Voices: Major LGBT+ rights group issues ‘state of emergency’ for US – the dramatic warning is not hyperbole

The words chilled my blood: “If you decide to stay.”

Not “how to effect change.” Not “how to build community.” But what to do if, despite the dire warnings and perhaps your own better judgment, you decide to remain in a hositle environment.

This is not a State Department bulletin for Americans in a war zone. It is a new alert from the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s preeminent LGBT+ rights organization, which today issued a state of emergency for LGBT+ Americans. Citing “an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year” – a record 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been signed into law in 2023 – the HRC warns bluntly that “our community is in danger.”

In a detailed report accompanying the emergency declaration, the HRC chronicles a rash of anti-LGBT+ rhetoric and policy being peddled in state capitals from sea to shining sea.

Many of these bills, an HRC report points out, “rely on copy-and-pasted language from model legislation proposed by a national coalition of groups including the Heritage Foundation, Family Policy Alliance and Alliance Defending Freedom,” all of which have long histories of spreading anti-LGBT+ messaging and opposing equality.

“These folks have one goal: eliminate cultural and legal acceptance of LGBTQ+ people,” the report warns.

Despite what many on the right will no doubt try to tell you, this is not hyperbole. This tracks with what I wrote last week with regards to the attacks on Target’s Pride merchandise. We have reached a point of mainstream acceptance for LGBT+ people – most Americans believe companies should support the LGBT+ community while support among the general public for LGBT+ rights continues to rise, with 80 per cent of Americans supporting nondiscrimination laws – that has caused this violent and hateful backlash from those who recognize they are on the losing side of history.

To stem the tide of acceptance in the face of such overwhelming public opposition to their hateful agenda, far-right politicians across the country have turned to increasingly anti-democratic methods to enact their laws. In many states, “anti-equality elected officials subverted the democratic process to pass discriminatory legislation,” the HRC reports. This includes censoring and removing State Representative Zooey Zephyr in Montana and State Representative Maurie Turner in Oklahoma; expelling State Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in Tennessee; changing procedural rules at the last minute to pass anti-LGBT+ bills in Kentucky; ignoring procedural rules in Nebraska; and removing peaceful protesters in statehouses across the nation.

The report explains, in stark terms, the consequences of such laws. Citing internal polling, the HRC found that states without LGBT+-inclusive curriculums had higher rates of bullying against LGBT+ students, including higher rates of both verbal and physical harassment. Thousands of students now live in states where laws require teachers and school administrators to out youth who “adopt new chosen names and/or pronouns,” a practice which has horrific effects on LGBT+ students’ mental and physical well-being.

This is particularly true when the child has parents who are not accepting of gender nonconformity or homosexuality or bisexuality; a 2020 study from UCLA’s Williams Institute found that up to 45 per cent of homeless teens identify as LGBT+, while LGBT+ young adults aged 18 to 25 are 2.2 times more likely to experience homelessness.

Other statistics cited in the report are equally alarming. More than a quarter of LGBT+ workers have left a job because of prejudice in the workplace, with nearly a 10th of all LGBTQ+ workers reporting having been fired because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. A 2022 study from the Center for American Progress found that 15 per cent of LGBT+ and a third of transgender Americans were denied care by a doctor because of their identity. A study last year by the University of Connecticut and the HRC found that more than half of LGBTQ youth were bullied in school for their sexual orientation or gender expression in the past year alone.

This is, of course, being exasperated by the relentless attacks of far-right politicians and pundits spreading hate and lies about LGBT+ Americans, which in turn leads to literal attacks on LGBT+ people and groups.

Armed far-right street gangs have been intimidating and harassing drag queens. Last year, an alleged neo-Nazi murdered five people at a gay club in Colorado. It has gotten so dangerous for LGBT+ Americans that the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that our community is at threat from terrorist attacks.

It is frightening. Being a gender-nonconforming gay man in the South, I feel that fear every day. It is why I am unsure whether I want to or even can safely remain in Tennessee – a state with one of the most homophobic and transphobic state governments in the nation. I have not decided if I will stay here long-term, or even if I can stomach living in Kentucky, which is only marginally better. The truth is, both states – where my family’s roots run back more than 200 years – have made it clear that I am unwelcome and unsafe within their borders.

I will not be the only one assessing whether it is worth, or even sensible, remaining in a state that is so openly hostile to our very existence. It is unsurprising, then, that the HRC includes an entire section on things LGBT+ people in hostile states should consider if they are going to move. No doubt many will. No doubt that is what Republican leaders in those states want.

It is a damning indictment of our states, though, that any American needs to consider where they live based on whether or not they will be granted equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the US Constitution, or whether their children will be subjected to state-sanctioned bullying and violence in their own schools. Yet here we are.

LGBT+ Americans are increasingly unsafe in large swathes of this country. Far from hyperbolic, the HRC is sounding the alarm on just how these state legislatures are endangering our community and eroding the civil rights and liberties of not only LGBT+ Americans, but any American who does not conform to the rigid binaries patriarchal white Christian nationalists proscribe.

“By framing the existence of LGBTQ+ people as inherently vulgar, and suggesting that some people should have the ability to refuse to comply with the laws that govern basic civility in our public square based on a belief that LGBTQ+ people cannot or should not exist, our opponents seek to impose their worldview — to which they are, of course, entitled — upon the rest of the country and the world,” the HRC’s declaration warns.

If that is not an emergency, I don’t know what is.