The first month of 2024 isn’t even over yet, and hateful, bigoted Republicans have already introduced nearly 300 anti-LGBT bills. At least, that’s the narrative that left-leaning media are running with.
“285 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in state legislatures already this year, and it’s still January,” headline after headline after headline blared.
The media’s source for this claim is the American Civil Liberties Union, which is tracking purported “anti-LGBT” legislation in every state on a live map displayed on its website.
“Transgender people across the country are enduring a historic and dangerous effort to control our bodies and our lives, fueled by extremist politics with the goal of erasing us from public life,” ACLU attorney Harper Seldin said. “Taken together, these proposals are a blatant effort to deny transgender people the freedom to be ourselves at school, at work, and the support of the medical care many of us need to live.”
But is any of this actually true? Well, it’s certainly more complicated than any of these headlines suggest.
For one, the list is tracking bills introduced, not bills passed. And even the ACLU acknowledges that many, if not most, of these bills will never become law. Roughly 150,000 bills are introduced on all sorts of topics in state legislatures each year, and only a small fraction of them ever go anywhere.
After all, it often only requires one state lawmaker’s effort to get a bill introduced. So, getting worked up over bills simply being introduced is a tad alarmist.
Yet much more importantly, what the ACLU deems an “anti-LGBT” bill is so broad and partisan that it makes the group’s dataset essentially useless as any sort of meaningful metric. When people hear about “anti-LGBT laws,” they likely think of bills motivated by hate and animus that specifically target LGBT people for undue discrimination. While some of the bills cataloged by the ACLU could no doubt fall under that categorization, it uses a far, far broader brush in its actual analysis.
For example, laws that simply enforce sex segregation in public school sports, a basic matter of fairness and safety overwhelmingly supported by the public, and even many members of the LGBT community, such as myself, are dubbed “anti-LGBT” laws. So, too, parental rights legislation simply prohibiting schools from withholding information about students from parents (barring credible belief that revealing the information would lead to abuse) and allowing parents to opt out of sexual lessons is deemed bigoted by the ACLU’s analysis. Perhaps most absurdly, laws that accurately define the term “sex” under state law as referencing biology and reproductive capacity, not gender identity, are “anti-LGBT,” according to the ACLU.
Additionally, laws prohibiting schools from offering instruction on sexuality and gender identity in grades kindergarten through third grade are flagged as hate laws. But this isn’t necessarily hateful or bigoted at all. Where and when to draw the line isn’t always an easy question, yet everyone agrees that students shouldn’t be exposed to material that’s not age-appropriate. Does the ACLU really believe that not wanting kindergarteners to learn about sexual orientation or transgenderism makes you a bigot?
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The ACLU is basically saying any bill that takes anything other than the most liberal position on anything vaguely related to LGBT matters is a hate-fueled “anti-LGBT bill.” This is a shame because we are, unfortunately, witnessing real backsliding when it comes to the acceptance of LGBT people in the United States. And there’s no doubt that lawmakers in some states and localities are introducing laws that do unduly target and restrict the freedoms of gay or transgender people.
It would sure be nice to have a real list identifying where these problems actually exist. Instead, the ACLU is simply doing propaganda for the Democratic National Committee and trying to pass it off as neutral civil rights activism.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, co-founder of BASEDPolitics, and Washington Examiner contributor.