From pride to prejudice: The GOP’s push for ‘Family Month’ – Ivo Vegter

Key topics:Republicans propose replacing Pride Month with "Family Month"Project 2025 reveals a plan to enforce religious conservatismLGBTQ+ rights under threat from rising US culture war legislation.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Ivo Vegter.In another step on the road to Gilead, Republicans have introduced a Bill declaring June to be “Family Month”, instead of “Pride Month”.For someone who claims to know nothing about Project 2025, Donald Trump and the Republican Party he represents sure follow it quite closely.On the day he took office, Trump presumed to decree “biological truth”: “It is the policy of the United States to recognise two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”Actual scientists, whose job it is to study reality (as opposed to reality shows), disagree. “Many traits of the brain and body show marked sex differences, but the distributions of their values overlap substantially between the two sexes,” write six Canadian researchers. “[O]ur investigations support a reconceptualising of sex as continuous.”.The chart above shows a score of sex-related traits, both physical and psychological, and how they are distributed among nominal men and women. It is clear that there is a substantial group of people who fall somewhere in between. It isn’t for a government to declare that this cannot be so, or is not legitimate.Another study, of 17,785 subjects from 48 countries, found the same was true about sexual orientation, as Alfred Kinsey hypothesised more than 70 years ago.These are private matters, subject to individual freedom and not to government decree.Family MonthThis week, GOP congresscritter Mary Miller, along with eight Republican co-sponsors, introduced a Bill that takes the US further down the road to Gilead, the fictional fundamentalist theonomy that is the setting for Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.The Bill seeks to reclaim June, the first month of summer in the northern hemisphere, from “LGBTQ ideology”. Instead of Pride Month, this Bill proposes that it be rebranded as “Family Month”.“The American family is under relentless attack from a radical leftist agenda that seeks to erase truth, redefine marriage, and confuse our children,” Miller told The Daily Wire which broke the story. “By recognising June as Family Month, we reject the lie of ‘Pride’ and instead honour God’s timeless and perfect design. If we truly want to restore our nation, we must stand united to protect and uphold the foundation upon which it was built – the family.”There’s so much wrong with this statement, it’s hard to know where to start. It ends, however, with “Prejudice Month”.Project 2025All of this culture war stuff is meant to please the GOP’s right-wing evangelical and conservative Catholic base. Both groups are intent on (re-)introducing religious prejudices into government at all levels, and to discriminate against those who choose to live their lives differently.It reflects the conservative “family values” orientation of Project 2025, which states: “When the Founders spoke of ‘pursuit of Happiness,’ what they meant might be understood today as in essence ‘pursuit of Blessedness.’ That is, an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained – to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family – marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like. … Religious devotion and spirituality are the greatest sources of happiness around the world.”That’s just some of the very extensive verbiage dedicated to affirming that marriage is between not just any two adults, but between one man and one unrelated woman, that non-married couples should be urged to marry, and that school children ought to be instructed on the benefits of healthy marriages.Note how they replace “Happiness” with “Blessedness”, explicitly injecting religious fervour into a constitution that forbids the government from promoting one religion over others or restricting anyone’s religious practices. The Project 2025 authors claim that happiness is dependent upon doing not what people want, but as people are “ordained” to do, by the “Creator”.They directly contradict their own description of freedom: “The American Republic was founded on principles prioritising and maximising individuals’ rights to live their best life or to enjoy what the Framers called ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”They describe “this inalienable right of self-direction – of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good”, but extend that freedom only to those who choose to live according to religious dogma.Their whole shtick is you’re free to choose, as long as you choose what they tell you to choose.If people choose to live a different life, then they cannot claim to be living it “to the good”, and therefore, the government should not support or even permit it.Relentless attackMiller said: “The American family is under relentless attack from a radical leftist agenda that seeks to erase truth, redefine marriage, and confuse our children.”In fact, the American family is not under attack at all. Literally nobody (except some edgy teenagers) objects to people who choose to live as married heterosexual couples in a nuclear family with children. Well-functioning nuclear families, whether they be religious or not, are widely admired and recognised as a sound part of a healthy community.The opposite is true: people who do not fit into that conservative mould are under relentless attack from a radical religious agenda that seeks to define “truth”, restrict marriage, force people into homogeneous social structures, and repress children’s developing sexual preferences and identity.Let’s not be coy about it: this Bill is a frontal assault on the LGBTQ+ community, trying to drive them back into the closet. It seeks to restore and legitimise the prejudice of prior generations. It is a hate Bill.If anyone doubts they’ll be coming after the Respect for Marriage Act of 2022, which requires states to recognise same-sex (and inter-racial) civil marriages, and the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling of 2015, which held that the Fourteenth Amendment required such recognition, they’re being terribly naïve about the aims of the religious right. They’re bound to go the same way as Roe v. Wade, and for the same reasons.Same-sex marriagesThe entire premise that opposite-sex marriages with children in a nuclear family are the superior form of social organisation is flawed.There is no evidence to support the notion that same-sex marriages are in any way harmful, to its participants, to children in a same-sex family, or to society at large.They cannot be condemned on the principle that marriages are supposed to facilitate orderly procreation. If so, then people who marry late in life, or widows and widowers who re-marry without having more children, or people who marry despite infertility, or people who marry but do not desire children, ought to be condemned on the same grounds.Social research confirms that same-sex marriages are a threat neither to the institution of marriage, nor to the children entering into such a family through adoption, artificial insemination, or surrogacy.The only reason to object to such marriages is prejudice. It is pure discrimination against people based on the fact that they believe differently or make different choices than people on the religious right would like.Pride“By recognising June as Family Month,” Miller continued, “we reject the lie of ‘Pride’…”Pride is not a lie. It is not even clear what that is supposed to mean.LGBTQ+ Pride is a movement. It seeks to promote equal rights, self-affirmation, dignity, and visibility of LGBTQ people as a social group. It stands opposed to shame, social stigma, discrimination. and prejudice.One can take issue with some of the excesses of some Pride events, but to reject the entire movement is to reject the right of LGBTQ+ people to openly participate as equals in society. The existence of people like Miller and her co-sponsors demonstrates that the Pride movement is still necessary.Of its time“…and instead honour God’s timeless and perfect design,” Miller goes on.This is objectionable to secularists, including to religious secularists who consider the imposition by the state of religious precepts and morality to be a threat to their own religious freedom.It should be remembered that religious people established the separation between church and state, in order to protect their religious freedom.Miller’s description of God’s supposed design is wide open to critique.When the Bible was written, extended families were quite normal and widely accepted. So were families involving single parents, particularly in cases where one partner had died.Arranged marriages were almost universal. Many young men, and most young women, did not get a choice in who they were to marry. Many did not know their betrothed before they got married. Marriage was not based on mutual love and respect. That was something that, hopefully, came with time.The modern nuclear family, based on a marriage built on love, really only became common in the West during the Middle Ages. It is largely a product of the end of feudalism and the start of industrialisation, when property rights, land ownership patterns, the decline of agriculture, and the growth of trades and professions made nuclear families viable economic units.The nuclear family is not timeless. It is a product of its time.Imperfect designThe nuclear family is also far from perfect. In conservative families, especially where divorce is prohibited by religious mores, there is little recourse when one of the family members becomes abusive, violent, or otherwise destructive to a healthy family dynamic and the raising of well-adjusted children.Many nuclear families are highly dysfunctional, and expose members, especially children, to emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. Religious conservatism has little to offer battered women and abused or repressed children (although it has traditionally been fairly easy for a man to get rid of an inconvenient wife by having her committed to an asylum for hysteria).It is all well and good to point to a harmonious nuclear family built on love and mutual respect and call that an ideal. There’s certainly nothing wrong with it, and there’s much to appreciate about it. If you come from such a family, you’re a very lucky person.But not all families are like that, and they cannot all be forced into that mould. Dysfunctional families are not made better by forcing people to remain married, whether for the sake of religious morality or “for the sake of the children”. Outcomes for most members can often be significantly improved by allowing the family to break up.Of course, that’s not to say that broken homes are ideal. They’re not, but the solutions are not uniform, and do not lie with religious moralists who demand that people live as God ordained.Government policy ought to support all families, however they are constituted by the free individuals of whom they are comprised.Foundational values“If we truly want to restore our nation,” says Miller, “we must stand united to protect and uphold the foundation upon which it was built – the family.”But the family is not the foundation upon which the US was built. The US Constitution was revolutionary for its declaration of individual liberty.The cornerstone of the US is the right of every individual to follow their own conscience, as independent, unique, and autonomous people, rather than as members of a group, or followers of a doctrine.The US Constitution enshrines people’s rights to live their lives as they see fit, and not, as Miller and the Project 2025 authors would have it, to live as ordained.Another key principle upon which the US was founded – and why it is often referred to as a constitutional republic instead of a democracy – is that the majority should never be able to infringe on the rights and freedoms of the minority.One in five Americans do not believe in God. Of the four who do, one describes themself as “born again” or “evangelical”, and another as Catholic. Of the Catholics, half are lapsed and liberal.The strictly conservative religious doctrine on family that Miller espouses represents at best half of Americans, if that. Although support for same-sex marriage has declined recently among Republicans, a large majority of Americans (68%) continue to support it. Support is especially strong among younger people.So Miller’s Bill does not even represent a “moral majority”. Yet the beauty of the American Constitution is that people who believe as she does are entirely free to live their lives as their religion dictates, but the other half are also free to live their lives as they choose.Prejudice MonthIntroducing religious restrictions, programmes, and dogma into government violates core principles of individual liberty and religious freedom which, ironically, were established by religious people in order to protect their religious practice from the state.It is highly unlikely that Miller or any of her co-sponsors ever thought this deeply about the implications of their “Family Month”. They just hate gay people, and want to rain on their parade to “own the libs”.Instead of Pride Month, what they want is Prejudice Month, to celebrate their freedom to discriminate against those who are not like them..*This article was first published by DailyFriend and was republished with permission

From pride to prejudice: The GOP’s push for ‘Family Month’ – Ivo Vegter

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