Republicans' Flood of Anti-LGBTQ bills

Other than their self-prostitution and swearing of fealty to Donald Trump, nothing more signifies the efforts of Republican officeholders to pander to the evangelical/Christofascist dominated MAGA base than the legislative war these politicians are waging against LGBT Americans.   The number of anti-LGBT bills introduced last year set records and many believe the 2024 legislative sessions in states across the country will be even worse with both more bills and ever more extreme bills being introduced.  Republicans see such bills as a way to thrill the hate obsessed MAGA base with little risk of offending other voters who all too frequently ignore such bills because they foolishly do not see them as a risk to themselves.  Hence the effort to make LGBT individuals invisible in public schools and to strip LGBT citizens of public accommodation protections and to deprive transgender youth of appropriate medical care.  Thankfully, the 2023 elections in Virginia which saw Democrats take control of both houses of the Virginia General Assembly means that for the next two years Glenn Youngkin's efforts to turn Virginia a watered down version of Florida will be blocked.  For those living in red states with districts deeply gerrymandered by Republicans, they will not be so lucky.  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP jihad against the LGBT community.  Here are excerpts:

A bill that would have restricted healthcare access for transgender and gender expansive youth in Ohio was vetoed by the governor last week. Now, after cutting their winter recess short, Republican lawmakers in the state are flocking back to the capital to override the decision — a move representative of the larger GOP crusade against LGBTQ rights nationwide.

Last Friday, Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine struck down House Bill 68, which would have prevented doctors from providing puberty blockers, hormones and gender affirmation surgeries to patients under the age of 18, and barred transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams in high school and college, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

DeWine blocked the bill just minutes before he was set to publicly announce its fate. He told the media that he came to the conclusion after convening with medical providers of gender-affirming care at children's hospitals, speaking with families and young people who have sought and had varied experiences with that care, and reviewing testimony supporting and opposing the legislation. 

[T]he Republican governor's veto upset party members in the state legislature and across the country, even drawing rebukes from former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 presidential candidate and Ohio native.

Given that the bill cleared the Republican-dominated Ohio House and Senate with a supermajority — 62 of the 99 representatives and 24 of 33 senators — the legislators could garner the three-fifths vote necessary for an override, though it is unclear if they will retain all the support. 

These legislators' apparent enthusiasm to make the anti-trans bill become law reflects the greater push by GOP lawmakers across the nation to strip rights from LGBTQ Americans through legislation targeting their protections, freedom of expression and access, a campaign signified by the record number of anti-LGBTQ proposals advanced — and passed — in the United States in 2023.

The American Civil Liberties Union recorded more than 500 proposals progressing and over 80 passed in 2023 targeting LGBTQ Americans, particularly trans and gender expansive youth, a rate previously unseen in the organization's nearly eight-year history of mapping the legislation. 

Per the ACLU's tracker, 510 bills advanced across all but three states — New York, Illinois and Delaware — and Washington, D.C. in 2023, taking aim at LGBTQ civil rights broadly, trans people's access to accurate identity documents and the community's free speech and expression protections as well as healthcare, public accommodations and education provisions.

Eighty-four of the anti-LGBTQ bills became laws across 22 states last year, ACLU data shows, a huge spike compared to the 17 proposals signed into law in 2022 and the six or fewer enacted in 2020, 2019 and 2018. 

Most significant about the bills isn't just how they've grown in number but how they've escalated in their extremity and impact, she added. 

The vast majority of the proposed legislation sought to limit trans kid's access to healthcare by way of gender-affirming care bans and restrict student and educators' rights by barring trans students from participating in gendered school sports, forcing teachers to out students or censoring in-school discussions about LGBTQ people and issues. Of those 370 bills, 26 healthcare restrictions and 34 student and educator rights limitations passed. . . . viewed together, they represent an effort to, in so many words, eradicate trans people from public life."

Gender-affirming care bans exacerbate physical health disparities among gender expansive youth and young adults, while other targeted legislation threatens their mental health as well as that of LGBTQ people overall. . . . the proposals' presence in state legislatures still causes harm to LGBTQ youth, especially trans, intersex and nonbinary children, Debussy told Salon.

The volume of anti-LGBTQ legislation progressing in the U.S. last year even prompted the Human Rights Campaign to declare a national state of emergency for LGBTQ Americans, marking a first for the advocacy organization. 

"We have states where governors have turned their own trans constituents into refugees in search of health care, and good education, basic rights and freedoms," Brandon Wolf, the HRC's national press secretary, told Salon,

The state of emergency is not just one large danger, he added, quoting HRC President Kelley Robinson, "it's millions of individual moments of crisis that happen every single day."

Those crises contradict the views of anti-trans-bill supporters, who believe gender transitions are harmful to children and young adults, and argue patients should wait until they're older before making the decision to begin transitioning. Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp referenced such a claim when announcing that he signed a bill barring doctors from beginning hormone therapy for trans minors in March.

"Anti-trans legislation has become such a target for some lawmakers because they view it as a way to score easy political points," she told Salon, adding: "At the same time these bills are fueled by misinformation, the misinformation also allows these bills to perpetuate themselves."

The defeat of 228 anti-LGBTQ bills in 2023 also suggests that most Americans aren't buying into the conservative paranoia and right-wing rhetoric that stokes the anti-trans legislative movement, Wolf told Salon. 

Right-wing activists in America "promised the power-hungry politicians who signed up for their agenda that anti-LGBTQ+ hysteria would be a political slam dunk," Wolf said. "They promised that it would deliver election wins, that it would help usher in an area of authoritarian power, where democracy is no longer regarded as a shared value but seen as simply an obstacle. And by and large, they failed."

"[T]here really is no such thing as freedoms that only belong to other people, that when you allow one group of people's rights and freedoms to be restricted, you're really just laying the groundwork for the same to be done to your own."

1930's and 1940's Germans learned the hard way that attacks on Jews were just the beginning of the erosion of rights for all,