Will Somebody Tell Target Giving in to Bullies Is a Losing Proposition?
Also: LBGTQ+ Hate in Africa: Made in the USA
The right wing tantrum in the U.S. over acceptance of LGBTQ+ humans as a valued part of society has turned to social media driven campaigns to encourage consumer boycotts of companies deemed to be inclusive in their advertising and marketing.
The big picture here is MAGA types believing they have a wedge issue exploitable in ways that “otherize” a group through fear-driven campaigns. In the U.S. and elsewhere, mythology about gay “recruitment” and pedophilia is being used to motivate political action.
Jill Filipovic makes the case in her newsletter:
Right now, there is a global competition between the forces of human-rights-embracing liberal democracy, and the forces of authoritarianism, religiosity, and patriarchy. These are two inherently incompatible ways of being, and for the last few decades, liberal democracy has been on the rise. Now, we’re seeing the forces of patriarchal religious authoritarian rising, too — with Trump in the US, with Erdogan in Turkey, with Putin in Russia, and in nations like Uganda.
Movements for feminism, LGBTQ rights, and human rights are global, too. But we lose the big picture when we think that Trump, for example, is a uniquely American phenomenon, or that laws like the one in Uganda are the result of some uniquely African homophobia. They are interconnected. And the forces at work imprisoning gay men, lesbians, and trans people in Uganda are working just as hard to make life unlivable for LGBTQ people in the US, and anywhere else they can get a hold on power.
Domestically, the focus has been on the “T” in LGBTQ. Mostly made-up Issues around trans and nonbinary identity have been amplified by legislatures and organizations such as the Family Research Council and Do No Harm.
Republican lawmakers are pushing through legislation targeting members of the transgender community, casting them as duplicitous “groomers” and pedophilic threats. Twenty-one states have barred male-born athletes from participating in female scholastic sports. Nineteen states have passed bans on gender-transition procedures for minors. Books perceived to be discussing trans-related issues are being pulled from school libraries (thanks to a very small group of ‘parents rights’ advocates.) The list goes on…
The perceived need for legislation has increased awareness of LGBTQ+ issues and of Pride marketing among right wing and evangelical buyers– who were never meant to be included as sales targets.
There have been some early successes of right wing influencers, including intimidating Target employees, destroying merchandise, and social media videos of individuals harassing customers for simply shopping in the store. And, to nobody's surprise, anonymous bomb threats have been reported nationwide.
From LGBTQ Nation:
Last week, Target said it would be “making adjustments” to its 2023 Pride collection in response to “violent” customer backlash. The store wrote that, since introducing the collection, the retailer had experienced “threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and well-being.” The backlash included anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives recording their visits to the store and accusing store workers of supporting “Satanism” and pedophilia.
GLSEN* also reported receiving “an onslaught of hateful messages and threats to our mission and the physical safety of our staff” as right-wing media outlets spread “harmful and vicious lies” about the organization and its work, GLSEN wrote in a May 27 statement.
Fox News, for example, falsely claimed that GLSEN has been “pushing for kids’ genders to be secretly changed in schools without parental consent” and “providing sexually explicit books to schools for free.”
As evidence of their claims, the right-wing media outlet pointed to GLSEN’s guidelines suggesting that schools only disclose a student’s trans or nonbinary identity to their parents with the student’s consent. Fox News also noted that GLSEN’s “Rainbow Library” of free books for classrooms includes Beyond Magenta, a book that includes one trans person’s recollections of child sexual abuse.
[*Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is an American education organization working to end discrimination, harassment, and bullying based on sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression and to prompt LGBT cultural inclusion and awareness in K-12 schools.]
The righties’ outrage has included Bud Light, Kohls, North Face, and Target along with the flip-flopping over drag queens by the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the outcry over male models in Adidas women’s swimwear.
From the Los Angeles Blade:
The campaign against LGBTQ+ inclusion in stores is not grassroots, but rather a calculated move by the same far-right influencers responsible for the early anti-trans bills this year. Matt Walsh, who advised on and posted the very first anti-trans bill this year, delineated the strategy in April. His approach: “Pick a victim, gang up on it, and make an example of it. We can’t boycott every woke company or even most of them. But we can pick one, it hardly matters which, and target it with a ruthless boycott campaign. Claim one scalp then move onto the next.”
On the other side of the planet, Uganda is being held up as a role model for anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns, following years of effort by U.S. and Russia-based evangelicals. Africa has been fertile ground for these preachers of hate, since over 30 countries on the continent have laws on the books calling for imprisonment of LGBTIQ+ people.
Uganda’s president has recently signed into law a bill that imposes the death penalty for certain homosexual acts. It has been called one of the most extreme anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the world and has drawn international condemnation.
According to the Agence France-Presse, governments in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have also all recently embarked on campaigns to suppress efforts to spread awareness about the LGBTQ community in their nations’ schools. Tanzanian activist Fatma Karume told the Agence France-Presse that authorities are searching for easy scapegoats at a time when the broader region is gripped by economic crises. “They want to use this minority group to distract people,” she told the news agency
The bill received overwhelming support in Uganda’s Parliament, with one lawmaker even saying that it doesn’t go far enough and advocating for castration for queer men to prevent them from having sex in prison.
Among those seeding this culture of hate is the World Congress of Families (WCF), an elite international network led by US and Russian ultra-conservatives, best known for publicly and militantly opposing LGBT rights and abortion. Its agenda includes stances against contraception, comprehensive sexuality education (CSE), divorce, single mothers and multi-generational households.
Inflammatory rhetoric around the “gay agenda” and accusations that people were being “recruited” to homosexuality were not prevalent in Uganda prior to a series of lectures delivered by anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical pastor Scott Lively and his American colleagues in 2009.
In 2020, London-based OpenDemocracy found that more than 20 American religious organizations advocating against LGBTQ rights, safe abortion, access to contraceptives and comprehensive sex education had spent at least $54 million furthering their agendas in Africa since 2007. Close to half that figure was spent in conservative, predominantly Christian Uganda alone, where religious advocates advocate for gay “conversion therapy” and tout supposed success stories of “ex-gay” people.
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It is a mistake to disregard the right wing push against LGBTQ+ people as a passing fad. The social media influencers will, eventually, move on to other outrages, but the seeds they have planted will grow, left to their own devices.
Most importantly, the stern patriarchal family is key to the aims of our domestic fascist wannabes. Women are supposed to breed and manly men are necessary to keep order in the household.
I would love to drop in some quotes from today’s Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, but there is so much relevance I’d end up just ripping her off.
You should read the whole thing for yourself. Its connection to the present authoritarian factions in American politics is an eye-opener.
Here’s the lede:
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
Other Stuff I Read This Morning
Texas’s thriving wind industry got sucked into the culture wars by Paul Krugman Via the New York Times. It’s about anti-Woke energy (pun intended).
At this point, investing in renewable energy is simply a good business proposition; Texas Republicans have had to abandon their own free-market, anti-regulation ideology in the effort to strangle wind and solar power. But renewable energy is something environmentalists favor; it’s being promoted by the Biden administration. So in the minds of Texas right-wingers the wind has become woke, and wind power has become something to be fought even if it hurts business and costs the state both money and jobs
If all this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. But that’s Texas — and, I fear, much of America — in 2023
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There’s a new movement for La Jolla to secede from San Diego. Why now? And who might benefit? Via the Union-Tribune
The latest in a series of really bad ideas that refuse to die. Short answer: La Jolla’s afraid of the brown hordes coming to live there.
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Trump pledges to end birthright citizenship on first day in office Via The Hill. Dude, you said you’d do that last time you were in office. And besides, didn’t you already promise to suspend the constitution?
According to the Trump campaign, the executive order “will explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment,” which it says is that the children of foreign nationals born in the United States are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States as defined in the Constitution.
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I did call Target marketing. After a time on the phone tree, my call was answered by a woman employee. I explained nicely that I was opposed to Target giving in to anti pride folks. I further explained that years ago I had embraced, and shopped at Target because of their inclusionary policies. I said I would have to revise that now, and shop elsewhere unless the pride items return to the shelves. She said that may not happen. I said I was sorry.
We're all people, and we all deserve to be honored for being individuals; straight, gay, Bi whatever. She thanked me for my kindness during the call. She said other calls were hostile, just yelling at her.