JULY 25/AUGUST 1, 2022 EST. 1865 THE 48 HOURS AFTER ROE FELL Journey to AMY LITTLEFIELD DEMOCRATS AT A CROSSROADS Guantánamo NICHOLAS LEMANN A writer spends a week in America’s notorious penal colony, seeking out the truths we’re not meant to see. MOUSTAFA BAYOUMI THENATION.COM æ UNCOVERING EGYPT: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE NOVEMBER 4–16, 2022 Egypt remains a singular destination for exploring human history and culture, even as the freedom of its people grows more limited. Yet passionate and committed citizens continue their brave work; it’s a critical time to support the people of Egypt. On this exceptionally rich tour, we will not only explore extraordinary sites of the ancient world, including the ancient city of Alexandria, but also delve into the important issues facing the country at this crucial moment in its history. Our goal is to understand what is happening today while experiencing the magnificence of Egypt’s unparalleled cultural treasures. We will follow strict Covid-19 safety protocols throughout the program and will require that all travelers and tour staff be vaccinated and boosted. 100% of the proceeds from our travel programs supports The Nation’s journalism. For more information, visit TheNation.com/TRAVELS, e-mail us at [email protected], or call 212-209-5401. The Nation purchases carbon offsets for all emissions generated by our tours. GES MA GETTY I R / MAKE NEY O M NA N OP: A T Dawn patrol: Members of the abortion rights group Our Rights DC march to the house of Su- preme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on June 29 in Chevy Chase, Md. FEATURES 4 EDITORIAL 45 Letters B&A The Extreme Court 14 Journey to elie mystal 46 FIRST PERSON books the Guantánamo The Post-Roe Future arts 5 COMMENT 48 Hours Post-Roe regina mahone MOUSTAFA BAYOUMI A reporter spends a week at America’s Volunteers on abortion 32 32 A Big Tent hotlines heard a wave of notorious penal colony. The contradictory past despair and desperation. and uncertain future of amy littlefield the Democratic Party. 22 6 COMMENT nicholas lemann Cuba 12 Months On 38 A Gilded Age A year after nationwide protests, Cubans are still The decline and fall waiting for change. of the glossy. william m. leogrande COLUMNS kevin lozano 11 THE DEBATE 7 No Offense 41 Blunt Clarity Does Building Luxury On bad art, or washing Tove Ditlevsen’s Condos Create More our clean linen in public. unsentimental education. Affordable Housing? david bromwich lily meyer brian hanlon, tara raghuveer, ned resnikoff, 8 The Front Burner 43 We Are All God’s and john washington The right is firing up a Poems (poem) sex and gender panic. amit majmudar 22 Detainees’ Art 24 kali holloway 38 ERIN L. THOMPSON 13 Deadline Poet A look at paintings made by people Trump Considers an Early Entry in the ’24 Race locked up at Guantánamo. calvin trillin 24 The Worst Abuser You “ Could Ever Have During their periods of electoral success, the Democrats have VICTORIA LAW Tracy McCarter left her abusive partner, never been a clean, high-minded, Cover illustration: MAGES only to encounter a legal nightmare. egalitarian party.” 32 SUnAtiBtlRedI (ACLha QinUedR DAeStaHinIe,e ) , 2012 R / GETTY I 3VO1LU5ME Tbyh eT Nhaet Niona t(iIoSnS CNo 0m0p2a7n-y8,3 L78L) Cis ©pr 2in0t2e2d i 2n6 t htiem UeSs Aa ybeya Tr (htew No aistsiounes C ino mJapnaunayr, yL, LFeCb,r 5u2a0r yE, iMghatrhc hA,v Aenpuriel,, NJuenwe ,Y Jourlky,, NAuYg u10st0,1 S8e; p(2te1m2)b 2e0r9, -N54o0ve0m. 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A1UG . fmroicmro: fsihlmop f.rtohmen:a Utinoniv.ecrosmit.y IMf tihcreo pfiolsmt so,f 3fi0c0e Naloerrttsh uZse tehba Rt yooadu,r Amnang aAzribnoer i,s M unI d4e8l1i0ve6r. aPbOleS, TweM hAaSveT nEoR f:u Sretnhder a odbdlriegsast ciohna nugnelse stso wTeh er eNcaetiivoen ,a P cOor Breocxt e6d9 ,a Ldidnrceossln wshitihrein, IoLn 6e 0y0e6a9r.- 9T8h1e5 N. Patriionnt eids ainv atihlaeb UleS oAn. N OP: A 2022 Read this issue on July 9 at TheNation.com—before anyone else. Activate your online account: TheNation.com/register T I E D I T O R I A L / E L I E M Y S T A L FOR THE NATION The Extreme Court n 1992, fundamentalist christians who wished to see theocratic law im- posed on the rest of the country were stabbed in the back by a conservative Supreme Court. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the court ruled, 5-4, to affirm the right to abortion before fetal viability as recognized in Roe v. Wade. The court placed significant new restrictions on reproductive rights, but it didn’t overturn Roe. All five justices who voted to affirm Roe were appointed by Republican presidents. Indeed, the 1992 court comprised eight justices appointed by Republicans. Only Byron White was appoint- ed by a Democrat, and he joined the dissent against Casey and Roe. sentenced him to die just the same. In Kennedy Now, 30 years after Casey, the fundamentalists have the court v. Bremerton School District, they simply made up they want. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the a set of facts in order to defend a high school Supreme Court overturned Casey and Roe, by a vote of 6-3. All six football coach who was functionally pressuring justices appointed by Republican presidents concurred in the judg- public school students into Christian prayer. And ment; all three appointed by Democrats opposed it. in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. What has changed in the intervening years about the kinds of Bruen, they argued that actual statistics about gun justices Republicans appoint? It’s not like Richard Nixon, Ronald violence are irrelevant to whether a state is allowed Reagan, and George H.W. Bush tried to appoint justices who would to issue gun permits. frustrate the white fundamentalist Christian agenda. In fact, the Unleashing this kind of conservative on the conservative justices in Casey generally took a dim view of women’s court to combat Roe was like introducing an rights and had a Confederate’s love of states’ rights. invasive species into an ecosystem. Once they’re The principal difference between conservative justices then and done eating whatever it is they were brought conservative justices now is that the conservatives of 30 years ago in to kill, they just move on to killing the next were practical. They didn’t like abortions, but they understood that available prey. The conservatives sent to the no society in history had successfully prevent- Supreme Court to do away ed them. They understood that criminalizing with Roe have already can- doctors who can perform the procedures safely nibalized the 15th Amend- The difference between only leads to unsafe, unregulated procedures. ment and its protection of They understood that pregnant people will conservative justices then voting rights. They have seek control over their bodies, whether or not and conservative justices already eroded the separa- the state or the courts or the church acknowl- tion of church and state. now is that the former edge their bodily autonomy. Lawyers refer Next term, they’ll overturn were practical. to this approach as looking at the “reliance affirmative action. And after interests” of a prior decision. In her plurality that, they’ll likely go on to opinion in Casey, Sandra Day O’Connor even wrote: “People have LGBTQ rights and the right to use contracep- organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their tion. Off in the middle distance, segregationists views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the who never accepted the ruling in Brown v. Board availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” of Education are drooling with anticipation. Forced-birth fundamentalists never accepted that idea—or the To combat these conservatives, Democrats Casey ruling. So Republicans began seeking out justices who did not cannot go back to a 20th-century view of the Su- care about the realities faced by the American people. They sought preme Court and its institutional prerogatives. To out fanatics who would be willing to ignore the practical implications survive, Democrats must take power away from of their rulings—zealots who would not only ignore precedent but these people. Otherwise, pluralistic democracy ignore reality itself. And they succeeded. With the help of Mitch will go the way of the dodo bird, too slow and McConnell, the Federalist Society, and others, Republicans found flightless to adapt to new predators. After 1992, six people willing to do this dystopian work. Republicans engineered a new breed of conserva- 4 This has had consequences even beyond reproductive rights. In tive justice. The rest of us must create a new kind Shinn v. Ramirez, they ignored a man’s proof of his innocence and of Supreme Court before it’s too late. N THE NATION  7.25–8.1.2022 C O M M E N T / A M Y L I T T L E F I E L D who had already secured the necessary financial aid 48 Hours Post-Roe for an abortion let out all of the feelings they had about their parenting decisions and recent decision to leave an abusive partner. The call came in about an L hour after the ruling that changed the landscape of Volunteers on abortion hotlines heard a wave of shock, abortion access forever. The caller never mentioned urgency, desperation, and despair. it. That didn’t surprise Luquin. Even before Roe fell, she said, a lot of callers were in “survival mode,” un- able to take in news that didn’t have a direct impact ess than three hours after the supreme court on their immediate plans. overturned Roe v. Wade, Elyssa Klann sat down Advocates on the talk line had already noticed at her kitchen table, two laptops open in front a rise in anxiety and desperation from callers who of her. Klann is a psychologist who has volun- have been impacted by financial hardship and the teered for the All-Options Talkline for seven baby formula shortage. Lulu Feingold had recently years, supporting callers who are making decisions about their counseled a woman who had ordered abortion pills pregnancies and connecting them to resources when they ask via the Internet but was terrified to take them. She for them. Klann struggled to comprehend the map of abortion access wanted to go to a clinic, as it shifted in real time on her laptop screen. Callers in states hostile to but the wait in her area abortion rights wanted to know if they could still go to their appoint- was several weeks. Even before ments. Klann wasn’t sure. She checked the guide at abortionfinder.org. On Saturday morn- , “I could tell they were updating states as I was watching,” she said. Roe fell a lot ing, Karen Thurston, a Klann knew that 13 states have trigger laws designed to ban abortion of callers were grandmother who has once Roe fell, but not all of the laws went into effect right away. She felt “ had two abortions her- in survival the clock ticking as she responded to callers on the line. “I need to have self, sat down next to ,” mode one these resources for people because they might only have access to this a pitcher of water, just for another day or another week or another few weeks,” she thought. volunteer said. like she did at the start Klann is part of a network of grassroots activists who are mobilizing of every shift on the to meet a moment for which they’ve been preparing for years. By that talk line. After a restless Friday afternoon, at least eight states, including Alabama, Arkansas, and night, it felt harder today than usual to set her emo- Missouri, were enforcing bans, according to the Guttmacher Institute. tions aside. “When the ruling came down, I think In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton warned that prosecutors the general public felt a sense of shock and urgency,” could now enforce the state’s pre-Roe abortion bans, staff told patients Thurston wrote in an e-mail after her shift ended. sitting in clinic waiting rooms that they would have to remain pregnant. “But shock and urgency are the norm for our callers The patients wept, screamed, and begged for help. It was “complete who have been thrust into pregnancy emergencies.” despair,” a San Antonio clinic administrator told the news site The As the weekend wore on, protests surged across 19th. (On June 28, the total ban in Texas was temporarily blocked by a the country. Grassroots abortion funds in states like judge, though it has since been reinstated by the Texas Supreme Court.) Florida tried to get the word out that their clinics were Callers flooded the lines of clinics in states like Kansas because their still open. In Alabama, where abortion is now banned, appointments in surrounding states were canceled. In North Dakota, the staff at the West Alabama Women’s Center hunched owner of the state’s only remaining clinic wiped away tears; she’s plan- over their desks, calling to cancel patients who were ning to move her facility to Minnesota. Meanwhile, tens of thousands scheduled to come in the following week. In the Mid- of outraged donors reacting to the fall of Roe poured millions of dollars west, people who needed help with travel and logistics into abortion funds and practical support organizations that have been inundated the Midwest Access Coalition, so that the creating the infrastructure needed to move as many patients as possible fund’s Alison Dreith began her day on Monday with to states where abortion remains legal. more messages than she had ever seen. The All-Options Talkline was created to provide a buffer from chaos On a Sunday shift for All-Options, Tanvi Gu- like this. Its mission is to offer judgment-free support to people in all razada fielded a call from a woman in Florida who of their decisions and feelings about their pregnancies, whether they’re was experiencing a miscarriage but was too fright- leaning toward parenting, abortion, or adoption. “We provide a space ened to go to an emergency room. Now that Roe was where we try to take away a lot of that noise so that [callers] can really gone, she thought she might be put in jail. talk and listen to themselves,” Paulina Guerrero, the national programs Gurazada checked the latest information she manager for All-Options, told The Nation. “The fundamental principle could find online. She reassured the woman that is that the caller has the answer.” she could get medical care without running 5 On the morning of June 24, Cindy Luquin put that principle into afoul of any law. Abortion was still legal in action. For over an hour, she listened as a caller in a Southern state Florida—for now. N THE NATION  7.25–8.1.2022 C O M M E N T / W I L L I A M M . L E O G R A N D E grants at the US southern border and the prospect of Cuba 12 Months On embarrassment at the Summit of the Americas. From October 2021 through May 2022, more O than 140,000 Cubans arrived at the border—over three times as many as in the entire previous year, A year after nationwide protests galvanized by deep and more than had arrived during the 1980 Mariel economic discontent, Cubans are still waiting for change. boat lift or the 1994 rafter crisis. The humanitarian case for sanctions relief was reinforced by the ar- ne year ago, on july 11, a small protest by cu- gument that relieving economic pressure on Cuba ban dissidents in a poor suburb of Havana sparked might reduce the migration surge. nationwide anti-government demonstrations. In Meanwhile, several Latin American presidents, dozens of cities and towns, thousands marched foremost among them Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López to protest shortages of food and medicine, elec- Obrador, threatened to boycott the June summit in tricity blackouts, and a surge in Covid-19 infections. Most of Los Angeles over Biden’s decision to exclude Cuba, the demonstrations were peaceful, but in some neighborhoods, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. The White House tried protesters battled with police, overturned cars, and looted stores. to mollify the Latin American left by relaxing some of The unprecedented protests were a symptom of deep economic the sanctions on Cuba, but López Obrador and half a and political discontent. They shocked Cuba’s leaders, emboldened dozen other heads of state stayed home anyway. the opposition, and rekindled Washington’s perennial pipe dream of Biden’s measures were good in theory but weak regime change. Twelve months later, Cubans are still struggling with a in practice. Limits on remittances were eliminated, sputtering economy, which is triggering a surge in irregular migration. but there is no provision enabling Western Union to When the protests erupted, President Miguel Díaz-Canel de- resume remittance wire services. People-to-people nounced them as counterrevolutionary and called loyalists into the group travel was restored, but the ban on using streets to defend the revolution. Police arrested more than 1,300 people. government-owned hotels makes large group tours A few days later, however, Díaz-Canel softened his tone, conceding that nearly impossible. The Cuban Family Reunification the demonstrators had legitimate grievances. Subsequent state policy Program resumed, potentially enabling safe, legal im- has included both a crackdown on vocal opponents and programs to migration, but most Cubans must still travel to a third mitigate the hardships that brought people into the streets. Demonstra- country to request a visa. Without further action, tors charged with violent crimes have gotten heavy prison sentences, Biden’s tentative steps forward will have limited effect. ranging from five to 30 years, and leading dissidents have faced increased Cuba is facing another long, hot summer of short- harassment or jail. Meanwhile, the government has begun a program ages and electrical blackouts. Inflation has leveled off, to improve living conditions in 302 “vulnerable communities”—poor but with the informal exchange rate of the Cuban neighborhoods that were sites of the worst violence on July 11. peso to the US dollar at four times the official one, Hoping to capitalize on popular discontent, last September a group real incomes have stagnated. Although the tourism of opposition artists and intellectuals calling themselves Archipiélago industry has reopened, the number of foreign visitors joined traditional dissidents to call for a “Civic March for Change” on in the first quarter of this year was down 77 percent November 15. The government denounced them as counterrevolution- from 2019. Cuba is also suffering collateral damage ary agents of Washington’s regime change strategy. The prospective from the war in Ukraine as global inflation pushes demonstration garnered enormous international attention and the up the prices of food and fuel, Cuba’s main imports. Biden administration’s full-throated support. But on November 15, no The current economic crisis is the principal driver one showed up to march or bang empty pots as the organizers had urged. of the migration surge, but Cubans are also exhaust- The march’s failure was due in part to the government’s harassment ed from years of unrelenting hardship. The people and vilification of the organizers. But the demands for political reform, leaving are disproportionately young adults who see delivered by young, middle-class professionals, did not speak to the a bleak future for themselves on the island. Eleven most urgent issue for the majority of Cubans: their deteriorating stan- years after Raúl Castro announced his plans to build dard of living. The failure of the November protest left the organized a “prosperous and sustainable” socialism, the reforms opposition demoralized and in disarray. Many of the young artists are still incomplete, the economy is no more prosper- involved went into exile. ous, and living standards have not improved. Díaz- The Biden administration had been inching toward lifting some of Canel’s slogan, “We are continuity,” meant to convey Donald Trump’s sanctions on humanitarian grounds, but the scale of the stability in the post-Castro era, rings hollow, especial- protests revived hopes for regime change, so the sanctions were left in ly to younger generations impatient for change. N place. “After July 11, we hit the pause button,” explained Juan Gonzalez, Joe Biden’s senior national security director for the Western Hemisphere. William M. LeoGrande is a coauthor of Back Channel to 6 Biden’s Cuba policy might have remained on pause indefinitely if the Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between MAN D White House had not been pushed into action by a surge of Cuban mi- Washington and Havana. DY FRIE N A THE NATION  7.25–8.1.2022 spontaneous and practical; they are never “for No Offense expression’s sake.” By contrast, aesthetic feeling is self-sufficient. David Bromwich Jean-Luc Godard’s movie Breathless deals with a young thug and his dame and the binge of fraud, flight, and betrayal their infatuation puts them through. Nothing obliges us to think these people admirable human specimens. Nor do we think BBad Art them detestable. It is enough that they are interest- ing, and their surface glamour accounts for much of the effect. There is a moment quite early when On washing our clean linen in public. the hero turns toward the camera and addresses the audience head-on: “C’est jolie, la campagne…. ad art is doing very nicely these days, and Si vous n’aimez pas la mer—si vous n’aimez pas la the reason is that people want a message. An montagne—si vous n’aimez pas la ville: allez vous faire early symptom was the galloping first-personism foutre.” (It’s beautiful, the countryside. If you don’t of movie reviewers: “I feel…” was a hard-to- like the sea—if you don’t like the mountains—if beat gambit, since who can refute a feeling? A you don’t like cities: to hell with you.) more impartial claim was suggested by the successor locu- Was Godard saying, “Relax, it’s just a movie”? tion “It feels like…”—where the “it” meant that the feeling The moment seemed to convey a sharper admo- in question ought to move anyone. The broad-church piety was nition: “I don’t care if you like this, but you won’t harder to challenge than a mere first person. Meanwhile, negative walk out. It is going to interest you—later, you can judgments were on the way to becoming prohibited so long as the wonder why.” The impudence went hand in hand work wore its good intentions on its sleeve. with a peculiar freedom and unconcern. It surprised This is not a question of sincerity. Oscar Wilde said, “All bad the viewer’s wish for a rehearsed response, the click poetry springs from genuine feeling,” and in The Importance of Being of the trap in the usual plot. Earnest, Algernon recoiled from the display of affection by the hap- Iris Murdoch in her essay “Against Dryness” pily married: “It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen (1961) said that modern writing had inherited from in public.” A great deal of the admired and well-rewarded art of our liberalism and romanticism an image of human time consists of washing one’s clean linen in public. beings as agents of moral choice. Yet “we are not,” That the artist should have a function separate from the existing she wrote, “monarchs of all we survey, but benight- cultural or political apparatus is by no means a timeless idea. It goes ed creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are back to the mid-18th century and found its clearest formulation in constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). You by fantasy.” The task of artistic conscience was to may know a work of art, Schiller wrote, by a commitment that looks remind us of that deformation. like detachment. It does not make you want to go out and do some- “One is forever at odds with Marxism,” Mur- thing. This was a radical proposal, rather than a virtue at home in the doch added, because “reality is not a given whole.” Age of Enlightenment. The taste of the age was more truly represent- But liberalism, too, is a promoter of counterfeit un- ed by Joseph Addison’s verse tragedy Cato (1712), Whig propaganda derstanding: “Our sense of form, which is an aspect for a civic-republican ideal that gave pleasure to three generations of of our desire for consolation, can be a danger to viewers, but the sentiments they warmed to are now so frigid it is im- our sense of reality as a rich receding background.” possible to imagine what those people were feeling. The same is true The experience offered by art is not already in of the high art celebrated by the ancien régime—a painter like François place, not predigested; and if you understand Boucher, for example. reality as a given whole, you have no need of art. The successful artist shares with the politician a recurrent temp- You may create works of fantasy or rejiggered fact, tation to indulge in emotional claptrap. Bernard tutor the audience in prop- Bosanquet in Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915) er feelings, and hope to heal proposed that this urge to chase after tears some aspect of reality, but the That the artist should or laughter could be quelled by attaching the result will be not expression art-emotion to a particular object and not a set have a function separate but propaganda, or magic, or of reactions. His consequent definition of art from the existing cultural medicine. was “feeling expressed for expression’s sake.” Between the 2020s and an or political apparatus Notice, however, that this is something only earlier age of con- MAN the deranged would dream of wanting in real is by no means a formity, the 1950s, 7 D DY FRIE life. Our everyday expressions of feeling are timeless idea. the language of cliché N A THE NATION  7.25–8.1.2022 switched from middle-class respectabili- The ty—the self-evident ideal of movies like Front Burner Executive Suite (1954) and Marjorie Morn- ingstar (1958)—to the current Hollywood Kali Holloway agenda of the inclusive and the margin- alized. In last year’s film The Power of the Dog, an early-20th-century frontier businessman is relieved of the burden of his macho-sadist brother when his gay Why We Need Pride stepson surreptitiously infects him with E anthrax. In the just-released Top Gun: Maverick, the loner protagonist leads a The right is firing up a sex and gender panic, diversity-checked squadron of fighter pi- and anti-LGBTQ violence is spiking. lots to bomb a uranium-enrichment site in Iran. The first of these films is stark and arlier this month, the right-wing propagandist highbrow, the second flash and lowbrow, Christopher Rufo gave his social media followers but they share an a tutorial in the dark art of fearmongering— optimistic mor- specifically, how to lie in order to stoke anti-LGBTQ al. Elimination “ Just as once hatred. Republican legislators have already spent of bad guys knits there were the brotherhood the past four years filing some 670 anti-LGBTQ bills, with bourgeois of the good and more than 300 proposed in 2022 alone, a significant portion of ,” true. which target vulnerable transgender children and young adults. In recent commonplaces “Just as once weeks, right-wingers have amped up their smears against drag queens wrote André there were bour- who volunteer their time reading books to kids in schools and libraries, , “ Gide so geois common- claiming those story hours create “a sexualized environment.” Rufo, doing now there are places,” wrote his part, posted a Twitter thread advising conservatives to dispense with André Gide in the term “drag queen” in favor of the phrase “trans stripper,” because revolutionary Return From the the latter conjures “a more lurid set of connotations and shifts the debate ” commonplaces. USSR (1937), to sexualization.” “so now there You may remember Rufo from such social panics as “critical race the- are revolutionary commonplaces”—but ory” in schools—he has bragged about turning CRT, an anti-racist legal let us say the same of anesthetic uplift theory, “toxic” by rebranding it as a stand-in for the “entire range of cul- generally—catchphrases and righteous tural constructions” opposed by the right. Having exploited existing racial slogans which, though “so successful to- resentments to galvanize white parents and politicians against the teaching day, will soon emit to the noses of tomor- of America’s history of anti-Black racism, Rufo and his fellow conservatives row the insufferable odor of the clinic.” are playing a new round of rhetorical games whose goal is to criminalize and That odor has been with us for a decade further marginalize folks whose gender and sexual identities they oppose. or more, and it is not getting weaker. N And as Rufo shamelessly attests with his tweets, they will use any means at their disposal—no matter how disingenuous—to bully, shame, and legislate N against LGBTQ folks. DMA M O R E O N L I N E RIE thenation.com/highlights LibTs hoef TnioktTooriko ubselgy anra criesfte, rrtirnagn stpoh o“gbrico,o manidn gh”o bmy oLpGhoBbTicQ T wpeitotperle aicnc oMuanyt N: ANDY F › Abortion 2021; the months that followed saw Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s press RATIO Involves Killing— secretary claim that any opponent of his “Don’t Say Gay” legislation is UST aSOndPH TIEh aLtE’sW OISK! ““SMpgerornooraorbtoomawbri lL nyisg a at n rcgayer iTnontoghem ertsoies rf“m,og”r raF okgooeex mnt Nhd aeeen rlwdi bi sdse eheloxonuustatist l Lyciz haerau akrrdgianie cId antelhgsra,rg”taa hsartatnaemdtne e dGSreseOc.n”laP aIrtt oe Mw rp aMiucsbnhal’iiltgcl ofa asrncry hf sMrotoaomctle-s NI / AFP VIA GETTY; ILL RI › Billionaire Bash stoking this kind of paranoia to proposing legislation to ban children from OFF NICK SERPE drag shows, as Texas legislator Bryan Slaton said he would do in response to a RICE C B 8 v[Mwidaheroojo] oraifre ek Tiodabsy saleots rsa e Gdda rwyetieitnmhe es e wdxrruoaagtlei sz htinhogawt y , sochauelnl iwgn gicl hlt hibldee rppeenrro.f”po oGrmseineogrrsg ai“ apl aRewrev pe“rrteotes edmn aatdaktueil vtiest OP: GETTY; FA M T illegal for children to be exposed to Drag Queen performances.” Florida state O R LEFT F R EECCHHAARRGGEEAABBLLEE DDiiggiittaall HHeeaarriinngg AAiidd BUY 1 F R E E GET 1 W REG $299.98 W L O N E ONLY P R I C E $ 14 9 99 Each When You Buy a Pair PLUS FREE SHIPPING How can a rechargeable Limited Time Only! hearing aid that costs ““II wwaass aammaazzeedd!! 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A “Drag Your Kids to Pride” & terminate the parental rights of any adult who Right-wing event near the start of the month in Dallas drew brings a child to these perverted sex shows aimed politicians right-wing protesters, including a collective or- at FL kids,” which DeSantis appeared to support. ganized by a self-described “Christian fascist.” have modeled That’s precisely the kind of language that This is just the tip of the iceberg. The Armed and inflamed invites violence. One Sunday this Pride month, Conflict Location & Event Data Project re- a Texas pastor stated that “all homosexuals are anti-LGBTQ leased a study last month that found that from pedophiles” and called for LGBTQ folks to be rhetoric. 2020 to 2021, anti-LGBTQ actions increased “shot in the back of the head,” while an Idaho more than fourfold, rising from 15 to 61; that pastor cited t he need to “put all queers to death” to end “pedo- the number of anti-LGBTQ protests increased ninefold over philia.” The Anti-Defamation League tracked at least “seven the same period, with “at least 15 percent” of those pro- in-person extremist activities targeting the LGBTQ+ com- tests becoming “violent or destructive” in 2021; and that munity” in just one weekend. That included two incidents, in anti-LGBTQ protests and demonstrations in 2022 are on pace California and Texas, in which members of the neofascist Proud to surpass the number last year. ACLED reports that these Boys barged into drag events. (The Texas drag show was solely actions arose “as right-wing politicians and media outlets have for patrons 21 and over; no kids were even present.) The list mainstreamed the use of increasingly inflammatory rhetoric also included the violence that was barely averted when a group against the LGBTQ community in the United States.” of 31 masked members of the white supremacist group Patriot All of this would be dangerous in any historical moment, Front were arrested. On June 21, a group of “15 masked men” but at a time when the GOP is using the courts, the law, and dressed in the style of the Proud Boys—some waving signs old-fashioned white terror to undo decades of hard-won civil that read “LGBT is grooming our kids”—interrupted a Drag rights progress, it’s particularly alarming. This is a party that Queen Story Hour at a North Carolina public library after the yells about child sexualization while floating the idea of in- specting children’s genitals to verify sex, that claims to be the protector of children while O P P A R T / P E T E R K U P E R its members threaten to deny students free lunches because LGBTQ children might be among those who are fed. The forces that have coalesced on the right—white suprem- acist groups, QAnon proponents, Christian nationalists—have a common goal of reas- serting white cisgender heteropatriarchy as the law of the land. This is where we are. It can be dispiriting to watch your personhood be debated, your citizenship undermined, your very presence treated as a national problem. But even in the best of times, our rights are always pre- carious. Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney who has spent years on the front lines of the fight for trans rights, noted in a recent essay that “just as marriage equality did not bring liberation to our communities, neither will the fall of Roe or Obergefell or any other legal precedent mark the end of our fights for transformative justice and liberation.” (Note that Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion on the despicable ruling overturning Roe, wrote that the court “should reconsider…Griswold, Lawrence, and Oberge- fell,” too.) These are fights we will always have to wage, because the alternative is too bleak to consider. And because our most fundamental right, regardless of what the backlash insists, is simply to be. N