Pride Month Has Taken Center Stage in the Culture Wars

As church attendance has dwindled, the number of "Nones" - those with no religious affiliation - has soared and larger and larger percentages of the younger generations identify as LGBT, the evangelicals and Christofascists have gone into a veritable melt down as their ability to denigrate and persecute gays and others who do not embrace their fear, ignorance and bigotry based dogma has been impeded.  Enter amoral and cynical Republican politicians who (i) seek to court the evangelical and Christofascist voters who dominate the GOP primary voter base and (ii) care nothing about the harm of they inflict.  Under the guise of "parental rights" - but only if parents subscribe to the Christian extremist war on gays and those who are transgender - and "protecting children," hundreds of anti-LGBT bills have been introduced by Republican legislators that seek to erase gays from public schools, ban science-based medical treatment of transgender individuals, drive drag shows from public view and generally label gays as "groomers" or "predators".  Never mind that there have been ZERO convictions of drag queens for sexual abuse of minors even as the arrest and conviction of pastors, priests and church youth ministers numbers in the hundreds, if not thousands.  A piece in The Economist notes the renewed culture war and the role Christofascists and Republicans who prostitute themselves to them is playing in efforts to ban Pride events and denigrate LGBT citizens in general.  Here are article excerpts:

[T]he Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are not nuns at all. They are transgender and queer drag queens dressed in technicolour—or sometimes leather—habits, who raise money for local charities. The sisters’ fame grew last month when the Los Angeles Dodgers invited, uninvited and then re-invited them to the club’s annual gay-pride night game. The baseball team suddenly found itself caught between conservatives who consider the drag nuns an anti-Catholic group and liberals outraged that the team capitulated to appease the conservatives.

As absurd as the fight over the sisters has become, it is just one of many political skirmishes over gay-pride events this year. In Glendale, a city next to Los Angeles, a brawl erupted outside a school-board meeting in which officials were deciding whether to recognise June as LGBTQ pride month for the fifth year running. Parents protested against a pride assembly at an elementary school in North Hollywood. Nor is the backlash limited to California. Conservatives [a misnomer, in my view] called for the boycott of Bud Light, Cracker Barrel, Target, The North Face and other brands that recognise pride month, work with transgender influencers or hawk rainbow-flecked merchandise.

Bill Clinton first declared June to be national “gay and lesbian pride month” back in 1999. So why, more than 20 years later, has pride become controversial? Two connected trends explain it. First, the scope of pride has changed over the years, perhaps faster than public opinion. During their presidencies Barack Obama and Joe Biden expanded their pride declarations to include more people of different sexualities and gender identities. This year Mr Biden proclaimed June to be “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex pride month”. LG has become LGBTQI+.

More Americans than ever, about 71%, support gay marriage. But there is less enthusiasm for the latter bits of the initialism. A recent survey for The Economist by YouGov suggests that about a third of Americans think society has gone too far, and the same think it has not gone far enough, in accepting trans people.

Second, issues around gender identity have become core to the culture wars. The Republican Party’s presidential hopefuls are betting that framing their fight against drag shows and books with queer characters as a battle for parental rights will win them votes. Nikki Haley has suggested, without evidence, that trans children playing in girls’ sports has led to more teenage girls contemplating suicide. Mike Pence called the Dodgers’ drag-nuns invitation “deeply offensive”. And Ron DeSantis, by prioritising anti-LGBTQ bills as governor of Florida, has turned himself into America’s biggest anti-woke warrior.

Florida has pushed anti-LGBTQ bills, such as the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, . . . . But it is not the only state doing so. The American Civil Liberties Union reckons state lawmakers have introduced nearly 500 gender-identity bills in 2023 alone.

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are declaring victory. “May the fans be blessed!” they wrote after being invited back to the baseball game. “May the beer and hot dogs flow forth in tasty abundance!”

Hate, ignorance and bigotry are increasingly the face of Christianity in America and are driving the younger generations from religion.  Indeed, nowadays when I hear someone wearing their "conservative" religious beliefs on their sleeves or engaging in feigned piety, my first reaction is to view them as hypocrites and not nice people.  Opportunistic Republicans could care less about the damage they do to the Christian brand, but one would think true Christians would do more to oppose those who have made Christianity something toxic and ugly.