent hate crimes, while they never went away, are on the rise.
The Williams Institute of the UCLA School of Law reported in 2022 that “LGBT people [are] nine times more likely than non-LGBT people to be victims of violent hate crimes.”
The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a group that describes itself as “a disaggregated data collection, analysis, and crisis mapping project,” found that anti-LGBTQ incidents including “demonstrations, acts of political violence, and the distribution of offline propaganda — have more than tripled from 64 events in 2021 to 193 events in 2022 as of mid-November.”
At least 417 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the United States since the start of the year — a new record, according to American Civil Liberties Union data as of April 3. That’s already more than twice the number of such bills introduced all of last year.
Education and health care-related bills, in particular, are flooding in at unprecedented levels. Along with a renewed push to ban access to gender-affirming health care for transgender youth, there has been a heavy focus on regulating curriculum in public schools, including discussions around gender identity and sexuality.
Nearly every state legislature in the country has seen some form of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation introduced.
The American Civil Liberties Union has created a map.
It’s not just Florida, folks.