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| 'How They See Us,' a crash course on the anti-LGBTQ groups hoping to grab power under Trump. |
Due to recent attacks on queer equality by the Trump Administration and the boasting of the religious right and anti-LGBTQ hate groups (such as the Family Research Council) that they played a hand in these attacks, I think it's time to pull out information from the archives of this blog. We need a crash course in what we are dealing with.
In 2013, I published a free online booklet, How They See Us: Unmasking the Religious Right War on Gay America.
How They See Us breaks down how organizations like the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, and others exploit religious beliefs, fear, and junk science to demonize the LGBTQ community.
An excerpt says the following:
. . . their idea of Christian values seem to rely heavily on forgetting the ninth commandment against bearing false witness because these groups have declared war on the gay community and their weapons are propaganda designed exploit fear and religious beliefs. Through a clever use of junk science, misrepresented scientific work, outright lies, or . . . demeaning images, they work to stand as a roadblock to any advancement of gay equality by stigmatizing the gay community and falsely labeling homosexuality as a threat to societal order and wellness. And what’s worse, they use the religious belief which designates homosexuality to be a sin as a free license to sugarcoat their tactics as mere “expressions of their personal religious beliefs” and label every question regarding these tactics as an “attack on their religious liberty” or an attempt to “silence” them. What these groups do is nothing new and it’s certainly nothing Christian or moral about it. When any group spreads propaganda, it’s always “in defense” of something and it usually scapegoats a group undeserving of such hostilities. Whether it be the defense of “Southern culture,” the “German homeland,” or “Judeo-Christian values,” it all adds up to the same thing - isolating an innocent group as the essence of evil and claiming that if only said group were put in its place, the world would be a better place.
A key part of How They See Us spotlights images from a 1986 anti-gay comic book which sought to show the so-called dangers of the so-called “homosexual lifestyle” through stereotypes brought to life via an artist’s pen. I compare the ugly images in that comic to statements made in recent years by members of religious right groups.
In addition, I also show the subtle ways anti-LGBTQ groups push horror stories about the queer community, as well as distort science, to promote the the false idea that being gay is a "dangerous lifestyle."
With Trump in the White House, these groups can cause a lot of mischief. But so can we. With more power comes more scrutiny. In the past, they could get away with playing the "religious beliefs" card. However, as a recent Newsweek article has shown, there is a lot more spotlight focused on them.
With that spotlight comes a need to educate about these groups. The main thing being everything they do and say is a smokescreen. When they talk about "protecting the safety of women and children" "military readiness," "religious liberty," or "protecting marriage and American values," it all comes down to one thing - keeping the LGBTQ community underfoot, powerless, demoralized both physically and spiritually, and above all, with no rights.
Read it, download it, share it.