Anti-LGBTQ backlash comes to CA

by John Ferrannini

The nationwide backlash against LGBTQ equality has reached the Golden State, with queer heroes being demonized, Pride flags being banned, and even physical fights breaking out up and down California.

In Temecula – between Los Angeles and San Diego – a book about slain gay San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk has been banned from use in schools; in Sacramento, some Republican lawmakers walked out of the Legislature when Sister Roma of the drag nun Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, among others, were being honored; in Glendale, three have been arrested after violence outside a school board meeting; and in Orange County, the Pride flag has been banned from county buildings.

Open vitriol and scorn against the queer community in the United States is reaching a fever pitch just as Pride celebrations get underway across the country. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who just launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, signed bill after bill making the Sunshine State perhaps the most restrictive for LGBTQ people in the country, amid a wave of similar laws throughout America, including the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Things have gotten so fraught that for the first time in four decades, the Human Rights Campaign has declared LGBTQ people are in a national state of emergency.

And the rhetoric that LGBTQ people are a threat to children has been heard even in San Francisco; on June 7, Muhammed Abdullah, 20, said during his arraignment in San Francisco Superior Court on hate crime and other charges stemming from a June 5 incident in the LGBTQ Castro neighborhood that “the LGBT community is going against families,” adding that it’s “so fucked up” and “you know the truth.”

From

Temecula

Temecula Valley School Board President Joseph Komrosky called Milk, who was the first out person elected to public office in California back in 1977, a “pedophile,” just as the board decided to exclude a social studies book, “TCI Social Studies Alive,” that mentions Milk in supplemental materials. The board voted 3-2 against the book.

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