Anti-LGBTQ hate speech paves the road to fascism
Fascists start with the most marginalized and work their way up the ladder
The Q club shooting has provoked a range of responses. Decent people are horrified that five people, having a joyous night out without hurting anyone, were pointlessly massacred by a loathsome bigot raised in a hateful family. While others, lacking a shred of kindness or empathy, believe that the victims brought on their own demise by being perverts.
Jenna Ellis, a past part of Trump’s team of legal incompetents, was one of the latter. She believes the slain “are now reaping the consequences of having eternal damnation.” How do you get to be such a miserable shit? Especially when you claim to be a Christian but keep lying. Even going so far as to claim expertise in constitutional law when the bulk of your experience is as a prosecutor in traffic court. (I think I have answered my own question.)
Fascists are well aware of this inherent sexual bigotry in so many scared, weak-minded people — who have to tear total strangers down to make themselves feel big. The incipient autocrat uses fear of “the other” to grease his skids to power. And when installed at the pinnacle beats the drum to keep hold of what he had earned by stoking paranoia.
Mussolini’s fascist regime was obsessed with the "moral hygiene" of youth. It demanded sex only between a man and a woman after marriage and solely to restock tyranny’s pool. To this end, the regime banned contraception and abortion and taxed unmarried men. They also criminalized homosexuality. And in doing so, they classified it not just as a mortal sin but as a social disease.
Inevitably this hate of sexual others is combined with an idealized role of women as mothers — specifically as factories for producing a new generation of fascists. Mussolini reflected the autocratic belief in the separation of the sexes. "War is to man what maternity is to the woman." And he declared that a woman working outside the house was "incompatible with childbearing."
Typically, this focus on gender/sexual orthodoxy complements appeals to nationalism and xenophobia. The autocrat presents the easily persuadable with a sanitized version of an idealized society. And warns the citizenry that, without this future, they will suffer anarchy and domination under the yoke of the malevolent evil of the LGBTQ agenda propagated by godless liberals and soul-crushing socialists. The more absurd the claim, the better. Even tales of pedophilia rings of blood-drinking, left-wing elites seem reasonable to those who have forsworn the use of reason.
Fascists did not create homophobia. They just learned to use it to whip up the masses to support the leader’s cynically expressed desire for a more morally-centered, decent country. The leader, of course, does not give a damn and often leads a life of libidinous excess while suppressing the dumb shmucks who enabled his rise.
Germany criminalized gay sex in 1871 as part of the legal code governing the newly created German state. But the authorities rarely enforced the infamous paragraph 175 banning homosexual behavior. And by the 1920s early 1930s, Germany — especially in the major cities — enjoyed a flourishing gay culture. However, with the Nazi ascension to power in 1933, Germans were subjected to a campaign against heterodox sexuality. The movie “Cabaret” based on Christopher Isherwood’s experiences in pre-World War II Germany, related in his autobiographical novel “Goodbye to Berlin,” is an eyewitness account of the times.
Burned into history is the infamous yellow star the Nazis forced Jews to wear. Gays also had a badge to identify their “crime”, a pink triangle. And these were just two of the symbols visually enforcing the lesser humanity of the supposed enemies of Germany. Nazis mandated criminals wore green inverted triangles, political prisoners red triangles, "asocials" (including Roma, nonconformists, vagrants, and other groups) black triangles, and Jehovah's Witnesses purple ones.
The good Germans could sleep soundly at night, confident the regime had separated the saints from the sinners. And that it was doing the necessary work to keep the contamination contained.
Homophobia is not just the white man’s bigotry. Across Africa, tin-pot dictators distract the masses from their sub-optimal existence by demonizing gays. From Algeria to Zimbabwe homosexuality is illegal. In many countries the punishment is imprisonment. In four countries it warrants the death penalty. And there is little sign of any enlightenment. Fundamentalist Islamic countries are no better.
Today, Putin wields the sword of homophobia to unify Russians against an imaginary enemy — at the same time as they get their asses kicked by an implacable Ukrainian foe in a fight the dumbass dictator should never have picked. Illustrating that stupidity is as prominent a feature of autocracy as hate.
On Thursday, lawmakers in Russia’s Duma unanimously approved a bill banning all forms of LGBTQ "propaganda". The law bars all mention of what authorities deem "gay propaganda" in the media, cinema, books, and advertisements. It also prohibits "the propaganda of paedophilia and sex change".
Conservative American evangelicals will weep with joy at this enactment of state-sponsored bigotry. They will anticipate the day when a re-established Republican government backstopped by a packed federal judiciary will enact a similar repressive program. And promote an agenda not only demonizing the LGBTQ community but removing the right to same-sex marriage as they did with abortion - while also criminalizing sodomy and contraception.
And if they dare to dream big, they will hope for the dismantling of the entire civil rights structure protecting the rights of women and minorities and even the right of the average citizen to vote.
Do you think it cannot happen here? Take a time machine back to Italy in 1921 or Germany in 1931 and ask the citizen of those established democracies if it could happen there. The answer would have been a resounding “no”.
And yet ….