Why Are So Many White Nationalists ‘Virulently Anti-LGBT’?

The title of this post ask a question that has perhaps more than one answer, but I have one of my own. A piece at NBC News  ties the high correlation between white supremacists and anti-LGBT animus to the rise of the alt-right which combines racist views with Neo-Nazism.  While there is truth to that analysis, I believe that it leaves out one important factor: Virtually every one of the leading anti-gay "family values" organizations that pretend to embrace Christian values either traces back to or continues to have strong ties to the white supremacy movement.  Tony Perkins, head of Family Research Council, has very strong, documented ties to white supremacy groups.  Here in Virginia, The Family Foundation, a virulently anti-gay organization, traces back to the racist Massive Resistance movement.  Similarly, the anti-gay Southern Baptist Convention arose because of the denomination's desire to continue slavery.  This combination of a religious based bigotry against gays - whose very existence challenge fundamentalist Christian (and Muslim) beliefs on sexuality - and opposition to social change and perceived loss of white privilege results in a wide array of hatred towards those who are different. As the NBC News piece points out both the Nazi movement in Germany in the late 1920's and early 1930's and today's alt-right in America boil down to the same thing: a violent reaction to social change and a more progressive society based on a mythical past that in reality never existed.  Here are highlights from the NBC News piece:

Hundreds of white nationalists lined the streets of Charlottesville, Va., last Saturday to protest the removal of a Confederate monument. Some waved Confederate and Nazi flags, others brandished shields. They shouted racist and anti-Semitic slurs with chants of “They will not replace us.”

At one point, they chanted in unison: “F--k you, fa---ts!”

What these white, mostly male, presumably heterosexual protesters have in common is a belief in a “white ethno-state,” according to Southern Poverty Law Center Research Analyst Keegan Hankes. He referred to the so-called “alt-right” or far-right movement as a “grab bag of right-wing ideologies.”

“They believe that white people are being systematically replaced and that inheritance to their homeland is being taken away from them,” Hankes told NBC News.

Since the 2016 election, which advocates say emboldened many right-wing extremists, there has been a reported rise in anti-LGBTQ violence that is disproportionately affecting people of color.

While not all white nationalists are homophobic, Hankes said the majority of right-wing extremists are “virulently anti-LGBT” and share an anxiety and fixation on white birth rates, which are just barely keeping pace with racial minorities. He said some extremists may blame the disparity on the legalization of same-sex marriage.

“There’s this belief that basically white people are being replaced faster than they can reproduce,” Hankes said.

Former white supremacist Angela King, 42, was a propagandist for various neo-Nazi groups in the early 1990s. She admitted to creating propaganda aimed at promoting higher birth rates among white women.

“I did women-centric propaganda-type things,” King said. “I would write articles for some of the racist magazines or papers about things like white women shouldn’t get abortions, but women who aren’t white should.”

The neo-Nazis and skin heads King ran with believed gays were sick. She said they didn’t hesitate to ridicule LGBTQ people and abuse them in the streets.   “It was always a joke, that ‘at least they can’t breed,’” recalled King.

The years King spent in prison forced her to reflect on her hateful views, which she said she learned from her parents at an early age.  . . . A co-founder of the nonprofit Life After Hate, King now works to counter and reform people with extremist views. In recent years, she has nervously watched the far right grow into a more unified front.

King said the merger between the so-called "alt-right," whose followers she said tend to eschew Nazi iconography for a cleaner, media-friendly image, and what she called the “violent far right” she once belonged to, is unprecedented.

Backlash against marginalized communities doesn’t surprise University of Southern California Professor Chris Freeman, whose work primarily focuses on 20th century gay and lesbian studies. With the election of President Barak Obama, American’s first black president, and the legalization of same-sex marriage, the rise of far-right groups is consistent with historical trends, he said.

“Germany was very progressive on issues around sexuality at the turn of the 20th century,” Freeman said. In the years after the first World War, during the Weimar Republic, Berlin was a queer bohemia, he explained. The city was home to the Institute for Sexual Science, a famed sexology institute headed by Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld.

While anti-Semitism was at the heart of Nazi ideology, some of the frenzy that led to its uprising can be attributed to far-right hostility toward the sexual liberation of the 1920s, Freeman explained. As the country grew increasingly progressive, he said, more and more Nazis were elected.

“There was a push that was pretty likely to be successful in Germany in the 1920s and early '30s to repeal anti-gay laws,” Freeman added, "and then that all went belly-up when the Nazis took over.”

“So in terms of thinking about the politics of the far right, it’s reactionary politics, and it’s based in fear and hatred,” Freeman added.

The professor sees parallels between the rise of Nazism in Germany and the far right in the United states.  “People who believe in this idealized past that does not exist are panicked because [of] the visibility of queer people in the movement for our acceptance and the potential meltdown of the gender binary,” Freeman explained.

What’s different, he said, is that the world now has a history of what Nazism is and what it led to, which it didn’t have 75 years ago. “We don’t have the ability to pretend like it’s not happening,” Freeman said. 

And where is anti-LGBT hatred learned?  In homes and in church pews of fundamentalist and evangelical churches which also have long held racist views.  Unfortunately, many in the media continue to give undeserved deference to fundamentalist religion and have refrained from connecting the dots between the alt-right and Neo-Nazis and fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity in America. One good column on the issue is at the Dallas Morning News.  Here are excerpts:

Her words joined a similar outpouring from professed Bible-believing, God-fearing Jesus folk, punctuated by lots of venom, familiar FoxNews cut-and-paste criticisms of Islam, and lots of references to making America great. They too rushed to join the pseudo-Fascists in disputing the idea that a child in Syria was as important as their children, seemingly oblivious to the red flag that such agreement should raise.

This is a symptom of the heart sickness American evangelicals have inherited, one revealed in a growing Christian nationalism as well as a highly selective pro-life position, where apparently life isn't just more valuable inside the womb than outside of it, but inside America than outside of it as well.

This is especially true if the child looks like them, is likely to worship and believe and vote like them, if it will replicate them.

Amy's response and the responses of many white Christians to my Tweet were telling. They imagine that my capacity for compassion is so minuscule that it can only accommodate my own children. They assume that love for one must come at the expense of another. They reflect a fearful religion that instills in them fear that they are perpetually in danger. They reveal a faith rooted in superiority and self-preservation; one that breeds hostility to those it sees as outsiders.

Jesus was a homeless, dark-skinned immigrant who modeled sacrificial love and who welcomed to his table both beggar and soldier, both priest and prostitute, both Jew and Samaritan. It's almost impossible to simultaneously emulate this Jesus and champion exclusion, superiority or even protection, for that matter.

You cannot be both "For God so loved the world" and America First.  You cannot preach the gospel while despising refugees and foreigners and immigrants.  You can't claim that all lives matter while protecting only your own kind. 

You can't pledge complete allegiance to both Jesus and America simultaneously. At some point one will have to yield to the other, and when your religious position on foreigners begins to align with a malevolent Fascist extremist, it may be time to reconsider your interpretation of the gospel. It may be time to see if you've made God in your own caucasian image.