Last week you dished out the latest nausea from MAGA types who pretend to care about children, but amid the internment of kindergartners, cutting funding to catch child predators, and a measles outbreak at a detention center, you'd be forgiven for missing out.
I am referring to a coordinated campaign launched by the religious right to repeal gay marriage, arguing that it harms children. The effort is a direct attack on the Obergefell v. Hodges' 2015 Supreme Court ruling that makes same-sex marriage a fundamental equality right under the 14th Amendment, but also seeks to engage churches on the issue and change public opinion.
Good luck with that last part. Most Americans support marriage equality. But the Supreme Court? That's much more doubtful these days.
But what worries me most, as we wait for litigation, is that the campaign is another bogus MAGA ploy to use children as an excuse to attack civil rights and attempt, in Christian nationalist style, to impose religious values on society at large.
MAGA frames so much hate, especially around immigrants and diversity, as protection of children, and through decades of conspiracy theories has attempted to paint LGBTQ+ parents as deviant and predatory. (QAnon, for example, aimed to save children from homosexual and Democratic predators.)
In reality, it's the MAGA kids who are traumatizing children.
“Our children are afraid. They are terrified,” Chauntyll Allen told me. She is a school board member from St. Paul, Minnesota, who was recently arrested for her role in protesting at the church of a pastor who is also an ICE officer.
“And we're not just talking about immigrants,” he continued. All children “are seeing this, they are experiencing this, and they carry the terror in their body. What will this mean for our society in 20 years?”
This campaign to undo marriage equality, far from protecting children, is just another harm being inflicted on them for political purposes. It presents two California cases that purport to show how terrible any form of same-sex parenting is, but mischaracterizes the facts for maximum outrage.
The campaign also specifically targets in vitro fertilization and surrogacy as dangerous gateways to promoting LGBTQ+ families, an increasingly common position in far-right religious circles that would like to see more white women having babies through sex with white husbands.
Attacking marriage equality is not about protecting children, any more than deporting immigrants to stop crime is. Allowing it to be framed that way actually jeopardizes the stability of the approximately 300,000 children nationwide who are being raised by some 832,000 same-sex married couples.
It endangers the physical and mental health of LGBTQ+ children in any family who grow up in a world that is increasingly hostile towards them, with an increase in hate crimes based on gender and identity.
And it endangers all who value a free and fair democracy that separates Church and State by eroding the rights of the vulnerable as a precedent to erode the rights of whoever bothers them next. If LGBTQ+ marriages are not legally protected, how long will it be before racists turn to the Loving decision, which legalized interracial marriage?
If you doubt the MAGA agenda will go that far, when Second Lady Usha Vance recently announced her fourth pregnancy, one charming guy wrote on social media: “There is nothing exciting about this. We will never vote for your race traitor husband.”
Hate is a virus that spreads as it wants.
Those behind the effort to undo marriage equality say that by legalizing the ability for LGBTQ+ people to marry, the United States put “adult desires” before the well-being of children, which depends on being raised in a home that includes a married man and woman.
Never mind the millions of children raised by single parents, grandparents (looking at you, JD Vance), or other guardians who are not the biological John and Jane moms and dads of the conservative tradition. Never mind the many same-sex marriages that do not include children.
“Americans must understand the threat that gay marriage poses to children and that natural marriage is directly related to protecting children,” campaign leader Katy Faust said in an interview with a Christian news website.
Of course, the campaign also makes no mention of the hundreds of children currently held in detention camps across the country; On some days, the number of children locked up by ICE alone (not by Border Patrol or in the care of other agencies) has skyrocketed to 400 under Trump, according to the Marshall Project.
Outside of prison, black and brown children are traumatized daily by the fear that they or their parents will be kidnapped or even killed by federal agents. Thousands of children across the country, including California, have stopped going to school and other public places for fear of endangering themselves or their families. Don't expect to see these people campaigning to protect those children.
The campaign also ignores the fact that the US Department of Justice's funding to combat sex crimes against children has just been cut, leaving victims and prosecutors without crucial resources to fight this real and undoubtedly harmful exploitation of our youth by sex traffickers.
And Epstein. I can't even begin on the people at Save the Children who apparently ignore the victims of the sex crimes detailed in those files (many of them children at the time) while wringing their hands over families that don't look like theirs. It's a mind-boggling amount of hypocrisy.
But, of course, none of this has to do with saving children, not yours, not mine, not anyone's.
But framing it around protecting children is powerful manipulation — a last-ditch effort when same-sex marriage does, in fact, become more accepted. Because who doesn't want to save our children? Of whatever.
Don't be surprised if this effort gains traction in the coming months. As we get closer to the election, the MAGA machine will try to divert attention from immigration and return to old-school issues like feminism, abortion, and same-sex marriage, which time and time again their base has been willing to vote on regardless of what's happening.
Because they don't really care about children. They care about power and are perfectly willing to exploit children to get it.
