President Biden’s rhetorical bombast is both unwarranted and dishonest.
President Biden’s rhetorical bombast is both unwarranted and dishonest.
W hen the Supreme Court found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in 2015, then-president Obama said that there were “Americans of goodwill” on either side of the issue. He stated that opposition was, at least for some people, “based on sincere and deeply held beliefs.” And he emphasized the need to “revere our deep commitment to religious freedom.” Just seven years later, in signing a bill which requires states to recognize same-sex marriage should Obergefell ever be overturned, President Biden took a very different approach. If you’re not fully on board, you’re a bigot.
Biden’s litany of bigotry reads like an intersectionality checklist. “Racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia — they’re all connected,” the president said. Racism is an ancient evil, from slavery to the KKK and beyond. What does enslavement and lynching have in common with opposition to experimenting on children confused about their gender by lying to them, chemically stunting their growth, sterilizing them, and removing healthy body parts? As recently as ten years ago, opposing medicalized gender transitions for minors was common sense. But in his speech, Biden called out “callous, cynical laws introduced in the states targeting transgender children, tarring families and criminalizing doctors who give children the care they need.”
Antisemitism is also an age-old evil. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they were hated for their race. Today, they are often hated for their nation-state. This has led to countless atrocities and genocide. But what does any of that have to do with the belief that marriage is necessarily a male-female union, on which families are founded and societies depend? As recently as 20 years ago, this Judeo-Christian belief was recognized as a central pillar of civilization. In the 2000s, President Biden himself agreed that marriage is “between a man and woman.”
Conflating racism and antisemitism with refusals to accept the progressive view on matters of sexual identity is a rhetorical ploy used by Democrats. They insist that opposition to LGBT ideology, in whichever form, leads to literal violence against people who identify as LGBT. But does it?
A recent House Oversight Committee hearing would have us believe that it does. During the hearing, survivors of the Pulse and Club Q nightclub mass shootings shared testimony. They spoke of the terror they felt when the shooter entered the building, how they watched their friends bleed to death, the ongoing PTSD that they suffer as a result. Awful though their experiences were, and unconscionable as the perpetrators’ evil was, the assertion that these actions were the result of conservative rhetoric and policy remains unsubstantiated.
Perhaps one reason progressives lump racism and antisemitism in with anti-LGBT attacks is that it gives people the sense the problem is widespread and deep-rooted. But shootings such as those at Club Q and Pulse are, thankfully, very rare. Moreover, the motive in both gay-club mass shootings was more complicated than LGBT activists let on. The Pulse shooter had Islamist sympathies; the Club Q shooter identifies as “non-binary.” In any case, these episodes are not representative of the day-to-day dangers that those identifying as LGBT face.
The Washington Post reported that “two dozen hospitals and providers have faced online harassment because they provide gender-affirming care to children, and a record number of transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been slain.” What is the relationship between moral outrage and criticism directed at gender clinicians online with the slaying of “transgender and gender-nonconforming people”?
Conflating murder victims with reckless clinicians is just a clever way for them to avoid accountability. Another way of doing this is labeling any criticism of gender ideology and the medical community’s embrace of it as “misinformation.” A letter signed on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and Children’s Hospital Association called on the Department of Justice to take “swift action to investigate and prosecute all organizations, individuals and entities responsible” for attacks “rooted in an international campaign of disinformation.”
In the United Kingdom, the women’s-rights campaigner Maya Forstater won the right to express views critical of transgenderism without losing her job. The judge, ruling in her favor, deemed her beliefs to be “worthy of respect in a democratic society.” The belief in traditional marriage also qualifies as such. It wasn’t too long ago that Biden thought so, too.