Juana Garcia/The Cougar
In recent years, the US has seen a massive wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation proposed in various state legislatures. A common refrain from the right is that these bills are needed to protect the safety and innocence of children. But if you look closely at the rhetoric and policies on display, it’s clear to see that the far right cares far more about limiting the rights of the LGBTQ+ community than they do about actually protecting children.
The influence of these policies has grown immensely in the past few years. In Texas alone, proposals were made to restrict drag performances and the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues in schools. While these proposals failed in the end, Senate Bill 14 passed, effectively banning gender-affirming care for trans youth in the state.
The situation doesn’t look too different in other states, with similar bills being proposed nationwide. Tennessee passed a bill banning “male or female impersonators” from performing near a minor. However, the bill was so broad that it was rejected by a Trump-appointed federal judge on First Amendment grounds.
But for every bill that was rejected, plenty of other similar bills ended up being passed elsewhere. In Arkansas, former Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed a bill banning gender-affirming care for trans youth only for the legislature to overturn the veto the very next day.
While critics of these bills say that they restrict individual freedoms, their proponents maintain that they’re necessary to keep children safe. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis claimed that the law banning classroom discussion of LGBTQ+ issues was made to prevent the sexualization of children. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh, known for his crusade against LGBTQ+ rights, often invokes the safety of children as well.
When it comes to conservatives using children as a talking point to argue against LGBTQ+ rights, this is by no means a new phenomenon. When Miami passed an ordinance prohibiting sexuality-based discrimination in 1977, singer Anita Bryant created an organization called “Save Our Children” to advocate for repealing it. Bryant claimed that gay people were trying to convert children because they “cannot reproduce, so they must recruit.”
Unfortunately, her efforts helped lead to the ordinance eventually being repealed. This rhetoric was eventually adopted by major conservative religious figures in the 1980s, further fanning the flames of homophobia. These movements ended up being instrumental in electing President Ronald Reagan, whose silence on the AIDS epidemic led to tens of thousands of deaths.
While the crusade against gay rights eventually failed, with the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling of 2015 and the Respect for Marriage Act of 2022 enshrining the right to marriage equality into law, the right has continued using the same rhetoric in the 2020s against transgender people.
In 2022, conservative figures like Chaya Raichik, owner of the Libs of TikTok X (Formerly Twitter) account, accused Boston Children’s Hospital and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) of systematically mutilating and castrating children for the sake of transgender healthcare. To back up this claim, conservatives cited a video of a physician discussing gender-affirming hysterectomies.
However, the doctor never mentioned children once in the video and the hospital’s website states that such surgery is only available to those 18 years and older. Of the five gender-affirming surgeries provided to minors since 2018 at Vanderbilt, all patients were over 16 years old, had parental consent and none received surgeries involving the genitals. However these facts did not stop both children’s hospitals from receiving harassment and death threats to staff, with Boston Children’s Hospital receiving three bomb threats following the campaign.
These threats put both the staff and the children themselves in potential danger. But even discounting these incidents, the far right frequently makes it clear how they feel more directly. If children were the primary concern, then it would stand to reason that conservatives like the previously mentioned Walsh would only support policies like banning gender reassignment surgery for minors or banning the depiction of trans people in media aimed at minors.
However, conservative pundits like Walsh go much further than that. Walsh has affirmed his support for banning transgender care at all ages, as well as expressing admiration for Russia banning gender-affirming care for all citizens regardless of age. Walsh has no interest in protecting kids; him and people like him just use them to advance their own hatred.
Perhaps one could argue that people like Walsh are a fringe group of right-wing extremists. However, the fact that Walsh spoke at the University of Houston last year and drew a crowd of dozens of people seems to imply otherwise. Moreover, this kind of rhetoric leads to real policy being put into place that can have immense consequences.
For example, look at the “Florida Parental Rights in Education Act” also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Governor Ron DeSantis championed the law, claiming that it prevented the sexualization of children. But even from the outset of the law’s passage, the provisions left no doubt as to what the true agenda was.
Not only did the law initially ban classroom instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten to third grade, but it also banned such instruction “in a manner that is not age-appropriate.” This last part leaves room for immense interpretation.
Theoretically, a parent could sue a school district if their 17-year-old child is exposed to LGBTQ+ themes in class in any capacity. This idea became more than just a theory when the law was expanded to an outright ban on such topics from kindergarten to 12th grade by the Florida Board of Education in April of 2023.
In a similar manner to Walsh’s anti-trans rhetoric, the law goes further than what is necessary to protect children and effectively bans discussion of LGBTQ themes in school.
In conclusion, the far right can try all they want to tie anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policies to the safety of children, but it will not change the fact that such positions are simply anti-LGBTQ+. In many cases, they either actively harm children like with the targeting and harassment children’s hospitals, or they allow their mask to slip enough to expose their broad intentions.
Whatever the case may be, freedom and equality in this nation can only be preserved so long as those anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives who hide their true agenda behind children are kept as far away from power as possible.
Calvin Nguyen is a Journalism sophomore who can be reached at
[email protected]
It’s laughable that you say we don’t care about children. We are the ones trying to protect children, while you liberals howl with glee each time an innocent baby is slaughtered in the womb.
Republicans try to pass legislation making it easier for children to be adopted while liberals are praising Hamas, who rape and kill children.
Be evil, if you like. Just at least be an honest, evil group.
If my comment goes through, you should see what my opinion is about this guy’s… wait… is this a guy?? “Just to be safe” ‘their’ opinion.
Before I make my point, I don’t stand for threats, from either side of the isle. Yes, people on the right side of the political isle get death/bomb/gun threats all the time.
As a conservative, I feel like you are being anti-woke by not accepting all people, beliefs, and religions. On a more serious note, LGBTQ+ propaganda has influenced every part of social media. The average for the first time a boy sees porn is in the realm of 10-12 years old, with part of the blame pointing back at this “Community”.
But before I get into your journalism as a former copyeditor myself, I’d like to say that this ‘community’ of people seem to hate being surrounded by themselves. Lesbian divorce rates are about 75%, much higher than regular marriage divorce rates, which are high themselves at around 50%. Additionally, y’all don’t foster much love. If I offend someone by just saying something and I don’t apologize, the whole internet will decide that I’m trash because I don’t agree with them. A community is meant to give support and stability, but from what I see, I see a bunch of scared people who want to be loved and not criticized for their wrong takes. The depression rates also skyrocket the more into that community a person gets. As a man who chose to not be gay despite my attractions, I would never support a community that supports fear, terrorists, and evil.
Going back to your opinion piece, you are literally just reiterating the words of all those in the media about people you probably don’t actually watch enough to know what they believe. And this is true for anyone, but I will counter ideas that are pushed like this. Anyway, I see very little creativity in this work, though I do find the fact you tried to push your point with evidence promising, be it that the evidence lacks context.
This will be the last thing and probably the most important, but children are the most vulnerable of all of us to society. Children’s minds are developing so much during the ages of 0-16 that it’s amazing to see happen. And it doesn’t stop there. The mind keeps growing till around 26 when it is fully matured. If this is the case, as science has said it is, would it not be better to limit a child’s access to screens, potentially bad influences, and inappropriate topics if need be. This should be a parent’s job and right since the child doesn’t start truly grasping the scope of the world, physically, socially, emotionally, etc. until after puberty starts. And as we know, so much development happens during that time period. Why shouldn’t parents protect their kids from the things they think are bad for them. If we continue to the logic that kids are truly the most vulnerable in society, then the LGBTQ+ ‘community’ should really start looking in the mirror and questioning why they want to trample over a kid’s right to be innocent. So yes, most conservatives, Matt Walsh, who has kids of his own mind you, very much included, should be able to stop their children from having these things brought up in THEIR schools, in THEIR relationships, and in THEIR lives. You claim that freedom won’t be achieved until we bend the knee, yet you dare to argue that the rights, commonly known as freedoms, of parents should be denied. How utterly, utterly selfish and hypocritical of you, and of everything you try to stand for.
UH_Needs_Truth acts like a controlled-opposition false conservative sooner than any kind of real conservative.
UH_Needs_Truth gets hysterical over the author of this piece, Calvin Nguyen, who, as I said, induces that kind of emotional reaction by his own and his own publication’s character of unaccountable opposition, while clinging to and saying absolutely nothing about Matt Walsh.
Matt Walsh isn’t an open opponent to conservatism, but a false friend to it working for Ben Shapiro who has done absolutely nothing to oppose same-sex marriage in the past three years so can hardly said to be a real conservative in any way, shape, manner or form or ever be expected to be welcomed back into the conservative fold.
Dear Daily_Cougar,
A Mr. Calvin Nguyen, listed as a member of your staff, recently had an article published on your paper’s website entitled “The Far Right Doesn’t Actually Care about Kids.”
It was presented on the website “3 weeks ago” according to the date attached, which is telling, because it’s both removable by the webmaster and undocumentable even at The Internet Archive, which I’ve often observed, frequently removes articles for censorship’s sake to secure an advantage for some dubious narrative that’s somehow become crucial to what progressives might happen to think is in their interests, without any means of appeal or redress of grievance should such a complaint arise.
Apart from the insult presented in the title of the piece to whatever group Mr. Nguyen thought he was addressing, The_Daily_Cougar by similar arbitrary archiving also fails to protect the dignity of discourse you might invite with any willingness to secure those same basic standards of academic accountability yourselves.
To give an example of the low standards of such expectations that the University of Houston has earned for itself, it was not even known to one of the librarians at M. D. Anderson library itself, until I pointed it out today, that there were no monographs (books not editable at some remote website) whatsoever meant for adults on 21st American History in the general shelves.
This failure to keep any kind of permanent sort of record about what the University might be willing to decisively curate as worthy of lasting value to our civilization, in its own time, of which it would like to purport to be a part and of whose benefits it is very much willing to partake in the form of public funding, doesn’t show any sort of confidence in what lasting convictions it might be willing to present as its own unified point of view as to either what’s valuable or what makes for valuable multi-sided discussion of what’s valuable if it can really be said to be willing to claim to any fixity in a point of view at all.
The previous editors of The_Daily_Cougar similarly failed to archive two articles I wrote also on the subject of same-sex attracted persons for their publication in 1989, after having archived nearly the whole following _decade_ of published articles but arbitrarily stopping abruptly once having reached the year in which my articles were published.
Now it looks as though the entire The_Daily_Cougar archive of articles is missing altogether! Is it somewhere on the website, and I somehow missed it?
So what “actual” grounds do you have for expecting any sort of constructive reply to your rude and unaccountable attack on the party with which you, contrarily, imply by its presence in your publication, a willingness to engage?
So in other words Mr. Nguyen’s article doesn’t so much inspire _thought_ as paranoid_conflict by anyone addressed by him who doubts they’ll be treated fairly just when they’re accused of lacking affection or consideration for the welfare of children.
I find these practices, as I’m sure do most others, after having been given access to and read such an all-too-typical account of his publication and its host university that are usually only seen at universities on the decline, too convenient to the cause of advancing his point of view unopposed to be plausibly thought of as accidental.
But it seems just as true that Mr. Nguyen appears to have refuted his _own argument by means of the very character in which he and his own sponsoring publication conducts itself:
His lack of published replies, except for a few, sooner indicates a _love for children on the part of his opponents, from their fear for what a lack of competence that publications like his own has in _real security of freedom of speech and discourse, forebarring from such children a legitimate education with a necessary willingness to not only champion a set of fixed values, but a fair discourse that exposes those fixed values to real opposition.
That is because real opposition is a necessary part of determining their worthiness of being chosen to champion in the first place, and the apparent lack of which is probably what makes the opponents of Mr. Nguyen with the phantom e-mail address too conflicted to reply when such venues and, significantly, other social media, deny them a fair hearing, rather than any such disdainful rejection of our children he imputes to them, all while being secure in his unaccountability.
Mike Taggart
Engineering Jr.
P.S. I might add UH_Needs_Truth acts like a controlled-opposition false conservative sooner than any kind of real conservative.
UH_Needs_Truth gets hysterical over Calvin Nguyen, who, as I said, induces that kind of reaction by his own and his own publication’s character of misconducted opposition, while clinging to and saying absolutely nothing about Matt Walsh.
Matt Walsh isn’t an open opponent to conservatism but a false friend to it, who has done absolutely nothing to oppose same-sex marriage or try to punish those who worked to force into American institutions, at any time in the past three years, so can neither be said to be a real conservative in any way, shape, manner or form, nor ever expected to be welcomed back into its fold.