"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Except, perhaps, in Florida and other GOP-controlled “mini-reichs” where hate, censorship, and persecution of vulnerable populations have become official policy! Is this REALLY the way the next generations of Americans want to live and be remembered by history? PHOTO: Public Realm
Last Wednesday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — who is expected to announce his campaign for the presidency as soon as tomorrow — signed a gaggle of bills targeting LGBTQ youth.
In addition to those he had already signed into law — including a “Don’t Say Gay” measure barring teachers from mentioning sexual orientation or gender identity and another prohibiting gender-affirming care — his latest laws expand the state’s prohibition on classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity, require that students use bathrooms associated with their sex assigned at birth, prohibit adults from taking children to see drag shows, and bar teachers from asking students about their preferred pronouns.
Another of the bills DeSantis just signed into law allows the state of Florida to take transgender minors away from parents who help them obtain gender-affirming care.
In raging against gender-affirming care, DeSantis lied that “they’re literally chopping off the private parts of young kids.” In fact, genital surgery is rarely, if ever, done under the age of 18. It’s not even all that common for adults. DeSantis is lying about it to scare people.
Meanwhile, the Republican presidential frontrunner has made it clear that trans people have no place in his vision of America:
“I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concepts of sex and gender transitions at any age. I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”
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My friends, these scare tactics are dangerous. Recent analysis found a 70% increase in hate crimes against LGBTQ Americans between 2020 and 2021, as the surge of these anti-LGBTQ bills began. And that’s only counting hate crimes that get reported. The years 2020 and 2021 each set a new record for the number of trans people murdered in America.
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The cruelest irony is that these Republican bills pretending to protect children are putting our most vulnerable children at greater risk.
LGBTQ kids are more than four times likelier than non-LGBTQ kids to attempt suicide, especially transgender young people.
Gender-affirming care reduces that risk. That is why it is life-saving.
“Don’t Say Gay” laws also strip away potentially life-saving support. A teacher who positively and respectfully discusses sexual orientation and gender identity won’t turn a straight kid gay. But such a discussion will make an LGBTQ student 23% less likely to attempt suicide.
The tragic truth is that “Don’t Say Gay” laws and bans on gender-affirming care are causing more young lives to be needlessly lost.
Laws that threaten to take transgender minors away from their families if they are receiving gender-affirming care will cause these young people even more trauma.
If they were really worried about children undergoing life-altering medical procedures, they wouldn’t pass abortion bans that force teens to give birth or risk back-alley procedures.
What the GOP’s vendetta against the LGBTQ community really is, is a classic authoritarian tactic to vilify already marginalized people.
This is how fascism takes root.
We need to see DeSantis’s bills and similar bills signed by Republican governors across the land for what they are — attempts to use bigotry and hate to elevate their political standing.
And we need to see this Republican attack on LGBTQ Americans for what it is: a threat to all of our human rights.
[My thanks to Allan Piper for work on a version of today’s letter.]
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Meanwhile, as Caleb Ecarma reports for Vanity Fair, Florida teachers have had enough:
“For the first time, I’ve actually started talking to my investment guy about retirement,” Michael Woods, a teacher who has spent decades working in exceptional-student education for public schools in South Florida, tells me. “I’m a 30-year veteran who showed up every day, hardly calls in sick, but now I don’t want to be a teacher in Florida.” Most troubling to Woods—a gay man who teaches science and biology courses—is the ballooning list of laws that police classroom material, discriminate against LGBTQ+ educators and students, and restrict sex education. “They’re all so vague,” he says of DeSantis’s new laws. “Even things that used to be easy like human reproduction [for ninth graders], I now have to check with my co-teacher and ask, ‘Is this okay? Are we still allowed to teach this?’”
On Wednesday, the governor rubber-stamped a batch of four bills restricting LGBTQ+ rights and expanding the Parental Rights in Education Act—or, as critics have dubbed it, the “Don’t Say Gay” law. The new measures, which will be enforced at public and charter schools, ban educators from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in pre-K through eighth grade, and place new, vague restrictions on sex education, including that such instructions “be age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
This latest salvo was a bridge too far for many teachers, according to Rebecca Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the US. “I just talked to one teacher yesterday who is leaving and she said, ‘I can’t teach like this,’” Pringle tells me. “‘I can’t teach while worrying that they’re coming after my license, or I’m committing a felony.’ They’re leaving in protest.” Pringle says she has tried to convince teachers to stay in Florida, given the dearth of teachers in the state. But that discussion has been difficult to have, she says, with teachers who are facing death threats or harassment.
Case in point: One fifth-grade teacher in West Florida said this month that she was placed under investigation by the Florida Department of Education for showing her class Disney’s Strange World, a children’s movie that features an openly gay character. Jenna Barbee, the teacher at hand, said she played the film to give students a post-exam “brain break.” But when a local school board member learned of the showing, Barbee said, she was reported to state officials. Barbee told CNN that she had already submitted her resignation before the incident, in protest of the “politics and the fear of not being able to be who you are” in Florida public schools.
It appears that no educator has yet been prosecuted or charged under Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law or its legislation restricting books in schools. But as fears mount over their future implementation, parents are already witnessing the effects of shorthanded schools and overcrowded classrooms. “Last year, I saw several teachers leave, and we had substitutes for three, four months of the year,” says Reagan Miller, a parent in West Florida whose two children attend public school. “We had a teacher who taught advanced math at our middle school for years and years—he just left to go be a 911 operator,” she tells me, “which blows my mind, that becoming a 911 operator would be less stressful than being a teacher.”
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My experience on the bench was that almost all the transgender individuals coming before me had attempted suicide on one or more occasions or expressed suicidal thoughts. To a person, they just wanted to be accepted, protected, and to live their own lives without harassment, interference, or fear. These are all things that today’s cowardly GOP “Brown Shirt Pols” would deny them.
The next generation is going to have to decide whether they want to live in a Nazi-inspired police “hate state” where individual freedoms are meaningless and cruelty, bullying, suppression, and betrayal are the norms. If not, then they had better get busy removing every GOP politico from every office — from local school boards and city councils to the Presidency.
How soon we forget the lessons of 1939! Perhaps that’s part of the GOP’s war on truth, education, and history!
The Republican Party, once a proud proponent of limited government, has become a font of government intrusion into the most intimate aspects of personal and family life.
Last Friday, a judge who previously worked for a conservative Republican legal organization and was then nominated to the bench by Trump and pushed through the Senate by Mitch McConnell, invalidated the FDA’s approval of a 23-year-old abortion pill (mifepristone) used in over half of pregnancy terminations in the United States.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the Dobbs case (in which Republican appointees on the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade), Republican states are criminalizing abortion. Some are criminalizing the act of helping women obtain an abortion in another state. Texas gives private citizens the right to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion. Idaho just passed an “abortion trafficking” law that would make helping a minor leave Idaho to get an abortion without parental consent punishable by five years in prison. Tennessee Republicans have made it illegal to mail medical abortion pills. In the last Congress, 167 House Republicans co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, conferring full personhood rights on fertilized eggs.
At the same time, Republican lawmakers want to make it more difficult for couples to buy contraceptives. Sixteen Republican-dominated state legislatures already bar abortion clinics from receiving public contraception funds.
So far, at least 11 Republican states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors, even if parents approve. Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has ordered state child welfare officials to launch child abuse investigations into reports of transgender kids receiving such care. Republican lawmakers are also pushing teachers to refer to students by their gender assigned at birth. Many are restricting which bathrooms trans students can use.
Republican states are also limiting discussions of gender and sexuality in classrooms. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a bill banning public school teachers in kindergarten through third grade from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity, calling it an “anti-grooming bill” and accusing opponents of wanting to groom young children for sexual exploitation.
Republican lawmakers are also putting obstacles in the way of same-sex marriage and are considering appeals to the Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. Texas’s Republican attorney general says he’d “feel comfortable defending a law that once again outlawed sodomy” in the wake of Dobbs.
Oh, and Republicans now routinely accuse political opponents of favoring child pornography. In her confirmation hearings, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was barraged with questions from Republican senators about her alleged lenient treatment of child pornographers. (In four days of hearings, the phrase “child porn” or “pornography” or “pornographer” was mentioned 165 times, along with 142 mentions of “sex” or related terms like “sexual abuse” or “sex crimes.”)
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Why are Republican lawmakers obsessing about sex? Three reasons.
First, by focusing on sex, Republicans can court both the evangelical right and the right-wing extreme QAnon vote (with its loony “Pizzagate” conspiracy claim that Democrats are pedophiles).
Second, by focusing on sex, Republican lawmakers don’t have to talk nonstop about Trump. They don’t have to discuss his indictment or other pending cases against him. They don’t have to say whether they agree with his vitriolic diatribes against other Republicans (DeSantis, McConnell, and any other Republican who criticizes him). They don’t have to defend his bonkers positions (on Ukraine, NATO, George Soros, immigrants, and all else).
Finally, creating a culture war over sex allows Republicans to sound faux populist without having to address the practical problems faced by most Americans — lack of paid sick leave, unaffordable child care and elder care, stagnant wages, and inadequate housing. And by focusing on sex, they believe they can ignore the sources of populist anger — corporate profiteering and price gouging, monopolization, union busting, soaring CEO pay, and billionaires who pay a lower tax rate than the average worker (courtesy, in part, of the 2017 Republican tax cut for the wealthy).
But the Republican obsession about sex is backfiring on them, as we saw in the 2022 midterms and again in last week’s elections in Wisconsin and Chicago. It’s drawing a contrast between the two parties that pits the GOP against the vast majority of voters.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent to Americans that while Democrats want to make life easier for average working people and end corporate abuses of economic power, Republicans want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of peoples’ lives.
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On a different note, please join me Friday for the second session of my course on Wealth and Poverty. (If you missed the first session, you can find it here.)
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Yup!
Today’s extremist GOP is an existential threat to individual liberty in America!
