They keep losing both secular and theological arguments - along with many members, especially among the young.Īnd look at what remains: marriage equality, even in Alabama corporate America competing to brand itself as pro-gay (sometimes to an excruciating degree) full integration of gay service members a lesbian mayor of Chicago and, in Corey Johnson, a future gay mayor of New York a married gay man among the main contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination a cornucopia of media-affirming gay and trans equality openly gay and lesbian figures in almost every sphere of American life a preventative pill for HIV and a pill to all but eradicate it from the living and explicit legal protection from discrimination for half of the gay people in the country.
But it says a huge amount that Christianists are this panicked. There has also been executive action to defend the religious freedom of those fundamentalist Christians who make up a core of the Trump base. With luck, law, and lobbying, it will fall. The impulsively renewed ban on transgender service members makes no sense, was enacted by presidential whim (a tweet, no less), defended with arguments that collapse upon scrutiny, and opposed by much of the military brass. Check out the website for the biggest gay lobbying group, the Human Rights Campaign, and you will find that gays and lesbians and transgender people “have been under constant attack” since Trump became president.Īnd, yes, there has been some blowback, as one might expect after an astonishing decade of faster progress than in any civil-rights movement in history. Gay students arriving in college in 2019 will be told instantly that they are oppressed in countless ways, and trans students will be told that they can be oppressed by gay people, as well. If you glance at media aimed at gays, lesbians, and transgender people, you might imagine we are living in a state of siege. I think it’s worth repeating that - especially in front of the younger generation - because it gives us critical perspective on where we are now and where we are headed. There has never been a better time or place in the history of the world to be gay than in 2019 and in the West.