In response to a column on political philosophy, I got mobbed by the religious right, obsessing about the supposed LGBTQ+ threat to children.
Hardly had my column defending liberal democracy against the illiberal paleo-conservatism of Ernst Roets landed, than I got mobbed on Twitter by people who insist that the Gay Pride movement and the rainbow flag represent ‘degeneracy’ and the ‘sexualisation and grooming of children’.
I don’t really understand the relevance either, but clearly a lot of people on the (predominantly religious) right think children are being eaten alive by the classical liberal principles of tolerance and equality.
The barrage was accompanied by photographs, most lacking context, and some deliberately misleading, of children witnessing what in some cases appeared to be questionable, suggestive, or crude behaviour.
‘Do you support this?’
‘Why do you defend this degeneracy?’
On the obviously objectionable images involving children being exposed to overtly sexual behaviour, I promptly said no, I don’t support this. I don’t defend this. Who does?
On more ambiguous cases, cases that lacked proper context, or cases where I didn’t accept the prejudicial descriptions (like ‘degeneracy’, which is a far-right 4chan epithet), I reserved comment. Extensive caveats and clarifications don’t really work in the Twitter format.
Disinformation
Many of the images were actually not from Gay Pride events, events at schools, or events deemed ‘family friendly’. Several were clearly from adults-only events like the Folsom Street Fair, which celebrates BDSM and kink, whether straight or gay.
The Fair includes nudity, provocative dress, and suggestive acts. Its participants do not view sex as something dirty and shameful, but as something fun, healthy and worth celebrating.
And its organisers clearly say: ‘Please do not bring children less than 18 years of age to our street fairs; the environment is very much for adults only. If you want to expose your child to alternative sexualities, there are other ways to do it – read a book, watch a movie, or attend a conference. Our gates and security volunteers will stop you, discourage you from entering and reinforce our policy directly with you (repeatedly). Find a babysitter; and, enjoy a day with your adult friends.’
A few photographs of children at such an event does not reflect on the LGBTQ+ community at all, since it wasn’t a Pride event. Using them to attack the LGBTQ+ cause is outright disinformation.
It doesn’t even really reflect on the event organisers, who clearly object to the presence of children. It reflects, rather, upon the parents who insisted on bringing their children to such an event.
So the hysteria – and it is very reminiscent of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s – is based on a whole lot of misleading outrage fuel, and some kernels of truth about objectionable events that someone should probably do something about.
‘Sexualising’
None of the images were from South Africa. This isn’t a South African issue. In South Africa, children are more likely to return from school telling hateful anti-gay or anti-trans jokes than having been taught about tolerance and equality.
The photographic ‘evidence’ of the depravity of gay people also included images like this:
Someone saw this photo and thought it worth adding a caption to the effect that the Gay Pride movement is all about sexualising the girl in the picture and making her gay, or trans, or whatever.
And then someone thought it should be sent to me, as an argument against either LGBTQ+ equality or liberal democracy – I couldn’t be sure.
Who sees a beautiful picture of happiness and tolerance like that and immediately thinks about the sexual perversion of the little girl? That is pathological. Suspicious, even.
The struggle for gay rights is not only about sex and sexuality. It is about all other aspects of living an ordinary life accepted by the community, like marriage, tax, medical care, non-discrimination in public and private, and the freedom to display advocacy messages or dress however they want (provided their bits don’t hang out, just like with straight people).
Transgender
Much of the anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric on the religious right is conflated with opposition to transgender people. I was asked whether, or why, I supported ‘mutilating’ children, for example.
I don’t, of course, which is why I strongly oppose infant circumcision, a religious ritual popularised around the turn of the last century by John Harvey Kellogg. His goal, motivated by religious morality, was to reduce the pleasure and increase the discomfort of masturbation, which he considered to be the root of many evils. He succeeded, in America, at least. This is why circumcision victims require lubricant to masturbate.
Involuntary circumcision of children not old enough to decide for themselves causes harm, say scientists, and happens a lot more often than gender reassignment surgery, which contrary to the anti-trans camp’s claims, is quite rare under the age of 18.
On gender-affirming treatment, which at the behest of the religious right has been or is being banned in numerous US states, my view largely coincides with those of doctors and psychiatrists, since I am no expert on the matter.
The simplistic view that children under 18 are not competent to make decisions about their sexuality or gender is arbitrary, and objectively wrong.
There is scientific evidence that shows delaying care for transgender youth is substantially harmful, and that providing initial social and non-surgical medical care for youth who later choose to remain cis-gendered is not. The spate of bans on gender-affirming care in the US is hurting vulnerable children.
It is entirely understandable, to my mind, that someone who wants to transition to female doesn’t want to wait until they have a thick beard and a hairy back, for example, and someone who wants to transition to male doesn’t want to develop big breasts, while they wait until someone else’s church elders consider them competent to make decisions over their own bodies.
No regret
This issue is not amenable to simplistic one-size-fits-all rules. The heavy hammer of the state is certainly not an appropriate tool with which to govern gender-affirming care. Case-by-case decisions should be left to individuals and their doctors, in my view.
As it was, before the youth care bans, transition regret after gender-affirming surgery is very rare (1%). By contrast, regret about circumcision was last surveyed at 10%.
That trans care is an issue in need of urgent authoritarian intervention is far from clear.
Transgender people deserve the same acceptance and tolerance as anyone else. How someone identifies, how they express that identity, and what their genitals look like, is no business of the nannies of church or state, or indeed of anyone else.
There are some problems that need ironing out, such as how to accommodate trans people in gender-separated spaces, whether to allow trans participation in women’s sports, and what exactly to teach school pupils in sex education and other classes.
These seem like resolvable problems to me. (One bathroom. Three bathrooms. Negotiate stricter limits on who qualifies for women’s events. Remove objectionable material from schools if it meets objective criteria, instead of a priori banning all books referencing LGBTQ+ issues and teaching that it’s okay to be gay.)
Such points of contention can be resolved in a free and open society. They are not grounds for strident anti-trans or anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination.
Narrative
It wasn’t until I came across a document published in 2015 by the Family Research Foundation (FRC), however, that all this strident anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-trans rhetoric began to make sense.
Here, in a single paper, was the entire anti-trans narrative that has since appeared in the right-wing press and on social media. Here were all the talking points about ‘LGBT Ideology’ that had been hurled at me by the religious-right opponents of both classical and left-wing liberalism.
To quote them: ‘Family Research Council believes the context for the full expression of human sexuality is within the bonds of marriage between one man and one woman.’
There you have it. It is a fundamentalist Christian-right activist group that opposes pornography, embryonic stem-cell research, abortion, divorce, and LGBTQ+ rights such as anti-discrimination laws, same-sex civil union or marriage, and adoption by same-sex couples. It is positively Victorian.
It has been agitating against gay rights since the 1980s. It once took to the newsletter of a far-right anti-semitic white supremacist group, Liberty Lobby, to raise the terrifying spectre that AT&T’s telephone exchanges might be manned (if you’ll excuse the pun) by lesbians.
FRC is designated as a hate group by the (admittedly rather left-wing, but widely viewed as authoritative) Southern Poverty Law Center.
One of the co-founders of the FRC, George Rekers, is divorced. He was also busted for hiring a male prostitute in 2010. Of course he was. The most strident ‘think of the children’ bigots often turn out to be hypocrites motivated by hatred for their own repressed sexuality.
Religious right groups like FRC have also made alliance with trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) groups to motivate them to target transgender people. There are also allegations that they attempted to infiltrate transgender groups to sow disarray from the inside. A conservative (and Catholic) journalist, Ed West, appeared to confirm as much at the Conservative Party Conference in Britain in 2021.
So, all of this hatred for LGBTQ+ people spewed all over my Twitter timeline, in response to an article that had nothing to do with the subject, was all concocted in the US, by far-right evangelical hate groups.
Hateful
It is unclear to me why religious conservatives believe that anyone who defends LGBTQ+ rights automatically condones sexually explicit behaviour around children, or seeks to ‘groom’ children.
I lie. It isn’t unclear to me. It is because they are hateful, vicious and vindictive, and will do or say anything to ‘win’ the ‘war’ against ‘the libtards’.
They will do anything, however crude and defamatory, to discredit people who dare to stand up for gay rights. That is why they hurl insults such as ‘groomer’ and ‘paedophile’ at them on social media (as they did to me, repeatedly).
It’s an intimidating mob to oppose, in truth, and they have a long history of trying to falsely associate the LGBTQ+ movement with paedophilia.
Yet to the extent that their concern over children being exposed to sexually explicit behaviour is legitimate, it is very well covered by law. This isn’t a grave threat that must urgently be dealt with. It has always been illegal.
South Africa, for example, has laws against the sexual exploitation and grooming of children, including the exposure or display of genitals, anus or breasts to a child.
If a particular instance of this occurs, it is a simple matter to report the crime to the police.
In a free society, one does not vilify an entire category of people on the basis of a single offender’s race, affiliation, beliefs, sex, gender, or sexual orientation. Doing so is called prejudice, or stereotyping, or discrimination, and it violates the basic human rights and individual liberties according to us in our constitution.
Guilt by association
If we were to follow the religious right’s condemnation of the entire LGBTQ+ community and the entire doctrine of equality and tolerance, over a handful of objectionable incidents, we would have to condemn the entire religious right as a group, too.
Research shows a ‘startling and consistent picture’ of child grooming and sexual abuse in religious settings, and the protection of offenders by their institutions and congregations. This is true not only for fringe sects, cults and the Catholic Church, but also for mainstream Protestant denominations.
Fully 93% of sex offenders describe themselves as ‘religious’.
When pressed, these people will say, ‘But teachers abuse children at higher rates than clergy.’
This may be true by a small margin, as far as the statistics go, but one can’t really trust statistics when churches systematically cover up incidents of child abuse.
Or they’ll say they condemn child abuse in the church too, which many no doubt do.
Not enough, however, to end the practice of ‘handling’ abuse cases ‘internally’, instead of reporting them to the police. The difference is that one option lands the abuser in prison where they belong, while the other allows them to ‘repent’ and be ‘forgiven’ (not by the victim, mind you), and be quietly shunted to a different parish where they are free to continue their perverse crimes.
The religious right is also guilty of the practice of conversion therapy for children suspected of deviating from religious gender norms. Often flying under the radar with euphemisms such as ‘sexuality counseling’ or ‘ex-gay ministry’, conversion therapy is not considered ‘therapy’ by any legitimate psychiatric authority, and is widely denounced as being ineffective and harmful.
This suggests that the religious right doesn’t really care about the mental and physical well-being of children at all, and their outrage about supposed gay grooming has nothing to do with protecting the children.
The rank hypocrisy of the religious right on the supposed threat of gay people to children, in pursuit of their hateful and discriminatory anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, is galling to a neutral observer.
Projection
One may be forgiven, then, for detecting a certain amount of projection in the hysterical LGBTQ+ ‘grooming’ rhetoric of the more vocal members of the religious right.
Either way, this is a discussion that has nothing to do with the pros and cons of liberal democracy, and has very little relevance to South Africa, either.
The South African alt-right evidently imbibes all its talking points from evangelical American culture warriors. Their opposition to equal rights and liberties for LGBTQ+ people is all they have in common.
Don’t we have enough problems of our own to solve without fomenting hatred at home?
I, for one, will continue to advocate for equal rights and tolerance for LGBTQ+ people.
Amid the Twitter storm, I received one very touching message:
‘Hey Ivo,
‘We met years and years ago. And much as we have vastly different political and economic outlooks it is heartening to see you arguing clearly and calmly for lgbtq+ rights.
‘The vitriol you’re faced with (I’ve seen you called a pedophile at least 3 or 4 times) and your consistency in retaining the view makes it all the more heartening that there are still people, good people, on either side of the political spectrum.
‘I respect you for that.’
And that’s why I won’t back down. I cannot tolerate hatred, bigotry, and discrimination and still call myself a principled classical liberal.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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Image: By Flickr User iDJ Photography (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)