Lauri Carleton murdered by a Christian fascist in California in front of the store she owned for flying an LGBTQ pride flag. O'Shae Sibley murdered at a New York City gas station for dancing while Black and gay by someone who hurled anti-gay slurs at him and his friends.
Prominent fascists threaten that “for the good of society... transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”1
Across the country, over 500 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures in 2023 alone, and almost half of these specifically target transgender people. As of this writing, 83 of these have been signed into law—more than triple the number passed last year. These bills, in many different ways, legalize discrimination against LGBTQ people right down to banning books that even just mention the existence of LGBTQ people.
Hysterical mobs descend on school boards, libraries, drag shows, pride marches often joined by a contingent of violent armed thugs. They act as if the simple recognition that gay people are human beings and that their existence is OK will somehow result in “grooming” children—that is, manipulating young people to prepare them for sexual exploitation. The fact that this paranoia is insane makes it no less deadly.
This all-sided vicious anti-LGBTQ assault is one of the sharpest edges of the Christian fascist movement. This movement is being unleashed from the highest levels of the ruling class—concentrated in the Republican Party—who are calling forward millions of armed lunatics to prepare for civil war. These fascists are backed up by the Supreme Court, which is rapidly gutting the divide between church and state and which ruled just this June that it's OK to legally discriminate against gay people.2 They are fighting for a biblically based society, purging LGBTQ people from public life, subordinating women, with genocidal white supremacy and anti-immigrant hatred. They are determined, if need be, to rule through open violence and terror. At the heart of this movement is the mythical notion of America as a special god-ordained and Christian nation, a “promised land.”
The intense and widespread lies that LGBTQ people are “pedophiles” or “groomers” is no different than the hysterical fear spread by white racists that Black men were raping white women in the Jim Crow South. A totally groundless fear that was used to justify the mass lynching of Black people.
These lunatics see the very existence of LGBTQ people, let alone their integration into society as who they are, as a life-or-death existential challenge to the “nuclear family” and to traditional oppressive gender relations rooted in the Bible. These fascists argue that “god created men and women” as heterosexuals with immutable, unchangeable divisions of sex and gender. Anyone that does not conform, according to them, needs to be silenced, shunned and violently suppressed.
The intense and widespread lies that LGBTQ people are “pedophiles” or “groomers” is no different than the hysterical fear spread by white racists that Black men were raping white women in the Jim Crow South. A totally groundless fear that was used to justify the mass lynching of Black people. All this has direction and momentum and people need to wake the fuck up to what is happening, where this is coming from, and what's needed now.
So-Called Leaders Tell You to Go to Sleep
This is not some momentary fleeting movement that will dissipate with time, as too many representatives of this system and those who front for it try to tell you. In a recent interview, Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) cited a poll that 84 percent of Americans support equal rights for LGBTQ people but that there's a vocal minority whipping up violence and fear. She argued, “Fundamentally Americans believe that LGBTQ people should have equal rights. That is the basis of our country, that's patriotic, that's American.” She argued that the real problem came when “Trump came in and all of a sudden, we're allowed to be disrespectful, violent and angry towards each other as a society.”
Wait a minute, Sarah, “equal rights” is “the basis of America?!” Bullshit! Genocidal violence and imperial conquest are the real basis of America—from 1619 down to today. This is a country founded on a system of slavery that was made qualitatively more profitable through the legalized mass rape of Black women. A country where, for nearly a century, “we, the people” meant white land-owning men. Where raping your wife wasn't even considered a crime in most states until the 1980s. This is a country where, for most of its history, gay people stayed in the closet—with the danger of losing their jobs and even their lives if they were outed. It wasn't until 2003 that the Supreme Court fully struck down anti-sodomy laws which outlawed sex between men. This is a country of capitalist violence and exploitation, enforcing brutal global inequality—and the celebration of this, with its whole history of war crimes and crimes against humanity, is what it means to be a “patriotic American.” No decent person should want any part of this!
And listen, Sarah, what was done to O'Shae Sibley and what was done to Lauri Carleton were way beyond people being “disrespectful, violent and angry towards each other.” What every gay child in an unfriendly school fears, what every trans woman of color loses sleep over, is way beyond people being “disrespectful, violent and angry towards each other.” We are talking about a concerted assault against the rights, lives and very existence of LGBTQ people. And sorry, but these fascists don't give a fuck if they're going against public opinion! They think they have god on their side.
These mainstream movement organizations like GLAAD, and many others that repeat these same talking points, are tied into the Democratic Party which is most concerned with maintaining this oppressive system. This means keeping people who care about LGBTQ people contained and corralled to the BEB, the Bourgeois Electoral Bullshit! They try to calm you down, normalize this nightmare and convince you to rely on them and what have been the “norms” of this system (even though all those “norms” are being shredded by the fascists).
But maintaining this system is not in your interests!
This system of capitalism-imperialism has the patriarchal oppression and dehumanization of LGBTQ people woven into its foundation. It is changes within this system that are giving rise to violent resurgence of this fanatical prejudice against gay people.3 This won't be ended within this system, but through an actual revolution to put a radically different and far better system in its place.
What's Needed Now
Right now, as part of raising our sights and fighting for that world, people need to be standing up against these fascists. We need to be getting organized to defend each other's rights and lives from these racist, woman-hating and anti-LGBTQ thugs, in and out of government. And we need to do so as one critical part of building up the forces for revolution to overthrow this system which has bred and fostered these fascists.
To all those among the oppressed parroting this biblical anti-LGBTQ poison, you are allowing yourselves to be pitted against other oppressed people by genocidal fascists, when you should be uniting to end oppression. And you need to break with this anti-scientific religious bullshit. As the revolutionary leader and author of the new communism Bob Avakian said recently in his article “God, Prejudice, Oppression, Terror and the Way Out of This Madness”: “Oppressed people who are unable or unwilling to confront reality as it actually is, are condemned to remain enslaved and oppressed.”
The Points of Attention for the Revolution declare, “We fight for a world where ALL the chains are broken. Women, men, and differently gendered people are equals and comrades.” On this basis, we need to come together—to defend our LGBTQ youth, teachers, librarians... all those in the crosshairs of these fascists.
As Bob Avakian wrote in his seminal work Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed. A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution:
Instead of fighting and killing each other, what people need to be doing now is uniting to defend each other—opposing all unjust violence, not launching attacks on anyone but at the same time not allowing the police or “civilian” fascist thugs to wantonly brutalize and murder people. And people need to do this as part of building up the forces for revolution.
Instead of snarking and sniping at each other, and being divided by “identities,” people should be working to unite everyone, from every part of society, who can be united in the fight against oppression and injustice, with the goal of putting an end to this system that is the source of this oppression and injustice.
Instead of being a tail on the Democratic donkey—with its attempt to keep this monstrous system going, and to deal with the growing fascist danger, by relying on the “normal procedures” of this system and doomed efforts to “heal the divisions” that are deepening every day—people need to work for the revolution that is urgently needed, and deal with the fascist danger as part of doing that
