Steve Jonas for BuzzFlash: The Republican Party Transitioned from Homophobia to Transgender Phobia Without a Hiccup
February 27, 2021
Republicans have moved seamlessly from homophobia to transgender phobia. (Adrian Cabrero)
By Steve Jonas, MD MPH MS
Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is making quite a name for herself, taking her sexual-identity prejudices to new heights, even for a Republican. But of course, no prominent Republicans have come out to condemn for her remarks or her reactions. Which is not surprising, since transgender phobia is simply a relative of homophobia, which has been prominent in the Republican Party ever since Ronald Reagan made the Alliance-Made-in-Hell with the US religious right in the run-up to the 1980 election.
No, homophobia has been around for a long time. It turns up in the Old Testament of the Bible as well as in the New. The Republican Religious Right relies on that view in support of its homophobia, and cites chapters and verses in support of it. (Not every religious scholar agrees with that interpretation of the Bible. Indeed, the late Minister Peter Gomes, the well-known gay (and African-American) Baptist long-time director of the Harvard Divinity School, strongly disagreed with it [see Gomes, P.J., "Homophobic? Re-read Your Bible," New York Times, August 17, 1992, and Westminster, J., The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022, East Setauket, NY, Thomas Jefferson Press, 1996, pp. 155-56). In modern times it was used by the Nazis to promote their ideology once Hitler's dictatorship had been established. Indeed, despite the fact that the head of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, (the Brown Shirts), the most prominent pre-1933 Nazi armed force, Ernst Roehm, was himself homosexual and Hermann Goering was a cross-dresser, the Nazis went after the gays as their identity group of choice for demonization even before they went after the Jews full force.
But the use of homophobia as a direct political weapon, designed to help win elections for a given political party, can be seen to be an invention of the modern US Republican Party. Consider this from that first edition of The 15% Solution (pp. 148-49):
As early as 1985, at a conference entitled 'How to Win an Election,' the future patron of [the fictional first US fascist President] Jefferson Davis Hague, Newton Gingrich, spoke about Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. 'AIDS,' as it was known, was a painfully debilitating condition that almost invariably lead to death. It was later shown that in many of its victims AIDS was associated with a wide variety of diseases that generally weakened the immune system, some of which diseases were sexually transmitted. However, it had been quite incorrectly thought for quite some time that the appearance of AIDS had some special linkage to homosexuality. (The homophobes never abandoned that view.)
In any case, in 1985 when Gingrich addressed the issue AIDS presented as a serious public health threat, one that was poorly understood. An increasing number of people, many of them happening to be homosexual, were suffering terribly from the condition. At that time, addressing a right-wing reactionary political planning conference, the future Speaker of the House of Representatives had this to say about it (The Freedom Writer): 'AIDS is a real crisis. It is worth paying attention to, to study. It's something you ought to be looking at.'
'Ah ha,' you might say, 'your arch right-wing reactionary is showing concern about AIDS and its victims, and thinks something should be done to deal with it.' Well-no. Our 'Mr. Newt' as the right-wing reactionary political flacks like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity like to call him, was not showing concern about this new disease and its victims. Rather he was showing concern about the potential to exploit the then growing health and health care problem for right-wing political purposes [surprise, surprise]. For he had gone on to say:
AIDS will do more to direct America back to the cost of violating traditional values, and to make America aware of the danger of certain behavior than anything we've seen. “For us, it's a great rallying cry (emphasis added).”
It is surely not known whether Greene is familiar with this type of Gingrich-thought (although her district in Georgia is not too far from Gingrich’s former one). But she is surely following his example, to the letter.
By the 2000s, AIDS had retreated as a major illness in the US because of the development of a series of increasingly effective pharmaceuticals that could be used for its management. But political homophobia was well-entrenched within the GOP. Rather than AIDS, the new representative issue was gay marriage. Everyone, GOP-er and opponents as well, knew exactly what they were talking about, but since they were supposedly addressing the "institution of marriage" without specifics, they could claim that they were not being homophobic, only "defending" the former. That marriage in the United States is a bimodal institution, both religious and civil, that there is a major body of civil law in each of the 50 states that governs both marriage and its dissolution, that thus the right of gays to marry is covered by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, has been treated both by the Religious Right and the GOP as totally irrelevant. And of course that right was finally recognized as a Constitutional one by the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell.
A side bar is the Mormons’ traditional opposition to gay rights. And it will very interesting to see just what Sen. Romney does in the matter of the just passed LGBTQ+ Protection Act just passed by the House. In 2008, the Mormons, a most solid part of the GOP base as is well-known, organized the "Prop. 8" political campaign in California to overturn that state's law legalizing gay marriage. Their position is well-summarized in a statement at the time on the subject by one Boyd K. Packer, the second-highest leader of the Mormon Church. He said in a sermon that "same-sex attraction is 'impure and unnatural' and can be overcome and that same-sex unions are morally wrong" (Human Rights Campaign, hrc@hrc.org, 10/4/10). Nothing wrong with saying that, or believing, right? Except that the Mormons used it politically.
And so do the Republicans, then and now. Their political homophobia focuses less on gay marriage, because of Obergefell and because numbers of gays are strong Repub. supporters and contributors, and more on the prohibition of discrimination based on sexual identity in public accommodations in particular (which prejudice they shroud in the language of “religious freedom”), and in more general terms, as strongly screamed about by Greene, so what could be called Republican “Sex-Other-than-‘Straight’ Animosity,” which can be seen as direct descendants of the Religious-Right-induced homophobia which roared into the Republican Party in the days of that alliance with the Religious Right arranged by Ronald Regan (who just happens to have a gay son --- but no never mind --- and certainly had been friends with lots of gays when he was a Hollywood actor).
So where does this all lead? It's just politics, no? Well, no. We have seen what the politicization of anti-Semitism did in Europe in the last century. Like homophobia, anti-Semitism had been around for a long time. It was a societal/repressive weapon wielded by Christian churches for centuries since its invention around the time of St. Augustine in the 4th and 5th centuries, CE. But it did not come to have a specifically political use, that is to be used to promote certain political programs and to be used as an issue/weapon in political campaigns, until it was specifically developed as such, beginning in Austria in the 1880s, by such figures as Georg von Schoenerer, whom Hitler regarded as an important inspiration. The Nazi Party ran politically on anti-Semitism, it was fueled by anti-Semitism, its ideology was based in part on the supposition that the Jews were at first "different," then not worthy of/entitled to citizenship, then "less than human." There was a natural progression that proved impossible to stop under the Nazis, that began with politicization of anti-Semitism.
This is not to say that the palpable politicization of what has now become homo-transphobia by the GOP (remember Trump’s banning of trans-persons in the military, which has been revoked by President Biden) will necessarily to lead to a Nazi-type outcome (although in "The 15% Solution" it does (see chap. 18). But the danger is there. The politicization of homophobia made it "OK" in certain quarters just as the politicization of transphobia by Right-Wing Screamers like Greene, with will make it “OK” in certain quarters.
It goes without saying --- but what has been said on the pages of BuzzFlash with increasing frequency and emphasis --- that led by Trump and Trumpublican Party© (and what used to be known as the Republican Party will formally become the Trumpublican Party© at the CPAC annual meeting in February, 2021) our country is going down a very dangerous pathway (https://buzzflash.com/articles/donald-j-trump-on-the-road-from-racism-to-fascism-2011-2020?rq=Steven%20Jonas; https://buzzflash.com/articles/before-trump-was-a-wealthy-blowhard-buffoon-with-the-taste-of-liberace-now-hes-an-enabler-of-racism; https://buzzflash.com/articles/hair-trump-or-herr-trump?rq=Steven%20Jonas; https://buzzflash.com/articles/donald-trump-turning-the-corner-towards-fascism-but-first-lets-define-it; https://buzzflash.com/articles/trumpite-facism-how-the-nation-could-get-there-and-a-brief-glimpse-of-what-would-be-waiting-for-it?rq=Fascism; https://buzzflash.com/articles/what-might-a-second-trump-term-look-like-it-will-not-be-fun-folks). The German people had an excuse for what happened to them after Hitler took power: it had never happened before. The American people do not have that excuse.
Note to the reader. If parts of this column sound familiar to very long-time readers of BuzzFlash, they should. For it is based in a significant part on a column of mine originally published on these pages on Oct. 9, 2010, at: http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/206.
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH, MS is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at StonyBrookMedicine (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 35 books. In addition to being a contributor to BuzzFlash.com, he is a “Trusted Author” for OpEdNews.com , a contributor to Reader Supported News/Writing for Godot; and From The G-Man. His own political website, stevenjonaspolitics.com, will eventually be an archive of the close to 1000 political columns he has published since 2004. He is also a triathlete (36 seasons, 256 multi-sport races; not racing in the Year of the COVID-19 pandemic).
He has a blind-copy distribution list for his columns. If you would like to be added to it, please send him an email at sjtpj@aol.com.
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