Before announcing she was “obsessed” with politics (sure, girl) in a Vogue interview, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift said members of the gay and transgender communities were struggling for equality.
“Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she said. This is one of the key themes behind the new documentary, Miss Americana, released Friday documenting Swift’s political activism. Too bad nothing could be further from the truth.
In just four years, the legal and cultural landscape has shown that conservative fears of a “slippery slope” predating the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges were well-founded. The left-wing gay and transgender rights movement really wanted entitlement, not equality. Now, if they achieve anything less than being able to force their views onto others, they claim victimhood and decry anyone who disagrees with them as a bigot.
Unfortunately, many young people listen to Swift’s political opinions and therefore misunderstand what’s actually going on. It’s vital that her false narrative is corrected. Here’s a sampling of cultural struggles turned tumultuous lawsuits that showcase the opposite of the trend Swift imagines.
Let’s start with schools.
Transgender student Gavin Grimm successfully sued a school for not allowing Grimm use of the boys’ restroom, even though Grimm was born a biological female. In the aftermath of this case and others like it, it’s now widely assumed, particularly among liberals, that schools should immediately accommodate a transgender student’s request to use the opposite bathroom.
In fact, it’s so widely assumed that when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited a Catholic school which doesn’t allow transgender students, the liberal media simply referred to the school as “anti-transgender,” the school’s right to operate in accordance with their faith be damned.
It’s impossible to list all of these cases, as so many have emerged in such a short time.
With the help of the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union, dozens of schools have faced lawsuits on this issue with little regard for the privacy or rights of students except for the one or two transgender students fighting for their “right” to use a certain bathroom, whose rights are apparently more important in the eyes of the activist Left.
So, too, liberal activists have targeted sports, particularly at the high school and collegiate level, attempting to twist federal anti-discrimination to include gender identity despite it not saying so textually.
In June, several teenage track athletes, including one young woman named Selina Soule, submitted a complaint to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, asking it to investigate illegal discrimination against Connecticut athletes. This was following the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference’s decision to adopt a policy that allows transgender women, biological males who claim a female identity, to compete in girls’ athletic events. The biologically male transgender students competing as girls have consistently stolen opportunities from Soule and the other female athletes to compete and win.
This isn’t “equality” or “fairness.” And it’s just one example of a broader phenomenon.
The left-wing gay and transgender rights movement has also targeted teachers and professors. It’s not enough to have the right to be openly gay or transgender in school, activists, with a powerful legal boost from the ACLU and other left-wing groups, now demand that teachers and professors refer to their new names and new, “accurate,” pronouns, even as they defy logic and biology.
Peter Vlaming, a teacher in Virginia, was fired last year for refusing to refer to a student by a new pronoun that didn’t match the student’s biological sex.
Just this month, Dr. Nicholas Meriwether, a professor at Shawnee State, objected to a magistrate’s ruling featuring a similar pronoun debacle. Meriwether filed suit after university officials punished him because he declined a transgender student’s demand to be referred to as a woman, with feminine titles and pronouns. Meriwether believed doing this would contradict his Christian convictions and philosophical beliefs.
Like the other examples, these too are popping up nationwide — and they show how the liberal gay and transgender movement has gone far beyond asking for freedom to live how they like, and now demands that religious people bend the knee and adopt their left-wing beliefs.
Liberal activists have also gone after religious businesses and organizations, from restaurants to hospitals, demanding that they acquiesce to left-wing demands such as adopting children to same-sex couples, designing a cake or wedding invitations for gay weddings, performing a hysterectomy on a transgender person, and more. The idea that religious people are entitled to freedom of conscience has been utterly abandoned by the activist Left.
The case of Christian baker Jack Phillips, sued before the Supreme Court ruled on gay marriage, has nonetheless set the stage. Dozens like it have sprung up throughout the country in the aftermath of post-gay-marriage liberal activism.
It’s not enough for liberal activists that LGBT couples could adopt from other child welfare agencies, they must attempt to force faith-based agencies to honor their wishes, even above their religious convictions. And while many insurance companies are now forced to cover gender reassignment surgeries, that still is not enough. Hospitals, even faith-based ones, must also willingly perform transgender surgeries and related treatments or face anti-discrimination lawsuits.
The question of how far gay and transgender rights extend has also reached the employment realm. In October, the court will hear a landmark case regarding whether or not gender identity is a protected class under Title VII’s anti-discrimination employment protections for “sex.” Liberal activists want the court to rule that sex and gender are the same thing, essentially, that biological sex is itself a social construct.
Thankfully, though, there are some bright spots in the onslaught of anti-religious lawsuits sweeping the country.
In a major win last week, the Arizona Supreme Court protected two Christian artists in a dispute involving same-sex marriage beliefs. The court ruled Phoenix can’t use a nondiscrimination ordinance to force the owners of Brush & Nib Studio to create custom wedding invitations that express messages that violate their deeply held religious beliefs.
Even though the two women had never even been asked to make invitations for a same-sex wedding prior to their lawsuit, based on the ordinance, if they had declined due to their religious beliefs, they would have faced fines and even jail time.
In a surprising move, the Arizona Supreme Court struck a blow to that ordinance with a decision that reads like a veritable love letter to the First Amendment. Every now and then, as in this case and Masterpiece, the LGBT lobby is told to simmer down their demands.
Still, the overwhelming pattern of results indicates gay and transgender rights are doing just fine — in fact, they’re going way overboard. Their activist mantra is simple but demanding: We don’t just want equality in the public square, we want entitlement. In nearly every instance I have listed, it’s easy to see how, if successful, LGBT rights would not actually be equal, but theirs would, in fact, supersede those of overs by a long shot.
Swift is certainly free to think what she likes about politics, but it’s better for her fans and society alike if she educates herself about what she speaks first. Swift’s narrative that gay and transgender rights are “under attack” is utterly unsupported. In fact, it better describes the current plight of religious people in the United States.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
