Pride Month Is Needed Amid A Rise In Discrimination

The following (and very frightening) op-ed is by Charles M. Blow in The New York Times. Here is just a part of it:

This year there is a pall over Pride.

As the L.G.B.T.Q. community celebrates Pride Month, we are besieged by a malicious, coordinated legislative attack.

There’s been a notable rise in the number of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills since 2018, and that number has recently accelerated, with the 2023 state legislative year being the worst on record.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, in 2023 there have been more than 525 such bills introduced in 41 states, with more than 75 bills signed into law as of June 5. In Florida — the state that became known for its “Don’t Say Gay” law — just last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that banned gender transition care for minors and prohibited public school employees from asking children their preferred pronouns.

As Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, recently told me, the number of signed bills is likely to move higher: “There’s 12 more that are sitting on governors’ desks, so you could be at nearly 100 new restrictions on the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community by the end of this cycle.”

For that reason, on Tuesday, for the first time in its more than 40-year history, the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for L.G.B.T.Q. people in the United States.

I recently spoke with several leaders of L.G.B.T.Q. groups and historians who have documented the community’s history, and they all raised the alarm about the severity of what we’re seeing.

There have been other periods of backlash against the queer community, including with the passage of oppressive legislation, but this one has moved with alarming political calculation and efficacy.

“This is a terror campaign against our community,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of GLAAD, the pre-eminent L.G.B.T.Q. media advocacy organization.

The way this kind of terrorism works is that it not only punishes expression, condemns identities and cuts off avenues for receiving care but also creates an aura of hostility and issues grievous threats. It’s like burning a cross on someone’s lawn: It’s an attempt to frighten people into compliance and submission.

The Republican politicians pushing anti-L.G.B.T.Q. laws usually pretend that their principal, if not their sole, motivation is to protect children. But these laws operate in furtherance and protection of the fragile patriarchy, in perpetuation of the twin evils of homophobia and heterosexism and in reinforcement of abusive gender-identity policing.

These politicians play to a segment of the population that sees any divergence from its primitive ideals as deviant. So they build boxes. But for too many people, particularly young people, those boxes can become caskets: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five gay, lesbian or bisexual high school students attempted suicide in the past year. Last year the Trevor Project found that 45 percent of L.G.B.T.Q. youths seriously considered attempting suicide in the preceding year.

These politicians have Willie Horton-ized the transgender equality movement and, by extension, the whole movement for L.G.B.T.Q. equality.