How to Win LGBT Equality in the South

After years of effort LGBT Virginians will have non-discrimination protects effective July 1, 2020. What finally allowed this to happen?  The short answer is Democrats took control of the Virginia General Assembly while holding the governor's mansion.  The more detailed answer is that the majority of Virginians finally said "no more' to the Virginia GOP's three pillars of its agenda: demonizing gays, unrestricted gun rights, and pandering to the hate merchants who parade as "Christians" while basically pushing a white supremacist agenda.  With Democrats now able to revise the redistricting process, Republic strength in the state, which relied heavily on gerrymandering, will likely be reduced further. Making similar progress across the rest of the South will be far more difficult as the GOP remains entrenched and blindly follows the dictates of Christofascists even as the lack of non-discrimination protections makes other Southern states less competitive in attracting new businesses - something that ought to priority No. 1 in the age of an economically crippling pandemic.  A piece in The Advocate looks at the situation and concludes that federal legislation may be the only way to bring LGBT protections to the South as a whole (yet another reason to strive to have Democrats take control in Washington, DC).  Here are article highlights:

In a time when COVID-19 has brought such heartbreak to so many and has so disrupted the normal routines of life, it can be hard to yank our attention from the moment we are in. 

But something truly significant has taken place in Virginia this month. The politics of the state’s legislature finally caught up with the values of the state’s people as a law ensuring comprehensive nondiscrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people went into effect. Years and years of tenacious and hopeful work went into this historic bipartisan LGBTQ victory in Virginia — the first statewide win for a comprehensive nondiscrimination bill in the South. 

Winning anywhere in the South matters for the LGBTQ people who are actually impacted by the passage of a law, but it also ripples across the region’s political and cultural climate, and it changes the story: Now, it is possible to pass nondiscrimination legislation here. 

The South demands a multipronged strategy. There are states where it will take too long to win on the state level, and that’s why we must push hard for federal legislation, the most effective way to deliver protections to every corner of the South. 

In many Southern states, legislatures remain a bastion of anti-LGBTQ sentiment — just witness the recent cluster of bills targeting transgender youth that made headlines this year in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and more. Far-right conservatives continue to be overrepresented in Southern legislatures, and their positions are increasingly out of sync with the growing majority that supports LGBTQ rights. 

Look at North Carolina’s efforts to pass a bill protecting young people from anti-LGBTQ “conversion therapy,” . . . . the bill hasn’t yet moved out of committee — it was held up without even a hearing because Republican leadership of the North Carolina General Assembly wanted it defeated. Specifically,  a small group of powerful legislators who were doubling down on a view held by just the 13 percent of Republicans who opposed banning “conversion therapy.”

Stories like this are a salient reminder that LGBTQ Southerners continue to meet every formal definition of political powerlessness. Indeed, it is a particular variety of political powerlessness when a minority group has the support of an overwhelming majority of the public but still can’t achieve the basic threshold of equal protection under the law because a small group of politically powerful politicians are systematically blocking natural progress. 

Deploying both real-time and long-game organizing strategies is critical in every single Southern state. But this approach creates a patchwork of progress rather than a blanket of protections. That’s why we need to simultaneously focus on the passage of federal legislation like the Equality Act, which passed in the House of Representatives but is currently stalled in the Senate.

More than one-third of all LGBTQ Americans live in the South. This is our home, and we’ll continue to fight for and celebrate progress like this victory in Virginia. Indeed, as millions of Americans face unemployment and grave health and financial challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, nondiscrimination protections in the workplace, healthcare settings, and housing are more essential than ever. 

We are ultimately hopeful about what’s possible in the South. But we simply cannot wait for every state legislature to catch up with the people of the South. 

Every poll you can find and countless stories I could share, from the mountains of North Carolina to the Gulf Coast of Missisissipi, demonstrate that the people of the South are ready for federal LGBTQ protections. The next step is to move from “ready for” to “calling for” and “demanding.” 

This is what it will take to compel Congress to do its job and pass clear and comprehensive protections from anti-LGBTQ discrimination. It’s time that no one — not in the South or in any other region — is left vulnerable to discrimination.

Leaked Emails Show Trump’s Minion Promoted White Nationalism

Many Republican "friends" take offense when confronted with the reality that one of the Trump/Pence policies that attracted swing voters that allowed Trump to eek out a narrow Electoral College win is the active promotion of white nationalism.  Perhaps that truth hits a bit to close to home for their consciences. In any event, newly leaked emails underscore how Trump point man on immigration, Stephen Miller, the Joseph Goebbels of the Trump/Pence regime, actively promoted white nationalism to pander to the ugliest elements of the GOP base.  As noted previously, good people do not support bad people and cruel and vicious policies based on hatred. Republican "friends" need to decide whether or not they are indeed good people and cease their support of Trump/Pence and white nationalist policies or, instead, admit to themselves and the world that they are not good people and are cut from the same cloth as Stephen Miller and the overt racist policies he espouses. They do not get to have it both ways. The Washington Post reports on the cache of Miller emails. Here are excepts:

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller sought to promote white nationalism, far-right extremist ideas and anti-immigrant rhetoric through the conservative site Breitbart, according to a report released Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The report is the first installment in a series that draws on more than 900 emails that Miller sent to a Breitbart writer over a 15-month period between 2015 and 2016 and were given to the SPLC. The report describes Miller’s emails as overwhelmingly focused on race and immigration and characterizes him as obsessed with ideas such as “white genocide” (a conspiracy theory associated with white supremacists) and sharply curbing nonwhite immigration.

In the wake of the news Tuesday, at least one member of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), called for Miller to resign.

Among the more damning email exchanges highlighted in the SPLC report is one that shows Miller directing a Breitbart reporter to aggregate stories from the white-supremacist journal American Renaissance, or “AmRen,” for stories that emphasize crimes committed by immigrants and nonwhites. In another, Miller is apparently upset that Amazon removed Confederate battle flag merchandise from its marketplace in the wake of the 2015 Charleston church massacre; others reportedly show him promoting “The Camp of the Saints,” a racist French novel popular among white nationalists.

SPLC’s report indicates Miller was widely successful in molding the race- and immigration-focused stories that appeared on Breitbart. It repeatedly details how an email from Miller corresponded to a related article later appearing on the site.

The emails were provided to the SPLC by Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart writer and editor who exchanged scores of messages with Miller during his time transitioning from a press aide for then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to a senior adviser with then-candidate Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. . . . McHugh has since denounced her association with white nationalism and the far right.

“[McHugh] is well aware of the risks she took in giving us the material and confirming information,” said SPLC investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden, who wrote the report. “I think that’s incredibly brave.”

Hayden told The Post that he made contact with McHugh earlier this year as she was formerly on the periphery of several extremist groups he was following. McHugh was familiar with his work, Hayden said, and mentioned having materials she wanted to show him. After allowing him to view the emails on what Hayden recalled was “a very old computer,” McHugh ultimately decided to release the emails to him.

“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” McHugh said to the SPLC.

Several years on from the email exchanges, Miller is probably at the height of his power within the West Wing. As The Post previously reported, Miller is one of Trump’s longest-tenured advisers — along with Kellyanne Conway and Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner — and the most influential adviser shaping the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Excerpted emails shared with The Post show Miller drawing on stories from outlets such as the anti-immigration white-nationalist site VDARE and the conspiracy theory website Infowars and sending them to McHugh. Miller appears to urge McHugh to write about the stories and discusses how to frame them and push them to prominence on Breitbart’s site.

Hayden said. “The most important takeaway for me is that Stephen Miller found the basis for his ideas on websites that traffic in hate, and made it clear in his emails."

Miller is a thoroughly foul individual who has even been condemned by his own family members for his racism and advocacy for inhumane policies. He is a modern day Goebbels.

The 10 Biggest Homophobes and Transphobes of 2018

Homophobes Dallin H. Oaks, Mary Fallin, and Roger Severino.

As is common as December 31st approaches, many news outlets are looking back for significant events of the past year as well as heroes and villains.  In the last category should be included those who peddle hatred of others, especially LGBT individuals, under the smoke screen of religion or political self-prostitution to haters and hate groups.  A piece in The Advocate looks at some of the worse homophobes and and purveyors of hate towards those who are transgender.  Not surprisingly, the faux "Christian" Alliance Defending Freedom, the Roman Catholic Church, the Mormon Church and Republican politicians and apparatchiks that the prizes as the most hate-filled groups/individuals domestically.  The following are article highlights that look at these hate merchants and religious zealots:

LGBTQ people have made great strides toward equality in the U.S. and around the world, but we still have homophobes and transphobes trying to roll back our progress, and unfortunately some of them are running the country. We of course have had the usual suspects to deal with -- Mike Pence, Tony Perkins, Bryan Fischer, Louie Gohmert, Pat Robertson, and many more -- but here we'll spotlight some of those who particularly made news this year. 

Alliance Defending Freedom  The year's top Phobie Aware goes to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal nonprofit that specializes in causes important to the religious right. . . . . The ADF is still fighting for the right to discriminate. It's asked the Supreme Court to take up cases where ADF is trying to end a Pennsylvania school district's transgender-inclusive restroom policy and advocating for a funeral home's right to fire a trans employee. Oh, and it's got another case involving Masterpiece Cakeshop, for a refusal to make a birthday cake that celebrates a trans woman's gender transition. The ADF contends that the state of Colorado is harassing Philllips by expecting him to obey the antidiscrimination law.

Dallin H. Oaks [Mormon Chrch]  It's not news that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, known informally as the Mormon Church, isn't accepting of LGBTQ people, but one of its top leaders, Dallin H. Oaks, took the homophobia and transphobia to new heights this year. “Our knowledge of God’s revealed plan of salvation requires us to oppose many of the current social and legal pressures to retreat from traditional marriage or to make changes that confuse or alter gender or homogenize the differences between men and women,” . . . . Those pressures, he said, come from none other than Satan, who “seeks to confuse gender, to distort marriage, and to discourage childbearing, especially by parents who will raise children in truth.” . . . . There's an epidemic of suicide among LGBTQ youth in the church's home state of Utah, and much of the blame can be placed on the denomination's hatred.

Right-wing Catholics  It has been a banner year for homophobia in the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Francis, who once said “Who am I to judge?” about gay priests, said gay people don’t belong in the clergy. Not that the church has ever been truly accepting of gay clergy, but their presence has been an open secret for eons. With the church rocked by sex abuse scandals, Cardinal Gerhard Müller blamed gays for abuse, even though there’s no correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia.

Roger Severino [Trump Appointee] Roger Severino, director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, is overseeing the Trump administration's effort to define transgender people “out of existence,” as The New York Times put it in an October story breaking the news of a memo circulating among federal government agencies to legally define gender as something immutable and fixed at birth, as indicated by a person’s genitalia. He's also spearheading HHS's "conscience protection" efforts, aimed at aiding health care workers with religious objections to serving certain patients, which could well result in denial of care to LGBTQ people. Severino has a long history of working for far-right groups and opposing LGBTQ rights. He has opposed marriage equality, defended “ex-gay” therapy, and objected to allowing transgender people to serve in the military.

Mary Fallin and Jeff Colyer [GOP Governors]  As governors of Oklahoma and Kansas, respectively, Mary Fallin and Jeff Colyer signed bills into law that will allow adoption and foster care agencies that provide state-funded services to reject prospective parents who offend the agencies' religious dogma. They could be interfaith couples, single parents, or, yes, same-sex couples or single LGBTQ people. That's discrimination funded with tax dollars. For Fallin, the action was one more notch in a long record of anti-LGBTQ governing.

Texas Republican Party  Whenever the Texas Republican Party approves a platform, it's sure to be anti-LGBTQ. This year's may be its most hateful yet, though. At its biennial convention in June, the party adopted a platform that again endorses “ex-gay” therapy, as it has since 2014, as well as opposing marriage equality and supporting business owners’ right to discriminate against anyone who offends their religious sensibilities. It makes a new call for the state to repeal its hate-crimes law and opposes all efforts to recognize transgender people’s identity. 

Ann Coulter Goes to War with Trump

Not only is Donald Trump facing attacks from Hillary Clinton, but now anorexic drag queen look alike, Ann Coulter has declared war on Trump for his seeming flip-flop on immigration just in time for the launch of Coulter's new book, "In Trump We Trust."  It truly doesn't get anymore delicious in terms of irony!   I have always found Coulter to be a foul hate merchant who happily makes a living sowing hate and discord.  That Trump seemingly pulled the rug out from under her at her book launch is sweet beyond measure.  Talking Points Memo looks at the war fare  (read the entire piece to savor Coulter's twitter rants):  

Liberals may die tonight because there are limited supplies of those injections they give you for acute schadenfreude toxicity. Ann Coulter has been Donald Trump's biggest New York City white nationalist supporter. She's transformed toadying into a militant act. Just today her new book In Trump We Trust was released, a genuflecting, tour de force of leader principle obsequiousness. As many have noted, in the book itself she writes that Trump can do anything, change his position on anything - none of it matters. She and they are that devoted. Everything except shift on immigration.

So today, the very day her book comes out he shambles his way to embracing the Rubio/Bush 'Amnesty' agenda he spent the last year railing against and using as a cudgel to destroy the Republican establishment's favored ones. She even had an opening book party hosted by Breitbart.

Already at the book party, photos snapped by Twitters journos showed a sad visage and perhaps a growing thunder ...

I've been waiting all evening to see whether she's muscle through at least the first day of the book tour without acknowledging Trump had dumped her whole agenda. It seems not.

It seems Coulter will be the Dylan Thomas of Trump Dignity Wraiths. She won't go gently in that good night.

Hillary Clinton Launches "Alt-Right" Attack on Trump

While the self-prostitution of the Republican Party to right wing extremist groups has been going on for years, much of the activity went on under the radar to those who are not political junkies.  The GOP establishment always tried to at least put a little bit of limp stick on its dog whistle racism and empowerment of Christian Dominionist.  With the rise of Donald Trump, all pretense of civility and decency was thrown out the window and ugly elements of right wing society were openly welcomed or at least not spurned as Trump sought to win the vote of every angry white voter, every white supremacist, and every Christofascist extremest.  Now, Hillary Clinton has released an ad that ties Donald Trump to all of these horrible, scary people that can be found here.   A piece in New York Magazine looks at Clinton's move and why it is a calculated risk, but likely a smart idea.  Here are highlights:

From the very beginning of the 2016 general election, it has been obvious that Hillary Clinton’s campaign would go after Donald Trump with a claw hammer. He presented too ripe a target to ignore even momentarily, and given Republican misgivings about him it made obvious sense to exploit Trump’s weaknesses in order to both detach potential supporters and to frighten the Democratic base into showing up to vote. Beyond that, it seemed logical in a contest between two relatively unpopular pols to do everything possible to ensure that media coverage revolved around the other candidate.

But while a negative (or if you wish, “comparative”) campaign was a no-brainer, HRC’s campaign still had to decide on its scope and focus. They could simply underline Trump’s out-there rhetoric and unpopular issue positions again and again. They could instead make him out as a conventional Republican with a conventional Republican’s weaknesses — as a sort of rough-hewn and profane version of Mitt Romney. They could execute a combo platter of the above strategies.

Or they could Go Big and attack Donald Trump the way shocked elites in both parties tend to think of him: as the representative of a new and scary departure in conservative politics that replaced the usual litany of limited-government priorities with ethno-nationalism and a violent reaction to cultural change. 

With the new ad Clinton unveiled yesterday and her speech in Reno, Nevada, today, it’s clear that for the moment at least her campaign is indeed Going Big.

The ad does not begin with much subtlety, as noted on Politico:

“The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in,” a robed man identified as the Imperial Wizard of the Rebel Brigade Knights of the Ku Klux Klan says at the top of the video, followed by images of a Confederate flag fluttering in the wind, Trump waving after a speech, and a man performing a Hitler salute at what appears to be a Trump rally.

But then the ad seeks to do two fairly complicated things very briefly: explain the ethno-nationalist background of Trump campaign chairman and Breitbart News exec Stephen Bannon; and introduce the concept of “alt-right” as the broader movement backing Trump.

Clinton’s subsequent speech in Reno followed the same tack with significantly more detail. She spent considerable time presenting what you might call Trump’s racist prehistory, before his presidential candidacy, concluding with his support for the “racist conspiracy theory” of birtherism.

Her key argument was that Trump had, time and time again, resisted opportunities to repudiate racism and racists, and was only now ineffectively trying to change his tune. Her best sound-bite was suggesting that Trump’s slogan could well be: “Make America Hate Again.” And she concluded with a very direct challenge to Republicans to reject the “takeover,” citing Bob Dole’s call for racists to leave the GOP and George W. Bush’s defense of American Muslims.

All in all, it was a pretty compelling pitch that aggregated a lot of negative material on Trump’s unsavory comments and associations; the ad made more sense once you listened to her explanations. But this tack is not without risks.

For one thing Clinton and her campaign will need to devote far more resources to the kind of explanations she gave in Reno before it will begin to “stick” with voters who aren’t already hip to the ins and outs of white nationalism and Trump’s association with it. There are opportunity costs associated with that investment as well: It won’t leave as much time as she once had to focus on his dubious personal business record, his irresponsible tax plan, his climate-change denialism, and his incoherent foreign policy views.

[T]he great virtue of what Clinton is doing now is that it brings the widespread elite horror at Trump in both major parties down to earth and into the mainstream of the campaign. In the chattering classes it’s been an open and incessantly discussed question as to whether Trump represents the sudden advent of of an alien strain of crypto-fascism, or merely a crude version of old-school American right-wing populism.

For Republican elites, it hasn’t just been a matter of deciding whether to support or not support Trump as their leader; some conservative thinkers and opinion leaders view the mogul as an existential threat to everything they believe in. Bringing this mostly negative furor about Trump to actual voters instead of shouting about it over their heads isn’t the easiest choice, but could be the best choice.

What will be most interesting is whether these tactics shake the (mostly) stubborn loyalty of Republican voters to their nominee, and even turn a significant number of them to a one-time vote for a Democrat.

But either way, Clinton certainly knows that going after Trump in so visceral a manner will be wildly popular with Democratic activists starved for a presidential candidate willing to give as good as she gets in partisan warfare. And when it comes to “energizing the base” and perhaps deterring progressives from a vote for Jill Stein, you cannot get much more galvanizing than a warning that indifference or apostasy could elect a racist monster to the cheers of Nazis, Klansmen, and Vladimir Putin. From that perspective, Clinton’s new tack may well be a carefully calculated risk.