The Ruling Minority

THE BIG SUPREME COURT LEAK adds fuel to the cultural war fires burning throughout American society, stoked by conservatives-republicans who seem to think that focusing on issues of personal and community standards and values is their key to success. It isn't. Despite apparant legislative victories in conservative states around the country, it is an indisputable fact that a majority of Americans do not embrace the conservative cultural-moral agenda, opose it, and instead support progressive values. For example, far more than fifty percent of Americans believe that Roe v. Wade should be upheld, all polls and surveys reveal. People are starting to notice that a minority, a Republican minority, is governing the country, despite Democrat majorities in Congress and the fact that a majority of Americans lean center left. A combination of gerrymandering, grass roots projects to pack the nation's courts with conservatives, the electoral college, and other undemocratic forces are creating a situation in the United States in which the far political right has far more power and influence than is warranted by their sheer numbers. All these crazy new state laws prohibiting abortion, prohibiting teaching American racial history acurately, prohibiting any reference to gay and transgender people in schools - are we leaving anything out? - are unpopular even in the states in which they are being enacted. Having grown up in conservative soceity, having been surrounded by conservatives my entire life, one thing I know for certain: conservatives do not like homosexuality and transgender people, no matter how you slice it, no matter how you split and parse the semantics. For conservatives, homosexuality is something negative, something bad, something to be avoided and condemned. Hence the laws "springing up" around the country suppressing gay culture, including censoring and banning books which contain a pro gay or gay acceptance point of view. Progressives strongly oppose this conservative approach, and tend to believe that gay and transgender people should be treated like equals, with complete acceptance of them for who they are. Books containing positive attitudes towards them? The more the merrier! Censorship, especially of boooks, is traditionally a conservative approach. Radical liberals tend to oppose censorship, although there have envdeitnly ben instances in which misguided liberals tried to ban "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" because Mark Twain used the word "nigger" in both of them, which, of course, is equally ridiculous. Progressives are evidently going to have to fight for gay and transgender rights as much as they will have to fight for women's reproductive rights. Laughably, dishonestly, conservatives justify their war against gays and transgender folks in schools on the basis of "parents rights", rather than the bigotry which actually motivates them. They have no answer to the simple, obvious question: What about the rights of parents of gay and transgender children?