A sizable group of liberal organizations gathered on March 16 at Glory Church, a sizable Asian church in downtown Los Angeles. Inside the original fighting area, Pastor Richard Shin took the church.
” America was a dream land to most Koreans, including me, 40 times before. It was a land of liberty, a state of serenity”, Shin said in a movie tracking of the event. America has significantly changed. Our kid talks to lawyers about transgender issues, but their parents are unaware of this. When parents are aware of their children’s trans operation plan and attempt to stop it, their child may be taken aside. Behind this, the devil controls this and controls how we treat them.
Officials from a variety of faith-based organizations and organizations that support the so-called “parental rights” addressed the scant community about the negative effects of “gender philosophy.” In the park bit beyond, a handful of correct- aircraft organizers clad in black, including some Proud Boys, stood guard, according to movie footage posted on social media.
A priest at the march told guests that it was their “divine commitment” to mark a complaint.
By the end of April, each program needs 546 or 651 names in order for the ideas to be counted as vote steps in the November general vote. It is unclear how many names each action already has, but the Kids First California Committee, which is sponsoring all three efforts, had raised$ 82, 629 as of January, according to data from the California secretary of state.
Supporters of the initiatives have used common and false rhetoric that many other conservatives across the nation use, including baselessly claiming that kids are secretly going through transition at schools without the consent of their parents.
The anti- trans initiatives are a long shot in deep- blue California, which has some of the nation’s strongest civil rights protections, including specifically for LGBTQ+ people and people seeking gender- affirming care and abortion from out- of- state. However, there are red pockets in the state, and California conservatives are increasingly focusing on rolling back rights for LGBTQ+ people and making their state less safe for members of that community in the process.
Everybody Is A Potential Target, according to” Everyone Is A Potential Target.”
These conservatives in California have a lot of support, even though they ultimately do n’t have seats on their neighborhood school boards.
The elections took place months after tensions between far-right groups and parental rights reached fever pitch. In June, scores of protesters gathered in two Los Angeles school districts to protest events during Pride Month.
Hundreds of conservative activists, including Henry and Krpekyan, showed up in Glendale to protest the district’s support of Pride month. For the previous five years, the district had passed a Pride resolution without incident. The Glendale rally quickly descended into violence, and people at the protest described a scene of anti- LGBTQ agitators beating, kicking and hurling slurs at LGBTQ+ advocates.
” This is about, specifically, gender ideology being put upon and thrust upon children at Glendale Unified”, Henry, who does not have a student in the school district, told the Los Angeles Times after the protest.
Neither Henry nor Krpekyan responded to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Grey James, an organizer with LGBTQ+ advocacy group GlendaleOUT, told HuffPost that the protests and uptick in hateful rhetoric have had a chilling effect in schools.
Because everyone is a potential target, “people are afraid to show up and be associated with LGBT issues,” James said, noting that Glendale school teachers have reported that fewer and fewer students are taking part in events put on by the Gender and Sexuality Alliance.
” That’s a horrible way to live. Imagine being a kid and witnessing this in your community”, James added.
‘ This Is n’t A New Playbook ‘
Right-wing organizations in California have benefited from the ballot initiative strategy in the past. California’s voters approved Proposition 8 in November 2008, which forbids same-sex unions after it was briefly legalized earlier that year.
Prop 8 may have been defeated in part because of the confusion among the voters with the language and political advertising. California’s current attorney general, Rob Bonta, has vowed to make sure that the language of the initiative petitions is crystal clear. Bonta, a Democrat, refers to the proposed measures collectively as the” Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth” initiative. His summary of the measure stated that “individuals seeking treatment later in life” would likely still be responsible for paying for the costs even though the initiatives could have “potential minor savings in state and local health care costs.” Leaders from Protect Kids California, a subgroup of Students First California, have been frustrated by the state attorney general’s representation of their proposals and, in February, filed to sue Bonta over the petition’s title.
According to Tony Hoang, the executive director of Equality California, the state’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization that played a key role in fighting for the right for same-sex couples to marry, the history of conservatives turning to ballot measures to try to reverse LGBTQ+ rights in the state predates Prop 8.
” This is n’t a new playbook for them”, he said. I feel like we’ve gone back to the’ 70s with the Briggs initiative, where time and time again, our community is put up to a vote, and they’re hoping to galvanize their base with this red meat.”
The California public schools ‘ John Briggs ballot initiative, which was sponsored by state legislator John Briggs of Orange County, sought to outlaw lesbian and gay teachers from teaching in the state. The ballot measure had a goodwill among the electorate at first, but it ultimately lost in the 1978 election after a coalition of LGBTQ+ activists, including Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold office in California, successfully organized a campaign against it.
Anti-LGBT rhetoric has not proven to be popular at the polls in recent years because the broader conservative strategy has been made transgender and gender nonconforming people the target of today’s moral panic. Despite being successful in passing legislation that restates the rights of LGBTQ+ people, candidates for the federal, state, and local levels of government that run on anti-trans platforms have not performed well in elections.
Initiatives like the Protect Kids Act have the potential to have a negative impact, Hoang said, even if they do n’t succeed or do n’t even make the ballot.
We also are aware that LGBTQ youth in every state are at risk when the proposed measures are implemented, he said. Because far-right extremist politicians are using our community as a wedge issue, far-right extremist politicians are using our community as a wedge issue, we partner with hotlines that are getting more spikes of youth who are reaching out for help and having suicidal thoughts. Youth who identify as LGBT have four times more than their peers in suicide. More than a third of trans youth currently reside in states where they are unable to access gender-affirming care, and schools have reported higher rates of hate crimes against LGBTQ+ children.
In this year’s state and federal elections, equality advocates like Equality California say they must make plans for every outcome. The fights over LGBTQ+ equality at the local and state levels have not shown any signs of slowing down, and activists are concerned about what might happen across the country, including in blue states, if Republicans take control of Congress and the White House.
We are considering what are the practical things we can do in California to make sure that our protections are protected in light of what occurs at the federal level, Hoang said.
