As social conservatives across the country push a coordinated, nationwide effort to roll back the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender children, many veterans of the war over same-sex marriage are having the same gut reaction: we’ve been here before.
“These are old networks and opponents, but I don’t think they are ‘reawakening.’ They never went away,” said Evan Wolfson, attorney and activist who founded Freedom To Marry, one of the groups at the forefront of the marriage movement. Although support for same-sex marriage has risen to more than 70 percent since it was legalized nationwide in 2015, Wolfson said, “that doesn’t mean that the opponents completely went away.”
The recent signing into law of a trio of anti-LGBTQ bills in Texas, Florida and Alabama, and a raft of similar legislation under consideration across the country, evoke the same strategy that veterans of the battle fought against in the pursuit of same-sex marriage—and feature many of the same players that once seemed on the cusp of banning it nationwide.
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“It’s no coincidence that the anti-LGBTQ+ bills like ‘Don’t Say Gay’ measures we’re seeing in states from Florida to Ohio are so similar,” said Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, the executive director of GLSEN, which works to end bullying and harassment of LGBT children in schools. “Many attacks we’re seeing across states are nearly identical, because they are copycat bills stemming from the same source—a well-funded anti-LGBTQ+ extremist movement.”
The vast majority of those bills target transgender children seeking gender-affirming care and the ability to compete in school sports; many of the others, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” bills by their opponents, seek to ban classroom discussion or acknowledgment of LGBTQ people and relationships in primary schools. But some are increasingly extreme, targeting doctors with fines or felonies for treating transgender teenagers and parents with potential investigation for using their child’s pronouns. One new bill introduced in the South Carolina state senate on Thursday would forcibly detransition teenagers who are already on puberty-blocking medication.
Longtime advocates for expanding LGBTQ rights are experiencing déjà vu, said Barbara Simon, a spokesperson for GLAAD, as the primary antagonists from the battle for marriage reemerge to take the culture wars to the classroom.
“Opponents of marriage equality are failing against this rising tide of LGBTQ acceptance, but they’re still desperate to try, even proposing legislation that would legalize straight marriages to children under 17,” Simon said. “The wave of copycat bills in the states targeting LGBTQ youth echoes fights of long ago that Americans already believe are behind us.”
The debate about public expression of sexual orientation in schools is hardly new. In 1978, California’s high-profile “Briggs Initiative” sought to ban gays and lesbians from working in public schools, and similar legislation was eventually struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court nearly a decade late.
As social conservatives recover from losing the decade-long battle for marriage rights, right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, Focus On the Family and the American Family Association are working in concert to chip away at newly acquired LGBTQ rights. This time, they feel that they have a broader mandate—and a wider audience.
“While people who support man-woman marriage today tend to be conservative, opponents of gender ideology run the gamut of political persuasion,” said Jay Richards, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society.
That spectrum, Richards said, includes “religious conservatives, atheist scientists, radical feminists, and a growing number of lesbians concerned with the erasure of women.”
“Overreach from the radical left has brought together diverse Americans who believe male and female are objective biological realities and do not want to deprive women of rights and protections in schools, sports, and intimate spaces in the name of an anti-science gender ideology,” Richards said.
The opening salvo of the latest battle in the culture wars may well have been at the DeVos Center in October 2019, when the nation’s leading social conservatives gathered in Washington, D.C. to discuss a grave threat facing America’s children: the sexualization of children through culture, education and health care.
“The innocence, safety and security of all American children—that’s what’s at stake today,” Emilie Kao, a senior counsel at the conservative legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom, told attendees at the conference, each of whom was provided with a 66-page “Parent Resource Guide” on “the transgender issue.” Among those in attendance at the gathering—held at the Heritage Foundation’s national headquarters, and dubbed the “Summit on Protecting Children from Sexualization”—were leaders of major social conservative organizations, prominent conservative pundits, and Republican lawmakers from across the country.
“You may hear things today that are disturbing, shocking and heartbreaking,” Kao warned. “We hope that your response will not be to stay silent, but to tell others about what you’ve heard and to join us in engaging family, friends, communities and lawmakers to protect the future of America by protecting children from sexualization.”
Three months after attending that conference, South Dakota state Rep. Fred Deutsch, one of the conference’s attendees, introduced House Bill 1057, a proposed law that would make it a felony to provide children under 16 with gender-affirming care. Since the introduction of Deutsch’s bill, nearly 200 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in Republican-controlled statehouses around the United States, according to Freedom for All Americans’ legislative tracker.
Within the social conservative movement, supporters agree that the legislative push is just another stage in the long-running fight over LGBTQ rights.
“I would guess and hope that any figures who fought against the legal recognition of intrinsically non-marital unions as marriages would be working to stop the exploitation of public education for the purpose of promulgating arguable leftist ontological and moral assumptions on ‘gender’ and sexuality,” said Laurie Higgins, a culture issues writer at the Illinois Family Institute, which protested Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s signing of legislation that overhauled the state’s sex education curriculum to include LGBTQ education. “The Illinois Family Institute has consistently worked toward retaining sexual differentiation in the legal definition of marriage and working to protect parental rights and restore sound pedagogy on sexuality in public schools.”
Many of the new bills are essentially copy-pasted from state to state—Montana’s “Save Women’s Sports Act” and Idaho’s “Fairness In Women’s Sports Act” and South Dakota’s “Promote Continued Fairness in Women’s Sports” are all practically identical—with a sizable number crafted in whole or in part by Alliance Defending Freedom.
The legal advocacy group, which The Daily Beast reported last year is funded by a sophisticated dark-money operation funded by some of the country’s richest conservatives, is best known for heading up courtroom cases on behalf of anti-LGBTQ businesses and organizations. Among those battles include arguing for the criminalization of homosexuality in amicus briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, and representing “conversion therapy” practitioners in consumer fraud suits.
But the organization has also steered the fight for social conservatism from the legislative side as well, helping draft sample legislation that has mushroomed across the country. Deutsch himself helped with the spread, telling the New York Times that after crafting the transgender athletes bill—with the assistance of Alliance Defending Freedom and the Kelsey Coalition, which fights against providing puberty blockers to transgender children and participated in the October 2019 conference—he sent copies to legislators in other states in the hopes of taking the bill national.
Alliance Defending Freedom did not respond to a request for comment and has not publicly claimed credit for drafting the framework for many of the bills, and Joseph Harding, the Florida state representative who sponsored the state’s “Parental Rights in Education Act,” told The Daily Beast that the bill was driven by “horrific woke things happening in our schools,” not outside influence groups.
“The left and their allies in the media like you should really just take the loss,” Harding said. “You all really thought you could pull off your anti-parent movement by hiding behind a rainbow flag. You lost and frankly were exposed on a national level. When the majority of Democrat voters agree with me, you would think you would get the message.”
Deutsch, however, is happy to share credit with Alliance Defending Freedom for the finished product.
“ADF and South Dakota’s Legislative Research Council both provided expertise in crafting language,” Deutsch told The Daily Beast, adding that to his knowledge, the transgender sports ban that was ultimately passed and signed into law by Gov. Kristi Noem was drafted by her office.
In Ohio, House Bill 616—a copycat of the Florida legislation—was introduced last week by state representative Jean Schmidt, who as a member of Congress cosponsored a failed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have banned same-sex marriage across the country. The bill has also found support among rebranded conservative organizations that once existed to fight same-sex marriage, and have now pivoted to education as the issue has become a critical tool for Republicans seeking to take back Congress in the midterms.
“The real question is why do people want to sexualize kids at this age?” Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue—formerly “Citizens for Community Values,” a staunchly anti-gay marriage organization that blamed “homosexual activists” for redefining the institution—told the Columbus Dispatch upon the bill’s introduction. “Children need time to develop and grow up and parents should be guiding these discussions.”
Some Republican hopefuls even have firsthand experience with both the fight against same-sex marriage and attempts to keep LGBTQ identity out of public schools. Kevin Smith, a candidate for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, has been fighting to ban “pro-gay” curricula from schools for more than a decade: in 2010, as head of Cornerstone Policy Research, an anti-gay marriage think tank, he said anti-bullying legislation would “translate into discussions of homosexual issues in the classroom.” And two years after the state legalized same-sex marriage, Smith even led a pressure campaign for the state legislature to repeal it.
None of the groups working on the dozens of bills targeting LGBTQ student have dropped their opposition to same-sex marriage in the six years since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges granted the right to marry nationwide.
That fact is deeply troubling to advocates who note that many conservative political leaders have publicly indicated that they do not view Obergefell as settled law. Earlier this month, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) grilled Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson over whether the decision amounted to legislating from the bench, one which “creates a right that is not even mentioned in the Constitution.”
In October 2020, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas issued an angry minority opinion when the court declined to hear the case of Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who was fired after she refused to process the marriage licenses of same-sex couples. The justices argued that “by choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment,” the Supreme Court had “created a problem that only it can fix,” suggesting that the court could someday narrow the scope of its initial ruling in Obergefell—or even overturn it entirely.
Until then, the justices wrote, “Obergefell will continue to have ‘ruinous consequences for religious liberty.’”
The connection between the lingering hostility against same-sex relationships and the current targeting of LGBTQ teens, movement leaders say, couldn’t be clearer.
“They have always sought to exploit children and fears around education, young people, et cetera, going back to Anita Bryant and even before,” Wolfson said of anti-LGBT organizations, referring to the beauty queen-turned-anti-gay firebrand whose “Save Our Children” campaign overturned anti-discrimination ordinances across the United States in the 1970s.
“Now we see these same people targeting transgender youth, targeting our families, targeting our history,” Tim Gill, a gay philanthropist whose eponymous foundation has granted more than half a billion dollars to LGBTQ causes, said in remarks on Thursday in front of the Stonewall Inn in New York’s West Village. Gill, who worked with the Obama administration to have the site of the riots that gave birth to the modern LGBTQ rights movement designated a national monument in 2016, said that the recent raft of legislation would effectively prevent students from learning about their own history.
“They would essentially be barred from learning about this building,” Gill said.
Conservatives say that they are more than ready for the fight.
“On our end, nothing has been ‘reawakened,’” Higgins said, echoing Wolfson nearly verbatim, “because we never fell asleep.”
