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| SC Gov Henry McMaster |
Apparently the GOP has found a new target to create hysteria amongst its base.
There seems to be a bullseye painted on the book Gender Queer: A Memoir, with legislators and other elected officials as well as the astroturfed parental concern groups and spokespeople pointing to images in the book they claim are pornographic.
In other words, they have all conveniently found a focal point and will attempt to exploit it to the fullest extent to radicalize their supporters and demonize efforts to educate people on the lives and plight of LGBTQ people and specifically our LGBTQ kids.
It demonstrates two things - 1. That the nonsense over Critical Race Theory is apparently dying out. 2. How easy it is for them to pivot to targeting LGBTQ Americans.
Here are just a few of the instances in which it is happening:
Debate over explicit memoir becomes a focus of GOP gov races - GOP gov candidates are clearly mimicking a successful strategy ov VA Gov-elect Glenn Youngkin by targeting books as 'the enemy' of parents.
GOP governor bans LGBTQ book in school library as ‘obscene’ - In my state of South Carolina.
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| According to the Family Research Council, Billy Porter as the fairy godmother in 'Cinderella' is part of a 'leftist plot' to get children interested in gay sex. |
Conservative evangelical organization the Family Research Council has never abandoned the false claim that LGBTQ people are trying to 'recruit' children for sex. The group simply engages in creative ways to state it. Such as the following email:
. . . The far Left has been trying to normalize abnormal sexual behavior through the media for years.
From Amazon's musical "Everybody's Talking About Jamie," about a 16-year-old becoming a drag queen to "Cinderella," featuring Billy Porter as a cross-dressing fairy godmother -- there is now a constant stream of agenda-driven content being created for and directly targeted at our children.
And that's not all: PBS in New York City faced significant backlash for a broadcast of its "Let's Learn" series. The target audience (children three to eight years old) learned something alright -- from drag queen host "Lil Miss Hot Mess." In addition to singing from his book "The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish" to the tune of "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round," Lil Miss explains to children what a drag queen is: "[We are] everyday people who like to play pretend and dress up as often as we can," he said, adding, "I think we make pretty good role models."
PBS, which rakes in a significant amount of taxpayer dollars, has been overwhelmed by complaints from angry parents. And no wonder, considering the man hosting the show happily commented, "I think we might have some drag queens-in-training on our hands."
Oh the horrors!
For those who aren't keeping score, the email is a sequel to FRC's last hysterical money ask when it claimed that Disney, LEGOs, Skittles, and Kellogg's were plotting to 'indoctrinate' children into homosexuality.
Like the last email, FRC is merely trying to scare people. In fact when one eliminates the fear which FRC (and other right-wing sources such as the Daily Caller which was responsible for the non-controversy involving "Lil Miss Hot Mess) infuses into the situation, it's easy to recognize what's going here. Just a bunch of tired hypocrites fueling parental fears to the point of hysterics in order to fundraise. To them, everything showing how LGBTQ people contribute to the diversity of our country (and especially our families) is a plot. Just like to them, any thoughts or mentions of LGBTQ people must be semantically branded with ideas of sexual intercourse. The more vulgar and depraved, the better.
And they especially brand drag queens as if they were cautionary creatures parents used to frighten their children with if they stepped out of line. Forget the monsters like Peg Powler, Nelly Longarms or Jenny Greenteeth which parents evoked to scare their kids from straying too far from home. To FRC, drag queens are monsters to spook strictly the parents. Don't let your children even get close to them. And be careful of any program using them because they are trying to change your children. If you don't, your child may wake you up in the morning to tell you that he or she is gay. Or bisexual. Or transgender. Even worse, you may catch them wearing make-up and doing odd things with those Barbie dolls and He-Man action figures you bought them for Christmas.
While that is a bit over the top, it's akin to the connotative effect the Family Research Council hopes to have on its supporters when it comes to LGBTQ people. That's the irony of groups like the Family Research Council. They claim to be fighting depravity, but the depravity they rail against is usually what they have put into other people's minds.
“During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users, or the vast majority of people with AIDS, had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are? But it would’ve been inconceivable.”
The nearly 8-minute film features previously unreleased audio of former Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes scoffing at, and making light of, persistent questions in a span of three years (1982-1984) on the disease's outbreak from reporter Lester Kinsolving. The audiotape, which includes reporters openly laughing at the notion of a "gay plague," puts the administration's lack of response in perspective."As you can hear in the tape, the whole AIDS issue was treated by Speakes and the press pool, for that matter, as a joke. I'd like to think that the Reagan administration didn't realize what they were grappling with at first," Calonico told MSNBC.Reagan did not utter the word AIDS until 1985, following the death of his friend, Hollywood actor Rock Hudson, from the disease. He did not speak about the disease at length until near the end of his second term in 1987 during an AIDS conference in Washington, D.C. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had died," by the time Reagan made that speech. Reagan also reportedly prevented his surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, from being more aggressive about raising public consciousness of the disease.
