As noted in any number of posts on this blog, Donald Trump and Mike Pence are waging a continuing war against the rights and dignity of LGBT Americans. They are joined in this effort by state level Republicans across the country. Here in Virginia, if the Republican ticket were to win in November, much of the anti-LGBT agenda of the GOP - especially that of extreme homophobe, John Adams, the Virginia AG candidate, would have no firewall to stop it. Sadly, the quality of one's life often depends on where one lives - what state and at times even what locality in which you live. In Virginia's so-called urban crescent, life is tolerable. In Southwest Virginia where white supremacy and homobobia (the two usually are found together) reign supreme, it is a different world. The driving force behind the anti-LGBT jihad: Christofascists who make up a large part of the GOP base and often closeted Republican elected officials - think Ed Schrock, Larry Craig, Ken Cuccinelli and perhaps even Mike Pence - who seem to believe that the best way to hide their secret yearnings is to abuse those who are openly LGBT. A lengthy column in the New York Times (please read the entire piece and its graphics) looks at the reality of how different life can be depending on where one happens to live. Here are highlights:
All my life I’ve loved Texas: those big skies, big steaks and big attitudes. I’m there several times a year. But Texas doesn’t love me back. Certainly its lawmakers don’t, and lately they’ve been hellbent on showing that.
In June the governor signed a bill allowing child welfare groups to refuse adoptions that contradict their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” They can turn away gay men like me.
That same month, the Texas Supreme Court approved a lawsuit challenging the city of Houston’s provision of equal benefits to all married employees, including those with same-sex spouses. Although the United States Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015, Texas bucks and balks.
Not New York. My state loves me something fierce. What it did in June was finalize the design of a monument to L.G.B.T. citizens in downtown Manhattan. New York legalized same-sex marriage back in 2011 without any federal nudge.
There’s no such thing as L.G.B.T. life in America, a country even more divided on this front than on others. There’s L.G.B.T. life in a group of essentially progressive places like New York, Maryland, Oregon and California, which bans government-funded travel to states it deems unduly discriminatory. Then there is L.G.B.T. life on that blacklist, which includes Texas, Kansas, Mississippi and South Dakota.
The differences between states — and between cities within states — are profound, and while that has long been true, it’s much more consequential since the advent of the Trump administration, a decidedly less ready ally of L.G.B.T. people than the Obama administration was.
The federal government under Donald Trump won’t be rushing in to help L.G.B.T. people whose local governments fail to give them equal rights, a sense of belonging or even a feeling of physical safety. . . . . Immediately after his inauguration, references to the L.G.B.T. community were scrubbed from many federal websites, including the White House’s and the Department of State’s.
Plenty of the people he [Der Trumpenführer] pulled into his cabinet have long histories of pronounced opposition to gay rights. One of them, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, leads a Department of Justice that recently went out of its way to make clear, in court filings, that it did not consider L.G.B.T. people to be protected by a federal civil rights law that prohibits employment discrimination.
Without consulting or even alerting the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, Trump announced a reinstatement of the ban on transgender people in the military, and he’s now finishing the orders for how the Department of Defense should enforce it — within six months. His first Supreme Court appointment suggests that if he is able to ensconce several more, the same-sex-marriage ruling could well be revisited and changed.
We’re at the mercy of our ZIP codes: Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are often affected most by their municipality, not their state. In Waco, Tex., the lone justice of the peace who presides over weddings recently admitted that she won’t do so for same-sex couples no matter the federal law. But Houston, just a three-hour drive away, has in instances been a pioneer: Annise Parker, its mayor from 2010 to 2016, is the only openly L.G.B.T. person ever elected to lead one of the nation’s 10 most populous cities. And Austin, the state’s capital, is practically Key West, Fla. — minus the coconuts.
Picayune, Miss., where an 86-year-old gay man passed away last year, leaving behind his 82-year-old husband. They had been together for half a century. Although prior arrangements had been made with a local funeral home, it refused even to pick up the dead man’s body when it learned of his same-sex marriage, according to a breach-of-contract lawsuit by his husband that hasn’t yet been resolved.
South Carolina: another state that I love, another state that doesn’t love me back, and the home of Tommy Starling, 45, and his husband, Jeff Littlefield, 61. Starling told me that they live there, in the coastal community of Pawleys Island, because of Littlefield’s job in the insurance business, but they dream constantly of moving somewhere that doesn’t cast them as provocative social experiments, somewhere that doesn’t put and keep them on edge.
They had trouble trying to adopt in South Carolina, so they turned to California and to surrogacy to have their 11-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son. . . . . “But it’s getting exhausting,” he said, adding that the family’s occasional travel sustains him.
[R]esponses The Times received after asking L.G.B.T. readers to share their reflections on the freedoms and limitations of where they live. Readers were acutely conscious of the absence or presence of employment-related anti-discrimination laws in their cities or states. (Only 22 states have such laws governing all gay and lesbian workers, in both the public and the private sectors, while only 20, including New York, have them for transgender workers as well.) Readers mentioned the vigor, or laxness, with which their local governments patrolled against and prosecuted hate crimes.
And one after another, readers said they wished that a modest public gesture of affection wasn’t a potent magnet for stares, slurs or worse.
On the state level, the yardsticks for measuring respect for L.G.B.T. people include, recently, restrictions on “conversion therapy,” which attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. More and more mental health professionals are speaking out unequivocally about its dangers, and more and more state legislatures are outlawing it for minors. New Mexico, Nevada, Rhode Island and Connecticut did so in recent months; New Jersey, Vermont, Illinois, Oregon, California and the District of Columbia had previously done so. But that leaves 41 states without any such prohibition.
Alabama. In May, under the aegis of “religious freedom,” its governor signed a law that allowed taxpayer-funded adoption agencies to deny the placement of children in homes with gay parents. The Alabama House voted 60 to 14 in favor of the bill, after which the Alabama Senate voted 23 to 9.
Fifty years from now — heck, maybe just 20 — that kind of thing won’t happen. There’s only one long-term trajectory here. But in the meantime, it’s not O.K. for the federal government to be as cold to L.G.B.T. Americans as the one we have now is, because some of those Americans live in Alabama — or Texas. And those places don’t exactly brim with love.
While far from perfect, Virginia - at least for now depending on the November election results - is tolerable, many states and cities are not. That's one reason why the husband and I are selective as to where we vacation- New York City, Key West, Ft. Lauderdale, London, Paris, etc. - because we do not want to visit or give our money to places and communities that are hostile to LGBT people. We are not alone in this and its why many areas will never see the economic boost that LGBT tourism can provide.
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