Amidst the latest revelations of Trumpian skullduggery, it was easy to overlook a little story broken by WDRB in Louisville, Kentucky, a couple of weeks back about Dan Johnson, the Republican candidate for the 49th district of the state's House of Representatives. The station caught wind of the fact that Johnson, the self-styled "bishop" of Louisville's Heart of Fire Church, had posted or shared on his Facebook page oodles of racially inflammatory crap, including some images depicting President Obama and the First Lady as chimpanzees. Unfortunately, that isn't the most staggering thing about this story. When confronted about the images by one of the station's reporters, Johnson neither apologized nor dodged: he went straight-up Orwellian.
"It wasn't meant to be racist. I can tell you that. My history's good there. I can see how people would be offended in that. I wasn't trying to offend anybody, but, I think Facebook's entertaining," Johnson said.
When pressed, Johnson would not acknowledge that the images crossed the line. He calls it satire.
"I looked this up. There has been no president that hasn't had that scrutiny. Not one. I think it would be racist not to do the same for President Obama as we've done for every other president."
Well, as long as you looked it up...There's enough doubling-down doublespeak there to sate even the most discerning connoisseur of such stuff. Yes, I can see how you didn't mean this deplorably racist stereotyping to be racist -- if by "racist" you mean anything that might automatically disqualify you from public service. And yes, it would have been racist not to have employed this stereotyping in "satirically" portraying the Obamas -- if "racist" denotes conforming to minimal standards of civility in public discourse.
One doesn't have to look far to see from whence "Bishop" Johnson is drawing his inspiration for this heroic public stand. Fellow Kentuckian Kim Davis, who last year similarly stood up for religious bigots everywhere by choosing Heaven over Hell and refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, immediately comes to mind. The slogan displayed on a sign outside Heart of Fire, "Jesus and this church are not politically correct," dog-whistles the alt-right and similar wannabe-mainstreamed far-right fringe groups. But casting a lurid orange glow over his actions, and over the photo of the two men that Daily Kos included in its enhanced recap of the WDRB story, is the bishop's main political patrona and Public Deplorable #1, Donald Trump.
The Great Trumpkin's casual relationship with what most people recognize as "truth" has of course received intense coverage, if not always scrutiny, over the course of the current election cycle. When it has been critically scrutinized, what's been revealed should have long since disqualified him from running for local dog catcher, let alone the highest office in the land. PolitiFact's "scorecard" for the statements they've checked is jaw-dropping: a mere 15 percent rated "true" or "mostly true," and a whopping 72 percent found to be "mostly false" (20 percent), just plain "false" (34 percent), and "pants on fire" (18 percent) (as of October 20). Nor of course is it simply that he lies constantly that's the problem: what he's lying about -- from issues surrounding immigration to his past interactions with women, not to mention the birther sleaze -- is driving deep wedges into the electorate. This political climate of divisiveness that Trump has been instrumental in creating, or at least intensifying, is being widely, and rightly, decried. Such a climate has profound implications for all Americans, of course; however, it hits minority groups, the LGBTQ community prominent among them, especially hard.
It's true that LGBTQ folks haven't been serially targeted by the Trump campaign like Muslims, Hispanics, or African-Americans, and we even copped a weird shout-out, or rather spit-out, during Trump's epic pepper-spraying of the American electorate at the close of the Republican convention this summer. His other actions, however, notably his pledge to sign the First Amendment Defense Act and his choice of social conservative Mike "Hoosier Dada" Pence to be his running mate, leave little doubt how we would fare under his thumb, or rather, administration.
It's also true that as things currently stand, the possibility of Trump's being elected is beginning to appear remote, though as pundits across the political spectrum continue to remind us, this is an unpredictable election cycle. In the short term, however, much damage has already been done. Not only has candidate Trump given a voice, and a mainstream platform, to deep, bitter, and at times toxic sentiments that have long festered in parts of the electorate. He's also helped turn this already unsettled situation into a potential powder-keg scenario by celebrating violence at his rallies and darkly hinting that his supporters take to the streets in the event that he loses what he's already calling a rigged election. Discrimination against us won't have a White House champion under a Clinton administration (and that's no small thing). But given Trump's treatment of her over the course of his campaign, among other things, it's exceedingly unlikely that Clinton will be able to make any real inroads with his hardcore supporters. In sum, the hangover from the extended id-driven holiday from civility that his candidacy has modeled and enabled likely won't be pretty. And inchoate rage loves easy, familiar targets like us.
As unsettling as all this is, I find even more troubling for our prospects the potential long term effects of Trump's boldface contempt for rudimentary standards of factuality in his public statements. Coupled with the self-serving complicity of many in the mainstream media and the political party he has hijacked, this contempt has not only deepened public cynicism about ruling elites and the viability of the democratic process. More fundamentally, it has further eroded people's belief in the possibility for general consensus about most anything, from how the world works to how we should treat each other. This belief, and the willingness to uphold it, are prerequisites for a functional pluralistic society. In their absence, a situation arises that might be thought of as pluralism's evil twin, an ongoing gridlock of one-says/another-says in which any statement lobbed into the public arena carries more or less equal weight. Call it the Trumpian truth vacuum. And in a vacuum like this, minority groups like the LGBTQ community are, again, particularly vulnerable.
Consider by way of illustration the defeat by referendum last November, right around the time Trump was placing his stranglehold on the Republican nomination, of Houston's Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO). Passed by the Houston City Council in May 2014 by a healthy 11-6 margin, and supported by the city's popular Democratic mayor, Annise Parker, herself an out lesbian, as well as by city business leaders, HERO extended protections to a wide range of classes and conditions, including religion, military status, and pregnancy. Because it included sexual orientation and gender identity in its broadly inclusive list, though, the ordinance was bitterly opposed by local right-wing religious and social leaders, and quickly became a conservative cause célèbre across the state and even nationally. So far, this is simply the democratic process in action. But the process went off the rails with the subsequent actions of the ordinance's opponents. Putting our basic legal protections to a referendum was itself a problematic move: "No one's rights," Mayor Parker confirmed, "should be subject to a popular vote." Even more problematically, HERO's fate was sealed not by public hearings or televised debates on the ordinance's merits, but by a massive misinformation campaign that reduced it to a "bathroom bill," and dredged up the noxious zombie fiction about trans women being sexual predators. The city's voters were blitzed by images of pervs pursuing young girls into women's rooms, and wooed by high-profile figures like then-presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, Texas governor Greg Abbott, and former Astros baseball star and trans expert Lance Berkman, who diagnosed us as "troubled men."
The campaign against HERO exemplifies what the ongoing push for LGBTQ civil rights could expect to face in a truth vacuum: desperate and/or cynical opponents committed to negating the possibility for meaningful dialogue and appealing to the worst angels of our nature, and the absence of any institution, constituency, or social mechanism able (or willing) to function as an arbiter. It can be argued that the Houston vote was just one battle in a larger war against religious and social bigotry that we're winning, if slowly (marriage equality is now on the books, but the Equality Act isn't). And I'm inclined to agree. Still, there's a danger here that this Trumpian state of affairs will become normalized, and such an environment doesn't favor us.
The future of LGBTQ rights depends on our ability to continue changing hearts and minds. Emotion plays a significant part in this process, of course, since one of the biggest things we need to overcome is all the old gut-level shit so effectively played on by the opponents of HERO. But a key thing we have on our side is a handful of simple, basic truths: that trans women and gay men are not sexual predators, for example, and more generally that spectra of gender identities and forms of sexual attraction are a documented part of the order of things. Those truths, though, and the peer-vetted studies we cite to support them, not to mention our appeals to shared democratic principles and our common humanity, need a forum in which they're widely acknowledged and upheld for what they are. In a win-at-all-costs epistemological free-for-all where claims like it's not racist to portray POTUS and FLOTUS as monkeys and climate change is a Chinese hoax receive equal play, they're in danger of becoming just so much high-brow ear candy.
It's in our vital interest, then, to fight for a national climate in which "pants on fire" obfuscation in our public discourse is unequivocally called out for what it is, as often as necessary. This won't be an easy sell: going high to their low never is. But the stakes are too high for us, and all minority groups, not to do so. Truth vacuums plead for authoritarian intervention. And as Foreign Policy in Focus director John Feffer observes, if Trump is too "personally unpopular and...tactically inept" to exploit the current situation effectively, more politically savvy "illiberal" populists elsewhere in the world are having more success. Let's do everything in our power to ensure we don't get this close again to a backslide into religious tests, Jim Crow, and the closet.
Revised October 21, 2016: "to his business ethics and acumen" replaced by "not to mention the birther sleaze "