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| The place card for 'How They See Us.' |
In 2013, with the help of a few wonderful friends, I published the online booklet How They See Us: Unmasking The Religious Right War on Gay America. It was a short expose on how religious right groups demonize LGBTQ people via bad science, false accusations, and outright lies.
This what I wrote in the post announcing the booklet:
This booklet is free to anyone who wants to read, download, or link it to their blog. By all means, please do so. And above all, please "like " it on Facebook, twitter, and other forms of social media. In spite of the claims of the religious right, our goal is not to silence them, but to demand an answer from them regarding their tactics. Lies told in the name of God are still lies.
I received little to no mainstream attention (not even from LGBTQ groups) regarding this booklet, but I like to think of it as an underground success (with one million views and over 800 downloads on Scribd).
Things have change over the course of 12 years though. Social media influencers are now doing much of the work of that groups such as the American Family Association and the Family Research Council once did. And their reach is unfortunately enormous. One picture or video deliberately taken of context to portray LGBTQ people as predators of kids can be shared over a million times before it's proven to be false.
So, we are definitely dealing with a different landscape than in 2013. The one thing which will never change however, is the fact that accusations thrown at the LGBTQ community (we are sexually grooming kids, we want to put Christians in jail, we want to destroy America) are lies and these lies can always be defeated if folks fight hard enough to expose them.
With that in mind, I encourage folks to do now what I encouraged them to do 12 years ago - read, download, and share.
