The Great Unraveling
When everyone who disagrees with you is a pedophile, there are no frontiers left to conquer.
Note: This is a long one and your email is almost certainly going to cut it off before the end, so I suggest going to the site to read it instead.
In 2015, Obergefell v. Hodges finally settled the issue of same-sex marriage in the United States, and I did something very foolish: I let myself believe we were finally starting to get over our moral panic about LGBTQ+ people in this country. I knew people who opposed same-sex marriage weren’t going to suddenly start being super-cool about it or anything (I’m not that naive), but I assumed we’d do what we always do as a country: fight like hell to keep everything the way it is, but if change happens anyway then we bitch and moan for a bit and move on to the next thing that makes us mad. Gay marriage is an affront to God! The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyr--WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY CHANGED THE CARL’S JR. LOGO?!
The more time that passed without anyone mounting a significant challenge to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the more I felt justified in my optimism. The people who didn’t like it seemed to be learning to live with it—as they should have, since the ruling did not affect them personally and we’re all supposed to be minding our own business anyway.
As the creator of a newsletter called “A Hopeless Cynic,” I really should have known better than to mistake their silence for acceptance. My bad. Turns out, most of those folks still really don’t like gay people! They never let go of their prejudice towards the LGBTQ+ community, they were just waiting for an opportunity to resume spraying their homophobic bile all over the rest of us. And apparently, now is that time.
In March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—the creation of a mad scientist who wanted to build the perfect cohost for a Lenny Dykstra drive-time radio show—signed Florida House Bill 1557 into law. We’ll get into the specifics of the bill in a second, but first: a few words about Ronald Dion DeSantis.
The post-Trump GOP has, with varying degrees of success, adopted the Donald Trump style of politics. This style is typified by a steadfast commitment to being as loudly and alarmingly stupid as possible at all times while simultaneously refusing to exercise even one iota of self-awareness, and going about it so aggressively and relentlessly that eventually you get what you want because everybody is just so tired of hearing from you. Very few people can pull this off, because very few people possess the kind of shamelessness and self-regard needed not just to insist that this is all going very well, very well indeed, many are saying this is actually the best anything’s ever gone, nothing else has gone this well in I think all of human history, is what they’re saying, I’m not saying it but they’re saying it, I hear them, but to truly believe it, to know it the same way they know the sky is blue.
It’s not hereditary: Donald Trump Jr. can’t pull it off because he desperately craves his father’s approval, and the Trump political style demands a fanatical commitment to the delusion that you already have everyone’s approval (except for the haters and losers, of course). Matt Gaetz is in a similar vein, only his is the greasy, please-think-I’m-cool sheen of a man who has won the approval of his father and precisely nobody else. Various cronies and sycophants in Trump’s orbit have tried to walk in the big man’s footsteps, but most have failed miserably because they’re not all that comfortable with being public figures, particularly reviled ones. One of the tenets of the Trump style is an unslakable thirst for attention, even if it’s entirely negative; if you are not on television or being talked about on television, you are a nobody.
Ron DeSantis is one of the few people who has managed to make Trump’s style work for him. He has none of Donald Trump’s charisma—Ted Cruz makes Ron DeSantis look like Ted Cruz—but he possesses the same utter lack of regard for what anyone else thinks, the same petty and vindictive streak, the same contempt for anyone who is not him. DeSantis also shares Trump’s predilection for saying the quiet part out loud, along with Trump’s infuriating ability to escape any consequences for doing so. He doesn’t need the spotlight the way Trump does, but he doesn’t shy away from being in front of a camera because he believes, as Trump does, that no matter where he is at any given moment, he is entitled to be there. And what he lacks in interpersonal skills—that is, all of them—he makes up for in actual political effectiveness, despite never seeming to do any work at all.
The key difference between the two is that Trump has completely bought into the mythos of Donald Trump: he believes he has succeeded and will continue to succeed because he’s Donald Trump, bathed in a gold-hued aura that makes everything turn out just fine. Like Trump, Ron DeSantis is a colossal bag of shit and a deeply unimpressive person; unlike Trump, he doesn’t seem especially interested in trying to convince you otherwise. Still, the results are more or less the same: when DeSantis signed H.B. 1557 into law, it wasn’t because he cares about whatever he thinks the bill says (he has not read the whole bill, I have never been more certain of anything in my entire life). He signed it because that’s the whole point of being a powerful person. That’s why he’s there in the first place, sitting in that chair and gripping that pen like a silverback learning how to color: to do powerful-person things. What are you gonna do about it, pussy? Huh? [pulls fist back] HUH? Made ya flinch.
Anyway, the bill is titled “Parental Rights In Education,” but it has come to be known by a different name—the “Don’t Say Gay” bill—thanks in large part to this section:
Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
At first glance, it would appear that the ban only applies to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade, and even then only in the context of sex education. Some on the right have leaned on this literalist interpretation as a way to dismiss concerns about the bill, even though such an interpretation would seem to render the legislation completely pointless; K–3 students aren’t taught sex education. As is often the case with legislative end-arounds like this one, the devil is in the details.
The next part—”or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate”—is purposefully vague, seemingly leaving it up to the parents to decide whether their child is an appropriate age to learn that gay people exist. So if the parents prefer to keep their 17-year-old kid in the dark about gay people—and how’s that going for you, by the way?—they could say it’s not age-appropriate and sue the school district for violating this rule.
In addition to banning teaching students about gender identity and sexual orientation, the bill also prohibits “classroom discussion” about these subjects. Again, the ambiguity of the language is intended to create confusion about whether this rule applies solely to teaching students about sexual orientation or gender identity. The opacity of the bill’s text sends a clear-as-day message about the intentions of the legislators who wrote it, and given what we know about Ron “2004 Field Sobriety Test Runner-Up” DeSantis, it’s no wonder the bill’s opponents have grave concerns about how exactly the law will be enforced.
It could mean that any discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity, even in passing, is against the law; in that case, gay teachers would be prohibited from even mentioning that they’re gay to their students. A student who is questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity would be prohibited from talking about it with a teacher they trust. That’s why claims that the bill is being misinterpreted have largely failed to sway critics; why else would you write a bill with loopholes big enough for the governor to drunkenly pilot a pontoon boat through, unless your expectation is that those loopholes will be exploited? The right knows that, which is why they quickly stopped trying to defend H.B. 1557 on the merits. No such defense exists.
H.B. 1557 is going to do exactly what its critics say it will. That’s the whole point. When cultural norms required gay people to remain hidden and keep their sexual orientation to themselves, parents were more than happy to farm out these kinds of discussions to their kids’ teachers; hell, most of them preferred it that way. So why the sudden distrust of teachers? Because as we saw during the Critical Race Theory kerfuffle, conservatives fear that their kids are going to learn the “wrong” thing. That fear is based on the belief that there is, in fact, a “wrong” way to answer questions about sexual orientation and gender identity; to believe that requires a belief in a “right” kind of sexual orientation and/or gender identity.
When H.B. 1557 was being debated in the Florida Senate, opponents started circulating a list of major corporate contributors to the authors and supporters of the bill:
I suppose the idea was to put public pressure on these companies, which would in turn force them to put private pressure on the Florida state legislators to whom they’d donated and get the bill killed. I’m not really sure why people thought that would work; there are 160 state legislators in Florida, 101 of whom are Republicans. I don’t think any of them would be swayed by United Healthcare threatening to withhold ~$1,980 in campaign donations the next cycle. (“Walgreen’s is taking their $277.23 elsewhere, we gotta work the phones and fill up the war chest.”)
At best, expecting corporations to swoop in and save us from discriminatory laws and the ghouls who write them is hopelessly naive. At worst, it’s symptomatic of how profoundly fucking lazy we can be about standing up for what’s right. “Maybe if I tag Lockheed-Martin in my Facebook post, they’ll have a word with the mean politician!” People who fashion themselves big-time Politics Knowers1 will say this is a viable strategy because politicians are more beholden to corporate interests than they are to citizens, but they’re forgetting that the same applies to, uh…corporations. No politician or corporation is going to do what we want unless we can exact a toll on them for not doing it. And most of the time, we can’t.
A Florida resident has precisely zero leverage over United Healthcare: Florida is one of 12 states that never adopted Medicaid expansion, so you’re stuck with whatever insurance you get through your job. Your only options are to cancel your health insurance, or pay 3-4 times more for your own individual health insurance policy through another company. Unless you own the business, there is nothing you can do to punish United Healthcare for not stepping up. How are you gonna make Duke Energy feel the pain? Live by candlelight?
It’s not that corporations can’t make a difference in these kinds of fights; they can, but only a fool would pin their hopes on it. Nevertheless, like the blind squirrel finds the occasional nut, every so often mega-corporations stumble upon the right course of action—or, to couch it in more cynical terms, the corporation calculates that doing the right thing will yield a large enough financial and/or PR benefit that it’s worth pissing off a lawmaker.
In 2019, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed the LIFE Act (which stands for “Living Infants Fairness Equality,” we elect the dumbest fucking people, I swear) into law, barring physicians from performing abortions past six weeks. The blowback from citizens was massive, but what ultimately sank the bill was the threat by then-Disney CEO Bob Iger to stop filming in Georgia if the law was enacted, followed by similar warnings from numerous production companies. Hooray, Disney! everyone said.
When DeSantis signed H.B. 1557 into law last month, an expectant public once again turned to Disney to raise hell about it. Only this time, Disney remained silent on the issue, because despite what happened in Georgia, Disney doesn’t exist to advocate on our behalf. Disney got a lot of credit for taking a stand in 2019, but in that case the balance of power was clearly tipped in Disney’s favor: they only film in Georgia for the tax breaks, and plenty of other states would be lining up to offer the same incentives if it meant Disney started filming there instead. (It’s also worth noting that Disney wasn’t leading the “Boycott Georgia” charge anyway; Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos threatened to pull out of Georgia before Iger did.)
This time, Disney didn’t hold all the cards. Disney World accounts for roughly 97% of the reason anyone would want to go to Florida in the first place, which seemingly gives them significant influence in the Florida state legislature. But Disney also relies heavily on tax breaks and favorable legislation, which is written by that same state legislature. In that way, it was actually a perfect test case for what we should expect from corporations. Disney stood to lose just as much as they might gain from speaking out, so how they responded could be almost entirely attributed to their priorities as a corporation. With nothing else on the line, is it important to speak up for marginalized people or not?
Apparently not: Disney chose to do nothing at all, seemingly convinced nobody would notice if they sat this one out. It wasn’t until they started to feel the heat in the form of widespread media condemnation and a massive walkout by Disney employees that the corporation changed its tune, denouncing the bill and vowing to help repeal it.
To say that the backlash to the bill has been significant would be an understatement, but what really upped the ante is the backlash to the backlash: a cursed symphony of squawks and bleats by a cavalcade of well-known bigots and morons. The all-star lineup includes some of the worst people in conservative media and/or human existence, an intellectual JV squad of various right-wing has-beens and never-weres, the traveling carnival of QAnon freaks who always seem a little too invested in other people’s children, and a once-respected playwright and director. It’s truly a murderer’s row, in that I would not object if someone lined these people up in a row and murdered them.
If there is one lesson the GOP learned from the Trump era, it’s that nothing energizes their base like a good old-fashioned culture war. Conservatives don’t care about making their views more palatable to moderates or the left; a lot of times, the conservative viewpoint is “whatever liberals will hate most.” (There is a silver lining to this approach: on a fairly regular basis, some right-wing oaf gets so turned around trying to own the libs that they galaxy-brain their way into supporting socialized medicine or denouncing capitalism.)
That H.B. 1557 has generated such outrage on the left is itself justification for the bill’s existence. They don’t particularly care to argue that the bill isn’t about shoving gay teachers back into the closet, because that is what it’s about. Besides, it’s what 45% of conservatives think should happen anyway, so why pretend otherwise? Ron DeSantis’ own press secretary fired off some choice tweets:
A host of prominent conservatives quickly joined in. Laura Ingraham claimed the “real controversy” is “schools peddling gender ideology” and called schools “grooming centers.” The National Review wrote that “in some states, LGBT ideology is introduced before children can even write their own names.” (Presumably “LGBT ideology” means “telling children LGBT people exist and that’s okay”; can’t imagine why a media outlet founded by William F. Buckley would think that’s a problem.)
Marjorie Taylor Greene—best known for looking like that meme where Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc. has his face swapped with Sully—told Alex Jones she plans to introduce a federal version of H.B. 1557. Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance put on their best confused faces and made various tough-guy noises about beating up teachers while this chyron blared beneath their oversized heads:
The right’s counteroffensive revolves around the belief that a teacher would only discuss sexual orientation or gender identity with a student because the teacher is grooming that student, resurrecting the age-old trope that gay people are perverts and sexual deviants and taking it a step further: gay teachers are pedophiles who just haven’t been caught yet. David Mamet (yes, that David Mamet) said as much on Fox News, arguing that “teachers are inclined, particularly men, because men are predators, to pedophilia.” It’s such a perfectly conservative way of looking at the world: inventing a person or situation in your own mind and getting so scared of your own imaginary creation that you run around warning everyone about it. I’m absolutely certain at least one Republican lawmaker watched “Nightmare on Elm Street” and ended up drafting a bill prohibiting sleep-trespassing.
Disney’s halfhearted and belated defense of LGBTQ+ people earned them a deeply sarcastic thumbs-up from the left; meanwhile, they’ve become the focus of the right’s ire. DeSantis threatened to eliminate the special district that gives Disney World self-governing powers, Ingraham suggested Disney’s copyright and antitrust protection should be stripped, and…oh yeah, a bunch of “anti-groomer” protesters held a rally outside Disney World. (Technically they were in an IHOP parking lot. Free wifi there.)
I’ve seen the right use the old propaganda-by-paroxysm technique plenty of times before, but this time feels different. Publicly declaring that gay teachers are sexual predators? Accusing them and anyone who agrees with them—gay or not—of being, at the very least, supportive of pedophiles and grooming underage kids? That is some horrendous shit. Whether Republican lawmakers actually believe these accusations or they’re just content to let their base believe them, this particular genie isn’t going back in the bottle, and they know that. They have no intention of walking it back.
We are witnessing a great unraveling.
Republicans spent decades trying to position themselves as reasonable and pragmatic, the adults in a room full of children.2 They publicly distanced themselves from the more reactionary and bigoted elements of their party, even as they privately welcomed those elements. Then Donald Trump clomped on stage and shouted MEXICANS ARE NO GOOD! THOSE JEWS SURE ARE GOOD WITH MONEY--BUT I DON’T TRUST ‘EM! YOU CAN ALWAYS TELL A BLACK BY THE BIG BOOM BOXES THEY CARRY! Republicans lined up to denounce him and claimed they found his views abhorrent, but that wasn’t really what they found so objectionable—they just didn’t believe he could win by expressing those views so plainly.
But he did win, and his victory was a lesson to the GOP. Conservatives who define themselves by their prejudices and bigotry aren’t the “fringe elements” of their base, they are the base. They don’t want politicians to make their hatred more palatable to a broader audience, they want politicians who share their hatred; failing that, they want politicians who will give them permission to indulge their hatred. These people aren’t changing, and the GOP can’t win without them. So they’re dancing with the ones who brung ‘em. The steady drumbeat of homophobia and hatred on the right is nominally in support of H.B. 1557, but it’s about more than that; you don’t wage a nationwide scorched-earth campaign because of one bill in a state legislature.
What we’re seeing is a statement of intent: the right is done pretending to be anything other than what they are. And what they are is whatever the worst people in America want them to be.
Because they watched the first three seasons of The West Wing and left House of Cards playing in the background while they napped.
BETTER NOT TALK ABOUT SEXUAL ORIENTATION, YOU FREAKS.