The Real Danger To Kids Is Hatred, Homophobia, And Bigotry
They're not "saving" children ; they're embarrassing themselves in the name of "saving" children
I may have butted heads with my parents on far too many occasions, but one of the things I’m most grateful for is that they taught me early on that people are people. That may sound simple, but in our family, it meant that there was no “right” or “wrong” way to live, that each person had the right to choose for themselves, and no one had the power to pass judgment on them for it. It was a radical philosophy for a Northern Minnesota family and one that didn’t stick with all of my brothers.
Largely because of how I was raised, I set off for college assuming everyone looked at the world that way. Au contraire, Mon Ami. I soon found out that wasn’t the case at all. Some of my gay friends paid quite a price for simply being who they are. Some were beaten, some badly harassed, and it was made quite apparent to them that they were “less than.” This was during the early ‘80s, just before the AIDS crisis broke out. Things only got worse for them after AIDS became a thing.
Over the last couple of decades, the population of openly homophobic troglodytes appeared to have significantly diminished. However, the advent of Donald Trump brought the haters and homophobes into the open. As a result, the past few years have seen a substantial increase in open, virulent homophobia- such as what happened in Dallas recently.
We've been talking about how a big part of the fascist Christian right's obsession with accusing everyone else of "grooming" has to do with their desperate and futile obsession with preventing the next generation from becoming LGBTQ. Because they cling to ignorant beliefs like they cling to their guns and their Trump-autographed Bibles, they think if they just keep kids from seeing LGBTQ folks on TV or from reading about LGBTQ characters in books or seeing LGBTQ people in public, then they'll never be exposed to the concept, and therefore will grow up to be mindless mouthbreathing bigots like their parents.
These people are fucking morons. We've been explaining for decades that LGBTQ people simply exist, and that nothing they can do can change that, but they don't believe it. And so they're obsessed with eliminating it. Yes, people should understand that has potentially genocidal implications. We're dealing with white Christian fascists, after all.
Here is Greg Kelly, the beclowned Newsmax host, calling
the copscrimestoppers because he saw a video on the internet of kids in Dallas attending a drag show that's for kids.
OMG!! What about the children?? What about our poor, impressionable snowflakes??
Greg says he's calling Dallas police, but as Mediaite explains, and as you can hear in the recording, he's calling the North Texas Crime Commission, which is where you call for crimestoppers.
People can debate whether Kelly's schtick is performance art or he needs therapy or both — those are the only options we're providing — but this is what he's selling to his paste-eating viewers. He's yelling into the crimestoppers voicemail that he saw a "horrible video" online of "dancing transvestites with young children." He explains it "happened in the heart of Dallas," calling it "incredibly inappropriate" and "probably criminal."
Incredibly inappropriate? Probably criminal? Or is Kelly jealous because he wasn’t frolicking with the “dancing transvestites?” And what is Kelly so afraid of? Children are being exposed to a different side of life without being taught that it’s icky/awful/despicable/immoral/all of the above?
Then again, Greg Kelly does seem the poster boy for White Christian fascism, doesn’t he? Given that he works for Newsmax, you can bet he’s not renowned for his open-minded consideration of multiple sides of an issue.
Sometimes, the fear, ignorance, and homophobia displayed by White Christian fascists can be EPIC. And astonishingly dense.
It doesn't matter how much anybody ever points out that a kid is clearly a hell of a lot more likely to be in danger of being sexually exploited near a Southern Baptist church leader than they are at a drag show. These people think the existence of LGBTQ people is inappropriate. Read their own coverage of this event. They're not hiding it.
And as we said above, they think kids become LGBTQ by being exposed to LGBTQ people. They think they can prevent it. (When the reality is that kids who are already going to grow up LGBTQ are merely less likely to grow up depressed and suicidal if they see early and often that there are people out there just like them and their families support them.)
Do you see the overinflated pig-ignorance we are dealing with here?
It makes me wonder if those who were all fired up to “protect the children” even bothered to find out what was happening before they went nuclear.
Something tells me this was a case of “Ready! Fire! Aim!” You can do that when you ignorantly and incorrectly associate the LGBTQ community with pedophilia and recruiting children.
Haters gonna hate, right?
Ultimately, the Sturm und Drang has nothing to do with protecting children. It’s about harassing the LGBTQ community in whatever way White Christian fascists can. It’s about spreading hatred and homophobia and bullying people who are only looking to have an enjoyable afternoon.
Most bullying is done in groups because they lack the courage to take people on individually. In groups, individuals feed off one another and feel more courageous, so their behavior becomes even more offensive and intrusive.
The looming barrage of organized attacks on the LGBTQ community at this year’s Pride events by homophobic right-wing extremists tipped off last weekend in Dallas, where a notorious white nationalist led a crew of protesters who attempted to invade a family-friendly drag show held as part of the city’s Pride Week on Saturday.
Chanting “Groomers! Groomers!” while antifascist activists prevented them from entering, the crowd of about 40 protesters stood outside and hurled abuse at participants while carrying signs reading “Stop exploiting our kids” and “Confuse a child, abuse a child.” It had been organized on Facebook by an anti-LGBT outfit called Protect Texas Kids, but the crowd’s leader on Saturday was John Doyle, a leading figure in the white-nationalist American Populist Union (APU) and a popular YouTuber who specializes in racist, misogynist, and homophobic rants.
These are not nice or, in many cases, even well-adjusted people. They see nothing wrong with intruding upon the lives and activities of others they deem as behaving offensively. They can’t conceive of a moral framework outside their narrow worldview. Anyone coloring outside those lines is sick, immoral, wrong, and should be terrorized into understanding that.
Truthfully, if these hateful cretins took an honest look in the mirror, they’d see “sick, immoral, and wrong” in abundance. But, unfortunately, they lack the self-awareness and the honesty to recognize it.
Doyle first approached people gathered outside the event, a ticketed private show held at a gay bar but with no alcohol for sale, and marched up to them and began harassing them with snide remarks through a bullhorn, calling them “groomers” and “pedophiles.” One mother who had accompanied children who fled in terror from Doyle and the cluster of about a dozen MAGA-hatted “Groypers” who accompanied him turned and berated the smirking young men: “Shame on you!”….
Doyle and his compatriots were undisguised provocateurs. One protester standing next to him told a rainbow-haired counterprotester, “I can’t wait until we take all your rights away,” smirking. Doyle chimed in: “Every one, every single one of them.”
He later berated police officers who showed up and prevented them from tangling with antifascists, urging them to go inside and arrest the drag show’s participants. “The sheriffs in Texas need to go in there and blow off all their heads,” he told them. “That’s what the badge is for.”
Before the rise of Trumpism, these mouth-breathers almost certainly wouldn’t have seen the light of day. Instead, they would’ve existed in virtual anonymity in the swampy corners of the Internet, reduced to complaining about being unable to get laid.
One has to ask what self-respecting woman would give it up for someone like John Doyle and his band of impotent, wienie-less troglodytes?
Truthfully, the real “groomers” are people like John Doyle, who aim to teach people to hate those not like them. Speaking only for myself, I’m grateful for diversity because it means there are fewer mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging cementheads like John Doyle walking the Earth.
People are people. They are who they are. Children don’t become gay because they’re exposed to men in drag at a Pride event. They become gay because they come to understand that’s who they are. They should be proud of who they are, whatever path they choose. It’s not for haters and bigots like John Doyle to tell them if that path is right or wrong.
No, that’s a role to which simpletons like Texas State Rep. Bryan Slaton (R) are more than happy to appoint themselves.
That’s a GREAT look for someone whose Twitter bio reads, “Christian Conservative. Proud Texan. Defender of Liberty.” Man, those White Christian Fascists sure are big on Liberty, eh?
Just as long as you’re White, Conservative, Christian, and heterosexual, that is. All others need not apply.
And people wonder why I don’t miss Texas.
I still believe that people are people and that even sick haters and faux Christians like Bryan Slaton or John Doyle have the right to believe as they will. They don’t have the right to curtail the rights of others who happen not to live, love, think, and believe as they do. They’re free to live the life they choose and feel as they see fit, just like those in the LGBTQ community. Slaton and Doyle need not agree with that. That’s the beauty of America, though- there’s a place for ALL of us.
They can become physically ill in the presence of someone attracted to a member of the same sex, but that’s a “THEM” problem. They have no ethical, moral, OR legal right to curtail the rights of another person. Period. End of story. No questions allowed. You don’t have to like it, but tough s**t; that’s what America’s about- not just YOUR freedom; everyone’s freedom.
I feel sorry for hypocrites like John Doyle and Bryan Slaton. It’s not easy carrying around so much hatred despite referring to themselves as “Christian.” They’re about as Christian as I am the Queen of Sweden.
I don’t care if you get off buggering the tailpipe of a Lamborghini in the dark of night. If that’s what gets you through the night, you be you, Rosebud. Are you a good person? Do you treat others with respect? Do you help others when they need a hand? If you can answer “yes” to all three of those questions, you’re someone I’d like to have in my life.
People are people. Live and let live. Don’t be a dick.
Life will be much more pleasant for all of us if you can do those three simple things.
I’m a white, middle-class American. I attended a large, rather progressive high school in Central New York. In 1982, I had a creative writing class, and the teacher (we’ll call him Mr. W) was simply the finest teacher I ever had.
He was also gay, but in 1982, such things were not discussed openly. A number of asshole students would go out of their way to tell me that Mr. W was “a fag,” or worse. (My thought was, “Who cares? He’s a great teacher.”)
Moving forward in time, society got a bit better for the gay community. My city had pride parades, and duck races to promote fighting racism, and more. I took my young children to all of them.
Flash-forward to 2011, when my younger son ALSO had Mr. W for an English teacher, and ALSO thought he was fantastic… but in the intervening years, the school had formed a Gay/Straight Alliance club, chaired by Mr. W (now free to be openly gay) and Ms F, a straight English teacher. My 18 year old son joined the group as the only straight student.
‘Round about that same time, I took my older son on a pub crawl through the city for his 21st birthday. We STARTED at a popular gay bar, because the drinks were cheap and the music was good. Neither of us felt uncomfortable (nor did we feel that we were making the standard clientele uncomfortable.)
I and my kids are all straight. (I know… amazingly, all this exposure to “gaydom” didn’t convert us to some “perverted lifestyle.”)
Along those same lines, none of us are racist. I proudly fly a “Black Lives Matter” banner at the front of the extensive garden that is my front yard, and my younger son rented a limo for his prom, which he shared with Somalian friends from school.
My parents taught me that “people are people,” and I passed that learning down to my children (as, I am sure, they will do to the next generation when the time comes.)
These days, ALL of us (AND my ex-wife, my present wife, my mother, and my friends) kind of gasp in incredulity at the hatred that now permeates a huge portion of this country. It would be EASY (though perhaps too facile) to blame Trump for all of this. It’s not just Trump. It’s a lurking thing that has been morphing into its present virulence since the days of “manifest destiny” and the destruction/ subjugation of the Native Americans, or, later, “Irish need not apply.” The ideas of “illegal” people in this country, anti-Black sentiment almost 160 years after the Civil War, denigrating Puerto Ricans as non-American, blaming Asians for Covid (or jobs shipped overseas), or “replacement theory, ” or, well, the list just keeps growing… ALL stem from the “FACT” that White Europeans OWN this country, and the “FACT” that this was “God-given” to ONLY White Christians since the 1500s.
Would that our society could move forward, say, five centuries or so.
I won’t hold my breath.