Republicans have been successfully bashing gays for as long as I can remember. Back in Reagan’s time, religious conservatives preached gays deserved to die of AIDS — that it was God’s just punishment on the sinful. At the 1992 Republican convention in Houston, while Pat Buchanan delivered the speech Molly Ivins famously joked sounded better in the original German, conventioneers waved signs like “Family Rights Forever, ‘Gay’ Rights Never.” And as late as 2004, George W. Bush whipped up anti-gay hysteria by proposing a constitutional amendment that would make gay marriage illegal.
But in the years leading up to the 2015 Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage, the political saliency of gay-bashing began to lose its potency. Surveys at the time showed even conservatives largely accepted gay marriage.
This was not to last for a couple of reasons: 1.) because many religious people will never accept gays, no matter how much the rest of society has moved on, and because 2.) sex and gender being primal markers of identity, they are very powerful and personal things. Any number of times, I’ve seen otherwise mild-mannered people become totally incensed about these topics.
So, here was a still-effective, not-Impossible-but-red-meat option to motivate conservatives against the libs, but the traditional ways of doing it — religious censure and the clenched-jawed fear of gays — were no longer working. There was still plenty of steam left in the long American tradition of othering, fearmongering, and bashing those who are now called LGBTQ+ folks. It just needed to be reframed.
The weak link proved to be trans people. In Texas, we began to see that in 2017, when which bathroom high school students used became a major issue, strangely mirroring the ERA bathroom fearmongering by Phyllis Schlafly back in the ’70s. Then the next big anti-trans issue became trans athletes in high school. And despite all the hoopla, we were never talking about a huge number of trans athletes invading high school sports. When Utah passed a ban on trans athletes competing in sports in 2022, there were only four trans high school student-athletes in the entire state.
But once that hyperventilating moral panic about high school trans students began, it combined with the somewhat dormant anti-gay feelings on the right to help produce the hateful anti-woke movement we’ve endured the past few years. We see it in the hundreds of transphobic laws that have been introduced throughout the country and the disgusting innuendos about gays (and gay teachers) grooming young people. We also see it in the number of companies that once recognized Pride Month but are now cutting back after right-wing pushback.
All the above are part of the anti-woke movement. Now, anti-woke is not easy to define, which is one reason why it’s become such an effective stand-in for conservatives’ racist, bigoted, and homophobic views. Anti-woke serves as a convenient cloak to hide what is really being discussed, serving the same function as the old racist code words from the past like “neighborhood schools” or “law and order.”
The anti-woke argue they’re not homophobes. They just don’t like woke. They are morally offended by anything that might help people different from them. Mind you, they’re not personally narrow-minded but against those who want to shove their liberal opinions down their throat — those radicals who want to change pronouns, change books, and change anything, really. In short, the anti-woke movement is as a loud tantrum-like scream of “stop!” to the march of time. “We don’t need any of your damn change!” the anti-woke cry.
Coming from the other side, I have to say, “Well-played, conservatives. Gay-bashing was losing its efficacy, but you went after trans people and then remarkably came up with a vocabulary that was one part meaningless — ‘anti-woke’ could mean anything really — and one part a stealth term loaded and ready to fire the most bigoted views on the Other but without accepting any moral responsibility for your hate-filled, bigoted, amoral views.”
If only an app could be designed that would instantaneously translate the anti-woke’s ravings to reveal what they’re really saying, it might go something like this: “I’m a religious nut and no longer in the majority, but you must conform to my narrow-minded, bigoted view of gender and sex because God says so, and all this talk about gays and trans people makes me feel kinda funny and a little confused.”
Or, in plain English, “anti-woke” is “pro-bigotry.”
This column reflects the opinions and fact-gathering of the author(s) and only the author(s) and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.
