I’m *thrilled* to share we have a cover for COMING OUT REPUBLICAN: A HISTORY OF THE GAY RIGHT. Out in April 2024 from
@UChicagoPress
You can pre-order here:
I did a text search of “abortion” in my book on the history of the religious right, We Gather Together. I used the word 705 times. But this might be the passage I’d point journalists to right now: “in 1973, most religious conservatives did not oppose abortion.”
George Santos has inverted the long history of gay Congresspersons, especially Republicans, by being honest about his sexuality while telling lies about pretty much everything else in his biography.
Just got a Mac after a lifetime of using a PC and am having a complete emotional breakdown. Please pray for me and also let me know that
#itgetsbetter
.
There’s a lot of talk about what yesterday’s SBC bombshell report tells us about the current panic over “grooming.” I want us to remember that it was a Southern Baptist woman, Anita Bryant, who helped put these ideas in motion. /🧵
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the rise of Trump, but I think now after what we see happening at the border it is clear that the days of so-called
#FamilyValues
conservatism are over. /1
THRILLED to share some big news. I’ve signed a contract with
@UChicagoPress
for my next book, “Coming Out Republican: How LGBTQ Conservatives Paved the Way for the Modern GOP.” Set to publish in early 2023. There’s a fascinating history of gay Republicans, & I’m eager to tell it.
Here’s Kirk Cameron announcing his Christmas caroling gathering in protest of California’s stay-at-home orders: “If you love God, if you love Christmas, and you love liberty, you’re not going to want to miss this.”
There was a time when winning candidates thanked their supporters and promised to work on behalf of their constituents. That time no longer exists for Republicans.
Today is the official publication day for COMING OUT REPUBLICAN: A HISTORY OF THE GAY RIGHT. I’m so excited it is now out in the world, and I wanted to share some of the things it covers in a 🧵
@UChicagoPress
@garamondagency
Given Sunday's tragic events at the
#SouthernBorder
where the US govt fired tear gas at parents & their CHILDREN seeking asylum & the gross indifference to this by "conservatives," I thought I'd share again my thoughts on the end of
#FamilyValues
conservatism under Trump.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the rise of Trump, but I think now after what we see happening at the border it is clear that the days of so-called
#FamilyValues
conservatism are over. /1
It’s critics are calling Gillette’s commercial “radical” and an attack on masculinity, but the ad’s depiction of manhood is deeply traditional, even conservative. I wrote about it in my column for
@HuffPost
this week.
Religious opposition was not a given nor inherent. It was historically produced, and it varied greatly across religious groups, even conservative ones. An evangelical consensus opposing abortion, for example, took at least a decade to build.
Having spent recent weeks at the Reagan Library reading through White House files about the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s, this is EXACTLY the thinking that drove a large parting of Reagan administration planning and policy.
Dennis Prager: "During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users...had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are? But it would've been inconceivable"
“For all that Ryan did to challenge harmful and overly simplistic conceptions of AIDS, his story…also reinforced existing notions of ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence.’” Terrific piece from
@pmrenfro
on what would have been Ryan White’s 50th birthday.
“Conservative media outlets aren't focused on the actual athletic results but rather on how they can use the Olympics to stir up their audience's outrages and grievances” - my latest for
@TheWeek
But nothing gives us a more definitive answer that
#FamilyValues
are over than watching Republicans shrug their shoulders and turn their backs on the families being ripped apart by the very federal government they long said would do the same to their own families. /Fin
Developing a theological opposition took time since, as the evangelical publication Christianity Today noted, “the Bible does not comment directly on abortion.”
However, it’s worth noting that the very awful thing being done at the border – children being taken from their parents by a barbaric state – is the very doomsday fantasy Religious Right folks long imagined would happen /4
I think one thing that hasn't been said enough about the CT piece is how it will serve as a source of encouragement and support - and even defense - for the small but significant
#NeverTrump
evangelicals who are out there.
Key difference, though, is that they fantasized it would be done against THEM – against conservative, religious families with “traditional” arrangements of gender and sexuality /5
SBC and other conservative religious groups present the danger to the families (and the nation) as external and secular. Over and over again, it is clear that some of the greatest dangers are often internal and use religion as a cover for their worst actions. /FIN
This is all just the tip of the iceberg of a long & complicated history. But it’s vitally important to resist easy, pat generalizations, to recognize the range of historical actors at work here - & especially to appreciate that none of it was inevitable, but always contingent.
It’s here! Always amazing to have a book you’ve long worked finally in your hands. Apparently it is now shipping to buyers, so if you’ve ordered one it should be on its way. And if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? 🤣
@UChicagoPress
@garamondagency
As Trump’s
#ZeroTolerance
border policy has separated 2,000 children (and counting) from their families & as the GOP does nothing about it & as the party’s white evangelical base remains indifferent – or even supportive – of children being taken from their parents… /2
So, yes, the rise of Trump – the philandering, lying, profane, racist casino magnate who won 81% of white evangelical support – seems like the right time to ask if
#FamilyValues
conservatism is dead. /22
First, as background, the report details how SBC leaders kept a secret list of more than 700 abusive pastors to protect the SBC rather than protect Baptists from future abuse. /2
@SethCotlar
This is so interesting because some of the gay Republicans who began to break with the GOP in the 1980s and 90s spoke in this exact language.
@KevinMKruse
Also, I would add that much of Southern Baptist indifference to abortion was shaped by the fact that Catholics dominated the early pro-life movement. Anti-Catholicism was a more powerful driver of Southern Baptist ideas than pro-life theology for a moment.
A lot of Southern Baptist hesitancy on opposing abortion was straight up anti-Catholicism, still a powerful aspect of SB culture in 1970s. Here’s what WA Criswell, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, said about abortion and Catholics:
The nightmare scenario they imagined was an overbearing state coming between children and parents, mostly through the public education system, to usurp parental authority and set the child against the parents and their values. /7
And they used that nightmare fantasy to fuel a whole set of reactionary politics through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s that targeted the Equal Rights Amendment, the public school system, gay rights, etc. /8
Putting aside how bad this Bret Stephens column is - that's a given - this idea that it is harder to come out as Republican than as gay has been a common trope of
#LGBTQ
Republicans since the 1970s.
BUT an even more important difference is that they imagined this separation of children from parents as being mostly of an ideological, cultural, and spiritual nature – only a few extremists imagined it would result in actual *physical* separation of children from parents /6
The totalitarian state that separates children from parents has come to be – yet the very ones who for some 40 years ranted the federal government was seeking to “destroy the family” sit silently as it literally rips families apart at the border /20
Most of this abuse concerned SBC pastors victimizing Southern Baptist women, but the cases also involve children. As report says, “many of the survivors we spoke with were sexually abused as children, both boys and girls, who were of varying ages at the time of their abuse.” /3
I should note, I’m not only a historian of the SBC. I also grew up Southern Baptist. I have also written a lot about the SBC’s role in the politics of sexuality and gender. /7
@KevinMKruse
This is the page with some of the best quotations including the wildest one from W.A. Criswell, pastor of FBC Dallas, the most important church in the SBC that is now led by total Trumper Robert Jeffress.
The report only covers 2000-present, but it is clear this is a snapshot of a much larger crisis within the SBC that has gone on for decades. The same decades the SBC was a leading voice theologically and politically against homosexuality. /6
@arrpeebee
@KevinMKruse
I have. Randy was a member of my dissertation committee. I think this is a big part of the story, but I guess my disagreement would be that I don't think there's a single origin moment for a huge political movement like the Religious Right as much as there were multiple factors.
Universalizing Christmas is actually to secularize it - the very thing Fox News and ilk usually love to rant about this time of year - because to say Christmas is abt everything means it is abt nothing. Not that I expect them to be consistent or logical but c’mon - pick a lane!
Ainsley Earhardt on the Fox Christmas tree: "It's a tree that unites us. It brings us together. It's about the Christmas spirit. It is about the holiday season. It's about Jesus. It's about Hanukkah. It is about everything that we stand for as a country."
But I think it is worth remembering this important early moment of the SBC’s connection to the discourse of grooming and what it means in light of these horrific revelations and how SBC leaders ignored the regular and ongoing abuse of children in their churches. /20
“If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are gonna do things to you that have never been done before.” — the President of the United States
But Bryant’s brilliance was to change the debate from whether a minority group should have political equality to the question of whether parents had the right to protect their children from homosexuality. /13
NOW 👏🏻 IN 👏🏻 BOOKSTORES 👏🏻 So excited to see COMING OUT REPUBLICAN at my local bookstore just a few blocks from my house! Thanks to
@booksoup
for stocking it! I left a little treat in their copies for future buyers. 🖊️ 📚
@UChicagoPress
@garamondagency
As in so many other institutions, SBC churches were places where child predators – in this case pastors and other religious leaders – carried out their assault on innocent children. /5
And now that paranoid fantasy has become a REAL nightmare as parents are being stripped of their children at the border – not an ideological or religious separation of children from their parents, but a PHYSICAL removal made by force /19
been a conspiratorial fantasy of the Right, promoted in grassroots newsletters, conservative religious publications, right wing talk radio, and GOP campaigns. /18
The 1974 textbook battle in Kanawha County, WV erupted when parents and activists there claimed the government was using a new language arts curriculum to brainwash children against their parents’ traditional values and abandon Christianity for secular humanism /12
If it’s in
@PublishersLunch
, it must be official! Thrilled to announce that my next book, COMING OUT REPUBLICAN: HOW
#LGBTQ
CONSERVATIVES PAVED THE WAY FOR THE MODERN GOP, will be published by
@UChicagoPress
. And thanks to my incredible agent Lisa Adams
@garamondagency
At the age of about 23, I answered my work phone to a screaming Jean-Claude Van Damme who was yelling that he was going to sue the magazine I worked for over a piece we ran on him. He referred to himself in the third person the entire time.
Well, it’s finally happened. A very fancy restaurant in los Angeles called me yesterday to confirm my dinner reservation. I had never made a reservation. Turns out it was for the *other* Neil Young.
Very happy to share that as of this week I will be a contributing writer at
@TheWeek
where I'll be writing a bi-weekly column on politics, culture, religion, and...well, whatever Trump's latest assault on American democracy is. First piece out later this week!
A 15% drop for white evangelical support of Trump in just two months feels monumental. Even if it doesn't drop further, if it stays near 60% it could be devastating for Trump in November.
@PRRIpoll
BREAKING: Meanwhile, Trump favorability among white evangelical Protestants remains steady in new
@PRRIpoll
:
May: 62%
Apr: 66%
Mar: 77%
2019 (avg): 64%
Throughout Trump’s presidency, wh evangelical support has been reliably between 60%-80%.
We could go on and on, but the point is that the idea of an overbearing state actively working to insert itself into the “traditional,” heterosexual family and separate children ideologically and socially from their parents’ religious and cultural values has long… /17