The Continuing War on Pride Displays
[It’s probably a good time to remind everyone that this is a personal website and my comments do not reflect my employer.]
Natalie Cline and her army of bigots are at it again. For those blissfully unaware, Cline was elected to the Utah State Board of Education in 2020. She is best known now as a leading articulator of white grievance politics, that teaching about racism in America is bad because it makes (some) white folk feel bad and should be prohibited. Diversity and inclusion is a dangerous concept for folks like Cline. A few months ago she sent her army of bigots after a teacher for promoting communism, why yes it does feel like the 1950s never ended for some people. Unsurprisingly, Cline really hates the idea of queer people existing in public. On 11 June 2021 she attacked Pride displays in libraries. Her comment and those of her army of bigots illustrate some fascinating distinctions from other more moderate forms of anti-queer activism that I see in book disputes.
Cline’s Facebook post.
Cline’s hashtag invokes the idea of grooming. This takes on two, at least, connotations. The more benign meaning is the popular yet idiotic idea that queer folk are “indoctrinating” kids through books. Her army of bigots invoke this idea more that once in the comments. One warned that “there is also an agenda to intentionally bring about gender and sexuality confusion issues with our children.” Children are framed as inherently straight and cisgender, thus the evil queers must corrupt them. This reaches back to a slogan popularized, I believe, by Anita Bryant in the late 1970s: “homosexuals can’t reproduce, so they recruit.” The comments are full of allegations of indoctrination and the idea of that people won’t “become” queer without some outside influence. This is standard for modern commenters.
Interestingly, Cline’s “grooming” tag runs another way: towards child sex abuse. More than one commenter in her army of bigots brings this up. For example, one claims that “Studies show a majority of LGBT people were either exposed to pornography, or sexually abused at a young age.” Leaving aside the porn anxiety - and it’s worth noting that pretty much everyone is “exposed” to porn since the advent of the internet - this plays into a historical trope of queer people as sexual predators of children. This traces back at least to the 1930s and was a major element of the public campaign to purge queer folk from public view in the 1950s and ‘60s. I have students watch the disturbing piece of propaganda Boys Beware to illustrate this argument. The idea that queer people, particular gay men, are sex predators or that queer people are queer because of sexual assault was debunked decades ago but it remained popular for long after, deployed, for example, in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act debates on the floor of Congress. But this fell out of the major “respectable” political debates in the 2000s as anti-LGBTQ rhetoric had to find more socially acceptable language; what Reva Siegel calls “preservation through transformation.” As the general public became less homophobic, bigots had to turn to other arguments and thus “indoctrination” and “neutrality” became the center. I rarely see invocations of sex abuse claims even in private book challenges in the past decade. So seeing this made so publicly is always interesting because it demonstrates that some bigots, at least, are still happy to make the arguments in spaces they likely perceive as inherently safe for their views.
Many of the commenters raise the supposed norm of “neutrality.” Above is one example posted. It invokes the idea that schools and libraries are neutral identity spaces and no “sexuality” should be taught to kids. It is, of course, total bullshit. Schools especially, and to a lesser extent libraries, present an aggressively straight vision of society. I see this complaint so often about queer-inclusive books: “why have gay ‘family’ books when you don’t have straight ones!” But the libraries are full of straight family books. Pull any random book in the children’s area and you are likely to find a story about a mom and day with some kid doing something. Far more likely than representations of queer families. Schools present this even more assertively. To Cline and her army of bigots this is “neutral” because being straight (and cis) is the only acceptable reality. Public institutions have a duty to reinforce that reality. It is neutral to “groom” children to be straight.
This is why I strongly disagree with claims of neutrality. What Cline and her army of bigots are calling for is the exclusion of queer identity from the public square. Pride displays must be forbidden because our identities are inherently dangerous and (supposedly) undermine the full development of the next generation of straight citizens. There is no middle ground between Cline’s exclusion and inclusion of queer people as full members of society, neutrality is a myth. Libraries and schools have a duty to choose inclusion over exclusion.
Note: Cline’s post was public as of the posting of this piece. I have screen captures taken the morning of 16 June 2021 but in line with my research process I only identify people who hold offices of public responsibility. Thus, I leave the commenters identities off even though the comments were made on a public post.
