Gay conservative tools

Last September, I moved into a house with a small yard. With a yard, I began work on what I’m calling our Victory Garden (“Victory Garden” being the old WWII term for home vegetable gardens). As I’ve said before, I don’t want to get lost in the day-to-day goings on of the news cycles, and keeping busy is one way to do that.

As a transgender American, things aren’t looking good for us nationally, and following the news closely reminds me of that. It looks better if you’re in California because of the laws in the state, but nationally …

So, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple of weeks weeding and tilling the 8’ x 13’ patch of soil that my roommate and I have set aside for that Victory Garden. I’m personally looking forward in late summer and early fall to picking some San Marzano and Heritage tomatoes for saucing.

Metaphorically, I’ll need some of those tomatoes for tossing at my community’s enemies.

This past week, I’ve been beset by news that gay writer Chadwick Moore came out as a gay conservative. He did a fawning piece that he considered neutral for Out Magazine a number of months ago on Milo Yiannopoulos; a fawning piece that didn’t mention Yiannopoulos’ well known transphobia.

The idea of gay and lesbian conservatives is useful on the right, but the usefulness flows in one direction. Gays and lesbians may come out on the side of conservative Republican issues, but conservative Republicans don’t come out on the side of antidiscrimination protections for housing, employment and public accommodations based on sexual orientation.

Bryan Fischer sums up why in a piece he recently wrote for the American Family Association entitled The Myth of the Gay Conservative. In it he stated that a gay conservative “might be able to articulate a conservative view on national defense, or Second Amendment rights, or school choice, or repealing and replacing Obamacare. But he cannot be a conservative. Why? Because at the center of conservatism is a non-negotiable view of human sexuality and the family. At the heart of a conservative view of the world lies the family. Not the individual, mind you, but the family.”

“[T]here is no room in conservatism for the embrace of a lifestyle in which it is impossible for children to be conceived and brought into the world,” Fischer continued.

This brings me to transgender exclusionary radical feminists, especially ones that are lesbian. The Heritage Foundation is sponsoring a Feb. 16 panel of Hands Across the Aisle, a group that describes itself as a coalition of “radical feminists, lesbians, Christians and conservatives that are tabling our ideological differences to stand in solidarity against gender identity legislation, which we have come to recognize as the erasure of our own hard-won civil rights.” They are “committed to working together, rising above our differences, and leveraging our collective resources to oppose the transgender agenda.”

The lesbian in the panel is Meriam Ben-Shalom, whom I’ve written about before; the feminist on the panel is Mary Lou Singleton. The five people on the panel represent activists working on either antitransgender legislation or court cases in four states: Washington State, Minnesota, North Carolina and New Mexico.

The host of the Heritage Foundation sponsored panel is Ryan T. Anderson, who’s previously written for the Heritage Foundation. Anderson believes “The law must leave people free to engage in actions based on the conviction that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other.”

Anderson and Fischer exemplify why conservative Republicans aren’t working for LGBT civil rights.

I really do want to figuratively bury my head in the soil of my Victory Garden, but civil rights victories don’t come from ignoring that there are some gays and lesbians, some who identify as conservatives and some who don’t, who through their collaboration with conservative Republicans are working to deny LGBT community members basic civil rights.