solarbird | Dec. 19th, 2023

So let’s talk about anti-LGBT activism and Christian Nationalism, and how they intertwine, via a set of connections relevant this month. The two go together like steak and potatoes, like apple pie and ice cream, like Spiderman and animation. But while both are super important to talk about, it can be a bit of a melange, with the themes not always clear.

Still, one must persist, because it really does matter. Let’s see if we can make something better of it today than a disappointing brandy with an overdose of Bons Bois.

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson thinks he’s Moses. There, that’s a strong lead, don’t you agree?

Seriously, though, he thinks he’s been chosen by the Christian god, personally, and that Jehovah chose him specifically to lead the United States to a Christian Dominionism era as Speaker of the House. He didn’t think he was on live video, but he was, and now we’ve all seen it. If you haven’t, you can see some of it at the link above, and here’s the Rolling Stone article.

If I can communicate anything here, it needs to be that he genuinely believes this, exactly as much as Donald Trump wants to be a dictator. I’ve studied these people and their movement for decades. Mike Johnson is the kind of guy I thought they’d settle on, rather than a venal looter and grifter Hollywood and real-estate flim-flam man like Trump.

When he says this, he’s not joking. It’s for real.

But they ended up with Trump, since it turns out most of those guys don’t actually have the necessary charisma, and the ones that did became megachurch preachers because they want to swim around in money like Scrooge McDuck, but while on a Holy Water bender.

(By which I mean vodka. The holy water, it’s vodka. Oh, never mind…)

To be clear, that decision is actually quite good for our side; Donald’s megalomania really does hurt their cause. But to get back on topic:

You may want to note also that Johnson’s raising money by stoking fears about LGBTQ teenagers. Our crime is, as it always has been, our mere existence, and that’s what he’s using to raise the general level of both panic and cash. Naturally, Ron DeSantis is doing the same, only he’s trying to revive old blood-libel against LGBT parents, saying that he’ll “rescue” children from their own families.

(The traditional fundamentalist anti-LGBT blood-libel has long been “homosexuals can’t reproduce so rape your children to turn them gay and give them AIDS;” this is directly derived from the original anti-Semitic blood libel of killing Gentile children to make matzos and serves exactly the same purpose. You still hear it occasionally, but much less often and much less publicly. Now, they either want to abuse LGBT children, or steal children from LGBT and/or supportive parents to “save them” from queerness. There are enough parallels even in recent history that I hope you can see where these newer lines of attack come from.)

But Mike Johnson is far from the only Christian Nationalist we have revving the engines. Another group of them is up in the deep inland Northwest.

You see, every few decades, another round of white nationalists or neo-Nazis or Christian fundamentalists or both decide that a big area centred around northern Idaho – including western Montana, eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, and so forth – is going to be where they ride out some civil war or some end of the world scenario, before they rise up and take over under the guise of their new White Christian Empire. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, just for example, it was Aryan Nation.

Now, there’s another wave happening, thanks to several different groups. I’m sure we’ll get a dominant name eventually, but it hardly matters. Regardless, the big-name Christian Nationalists like Marjorie Taylor Greene – out here doing the rounds just recently – are out there revving it up.

This never works out for them. But it can kill a bunch of people before it settles down, and under the current circumstances, is probably going to be worse than usual. So keep it on your radar.

This may not seem Christian Nationalist, but it is: A Florida Republican lawmaker’s bill declares showing support for LGBTQ people to be a “political viewpoint,” and would ban the display of pride flags at government buildings, schools, and universities.

If this sounds like one of the steps Putin’s Russia took on the way to making us illegal, it should, but it’s also a position the fundamentalists have had on their own for decades. That’s because it’s been key to their politics that no one is gay or lesbian, bisexual or poly, trans or anything else; it’s all wilful perversion by people who are actually normal as designed by God, and being anything other that that is some kind of radical political agenda, demonic possession, or literal insanity.

Yes, insanity. (For some of them, that’s “demonic possession, but science,” used because it plays better, but that’s not important right now.) They’ve mostly been trying to revive the insanity accusation against trans people in recent yeras, but it used to be their standard position on gays and lesbians too. Insanity or wilful perversion, and certainly not a matter of identity, no matter what we might be fool enough to think about it. And the insistence on this is directly out of their religious belief, because if you aren’t choosing to be LGBTQ, then that can only mean God made you like that, which means it’s not a sin. And that, in turn, violates their incredibly strict cultural laws about gender segregation and male dominance, which is unacceptable.

Which means, of course, that it has to be a sin, so it has to be a choice or it has to be mental illness to be cured, observable reality be damned. But since they know science matters to most people – not as much now as it did 20 years ago but it still does – they have to get some of their own “science” too. And that’s how you get an entire industry of pseudo-science disinformation groups working the fundamentalist circuit, telling them what they know, and giving them lies they can use online, in the media, and in their laws. Which leads directly to:

The Southern Poverty Law Centre have put out a new breakdown on the current crop of fundamentalist pseudo-science groups spreading disinformation about LGBT people nationally. They’ve identified 60-some groups. Some have been around for decades, such as the American College of Pediatricians. It sounds official but it’s not, it’s always been a fake medical group posing as a real one. Some, however, are quite new, such as the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine. Naturally, they churn out cardboard science for anti-trans groups.

The fundamentalist movement has decades of doing this under their belt and they’re pretty good at it. The lowest level just put out obvious lies; the top level put out what looks like reasonable work until you examine things like their references, and most of all, how they picked their sample set, which is where you find that their OnE AmazinG TrIcK is to select the sample set necessary to give whatever result they want, and then claim it was randomly selected or otherwise representative when it absolutely wasn’t.

And that’s how you get to some of the absolute bullshit Republicans have been using to push anti-trans law. Ohio Republicans have been working on a trans health care ban this past month, in fact. And just as their cardboard-science generators pick their “study subjects” to get the results they want, the Republicans pick people to testify to give the results they want.

But it’s occasionally funny, because sometimes even with all those precautions they don’t get the results they expect, just like this time, when even one of the detransitioners they called to testify against trans heatlh care went hard against the entire idea of banning it. Hilarious.

That won’t stop them, of course – this isn’t about facts or evidence, it’s about God, Authority, and Power. But it is nice when their dog and pony show blows up in their faces.

Hm. Well, it’s not a great brandy, but it’s not as bad a mix as I thought. Here, let’s finish it off with some updates from the Hate Machine, won’t you? Eyes open now:

A brief stop in Honestly? Are you for real? territory gives us this: