Originally by John Casey at www.advocate.com
When we posted a story on Threads this week about how most married same-sex couples are worried about challenges to marriage equality in the wake of the Supreme Court’s most recent horrifying rulings, the comments underneath were ominous.
Rather than key in on losing our right to marry, readers said that we had so much more to worry about:
“Talk to any of us over 50. We remember, we know how bad it can get. Your marriage will be the least of your problems. Will you get fired tomorrow because of a new homophobic boss? Will they rent or give you a loan to buy? Will you be safe walking home?” one user writer.
Another wrote, “100% true but marriage equality is the least of the issues. Your own life is on the line. Everything else is secondary. We must vote.”
“Honestly they should be worried about having the right to exist. Trump will be using Putin’s playbook,” said another.
Those comments were the tip of the iceberg. To be sure, regardless of who wins the presidential election, the Supreme Court will almost certainly have overturned marriage equality a year from now. You can be sure that they will find a way to do it, come hell or high water.
And if the hell of Trump winning the presidential election in November occurs, with current polls suggesting he will, you can be sure that the celebrations of freedom on July 4, 2025 will be muted or far different than they were this year. That’s because the far right is hell-bent on implementing its Project 2025 plan for a dystopian society that is far less free and far more destructive.
Late last year, I was on a panel with retired Air Force Captain Tom Carpenter for a discussion about an MSNBC documentary about LGBTQ+ people in the military. Carpenter has devoted his life working to open the military to queer troops. When he was asked what the next frontier was with queer rights, he was quick with a comeback.
I’m paraphrasing here, but Carpenter basically said that our wins, including in the military, for more equal rights, and for marriage could all be aberrations, temporary, and taken away before our very eyes. Sinister forces, like those behind Project 2025, want nothing more than to take away our rights and make our sexual orientations, and our identities, illegal.
As we explained in a story late last month, Project 2025, drafted by the far-right, seeks to make the U.S. an authoritarian nation. The plan replaces tens of thousands of federal workers with those who have allegiance to Donald Trump. It also does away with access to contraception, a possible national abortion ban, cuts federal health care programs, and quite obviously includes a plethora of anti-LGBTQ+ initiatives.
Just as Carpenter predicted, Project 2025 is also coming after LGBTQ+ service members, as well as marriage equality, queer parents, and LGBTQ+ books — among many other exclusionary and harmful initiatives.
It also calls transgender people an “ideology,” labels transgender health care for children “child abuse,” and reverses policies allowing transgender people to serve in the military.
There are so many other shocking components, beyond how it decimates our community. It seeks to make the United States a Christian nation and do away with the separation of church and state. And all the components are in place to make this happen.
If the Republicans retain the House in the upcoming election, and Trump wins the presidency, Speaker Mike Johnson will be emboldened to push his Christian nationalism beliefs and further his hate toward our community, particularly gay men, his most fervent compulsion. And, if polls are correct, Democrats are in danger of losing the Senate, which means that Johnson will have allies like rabid Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville in leadership positions.
Layer this on the SCOTUS decision this week to give Trump immunity (I don’t think I’ll ever recover hearing this news, and I don’t think our country will either), and you have a trifecta of white extremist lunatics that will deconstruct any freedoms for those in marginalized communities, as well as religion, marriage, and health care rights. It will deport millions and put undocumented immigrants in concentration camps. It will ignore climate change. And those terrifying scenarios are just for starters.
My point here is not to rehash the reprehensible and retaliatory Project 2025 illegalities — which is what the document consists of, but rather to talk about how much we take for granted, and how complacent we are in protecting all that we take for granted.
The point that Carpenter was trying to make was that we should not take what we have for granted and not be complacent about protecting that which we take for granted.
If you think about our society today, everything is geared towards making our lives easier. Modern conveniences have made it so easy to take the easy way out. If it isn’t less than three clicks away, it becomes a pain in the ass.
We spend our days hunched over our phones or computers. Walk down a street anywhere, and people aren’t looking at you, they’re scrolling their phones. It’s so much easier to stare at that screen than to face reality.
Artificial intelligence will slowly take away our ability to do so many things manually. Except for one thing that is vitally important — our right to vote. For that, we have to make sacrifices. We must drive to a poll, or wait in a long line, or fill out a ballot and mail it or drop it off. Our phones can’t do that. AI can’t do that for us, it’s all on us.
And the consequences of making that extra effort, without relying on our phones or technology, can — and this is not B.S. — be life-altering in the most frightful way.
Politicians and pundits harp on us to vote, and many of us just shrug and say, “Enough. Stop telling me what to do.” Or “If I have time.” Or “One vote doesn’t matter.” And we’re told it does, and we just go back to staring at our phones.
We also hear people like Speaker Johnson say that queer people will be condemned and should be punished. Donald Trump says that he will be an authoritarian leader on day one. And any number of Republican candidates and elected officials who think abortion should be criminalized. And we say, “Well, it’s all talk. That won’t happen.”
We disbelieve that the Supreme Court could rule for extremists, again with, “That won’t happen.” And then the Court overturns Roe v. Wade, gets rid of affirmative action, overturns the long-held precedent of Chevron and the power of government agencies, and gives Trump immunity. And then that well-worn phrase, “That won’t happen,” turns into, “How did that happen?”
A year from now, will we be celebrating July 4th the same way we celebrated July 4th this year, or for the past 248 years? Things might be far different — beyond our worst nightmares and our regrettable complacency. Fireworks are more muted. Our long-held freedoms diminished, because when we were warned about Project 2025, we said, yet again, “That won’t happen.”
A year from now, let’s not be asking, “How did this happen?”
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