Photo: Wikimedia Commons
What are you up to this election season? Are you paying any attention? Are you working for your favorite candidates? Are you planning to vote and maybe even bring someone with you to the polls?
Or have you given up on politics? Have you fallen for right-wing mind-game attempts to suppress your vote by convincing you to embrace ideas such as: “They’re all the same.” “They’re all crooked.” “My vote doesn’t matter.”
If any of those things were true, political action committees wouldn’t be spending millions to get you to stay home from the polls. They’re investing in the idea that your vote really matters.
In each current election we hear it’s “the most important in our lifetime.” But of all targeted groups, LGBTQI+ people should be struck by the fact that the stark contrast of the sides this time brings real, life-determining, relationship-determining, consequences.
There are groups of people who occupy and benefit from such a privileged position in life, whether it’s heterosexual privilege or class privilege, that they can act above it all and even opt out completely. But voters whom one side wants to crush can’t afford to do that.
The Republican side in its new MAGA iteration has shown us from the previous administration’s actions that it not only doesn’t care about LGBTQI+ people but wants to disenfranchise them from any and all rights they now might have. And they’re already doing their best to destroy LGBTQI+ lives.
It’s put in place a Supreme Court that after reversing most established precedents has openly declared it will end marriage equality, the ability to argue that we have privacy rights, and even the right to birth control. It will make “anti-sodomy” laws legal again.
That side has spent time and energy attempting to pass bills at state, local, and federal levels to deny information to LGBTQI+ people through schools and libraries. Their goal is to make LGBTQI+ people feel like immoral outcasts.
It has fought school boards and city commissions to make sure that LGBTQI+ people are not thought of as anything but deviants, sick, and threats to what it preaches are American cultural values. It has fought in courts again and again to question any progress in the fight for human rights.
It’s used sectarian religious language, symbols, and arguments to break down the separation of Church and State, pretending that God justifies their bigotry and discrimination and convincing many in right-wing religious traditions that they deserve to be religiously triumphant over anyone that doesn’t conform to their dogmas.
And now, on top of this, the Heritage Foundation through a team of hundreds of the previous administration’s members has actually put in writing with Project 2025 how much further they plan to go to destroy any LGBTQ+ rights among others.
All this describes one choice in this election represented at all levels now by the Republican Party. If you think I’m kidding, do a web search.
And then there’s the other side represented by Democratic candidates. This side too isn’t neutral on LGBTQI+ issues.
One need only look at the people at the top of their ticket to see that the already well-known yard sign saying “Harris Obviously” is the only hope to stop the anti-LGBTQI+ juggernaut.
Not only are the rights of LGBTQ+ people proudly affirmed at every Kamala Harris and Tim Walz rally, but their records are replete with actions that signal their long, strong, and naturally sincere support.
As the District Attorney for San Francisco, Kamala Harris helped then-mayor Gavin Newsom circumvent state law against gay marriage. When California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state, was thrown out in 2013, then-California Attorney General Harris called clerks in the state herself saying: “You must start the marriages immediately.” Shortly thereafter, she officiated the marriage between two of her friends, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier.
As California Senator, Harris received a “100 rating” from the Human Rights Campaign and has since spoken out regularly against anti-transgender laws in red states.
Then there’s the similar long support from Vice Presidential candidate, Tim Walz, that began in 1999 when he sponsored the first Gay-Straight Alliance at Mankato West High School where he was a social science teacher and head football coach.
“I had students come to me who were concerned that there was an uptick in some bullying towards our gay and lesbian students, and this is in the mid 90s. They asked if I would be interested in helping start a gay-straight alliance group. My answer was ‘Absolutely.’”
“I recognized my responsibility in that you have an older, white, straight, married male football coach who’s deeply concerned that these students are treated fairly and that there’s no bullying. And the idea that my players would be interested in coming to that and learn and to speak, to create a culture in a school that was welcoming, open and understanding was something Gwen [his wife] and I always strove for.”
His career has been full of such support. Last year, as Minnesota’s governor, Walz issued an executive order to safeguard transgender people’s ability to receive gender-affirming care and to protect out-of-state patients, their families, and medical providers from being punished by other states for seeking that care.
There is no question what the vital, life-changing choice is this time. And this life or death crossroad reminds us of what the sharp-tongued late, great, Texas author, journalist, and activist Molly Ivins said about those who don’t want to be involved.
“What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols…. Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don’t much care for.”
This is clearly the time to grasp that – before it’s too late.
*The Minor Details*
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas, is author of When Religion Is an Addiction; Scared Straight: Why It’s So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It’s So Hard to Be Human and other works. Contact him at www.FairnessProject.org
