American Denialism

We’re seeing a lot of pushback to the idea that the Roe reversal is a domino — that despite Clarence Thomas putting gay marriage, contraceptives, and homosexuality itself on the target list in his concurring opinion, well, he’s just one guy, y’know? And besides, the Supreme Court didn’t outlaw abortion, they just left it to the states!

There is, of course, a lot of dishonesty in the pushback. People will lie, people have lied — including justices who said under oath during their confirmation hearings that Roe was “settled law”.

It’s not them we’re thinking about. It’s people who believe them. Especially gay people.

There are, in this bewildering world of ours, gay MAGA Republicans out there. You may have heard of them recently, when a Texas Log Cabin contingent — it still exists! — was pointedly excluded from the state party convention, something they were actually eager to attend.

We’ve seen a few up close, in our social-media wanderings. One in particular caught our attention, the day the draft Roe opinion was leaked. From what we could tell, he’s a comfortable well-off Republican suburbanite whose comfortable well-off Republican friends are comfortable with him having a boyfriend.

“Nobody really cares anymore that you’re gay,” he wrote. “It’s a non-issue. In fact, being gay has become BORING.”

Which would be awesome — were it so. That’s the world we want to live in, where being who you are doesn’t make a fucking difference.

Problem is, that’s not the world we live in now.

There was no explaining this to him, no citation of sources he didn’t wave away. That ACLU list of legislation challenging gay rights? Balderdash! They’re just playing it up to raise money, and besides, they’re just a bunch of commies, anyway.

That kind of thing.

The rationalization and denial is extraordinary, but we see it all over, the certain insistence that what’s happening isn’t really happening, that all threats are the product of excited imaginations — that it won’t happen to me. And they’ll keep on insisting until they’re carted away, shocked — Shocked! — that their friends would do this to them, would allow it to happen.

And there’s nothing we can do about that. The world is melting, the police are timid thugs, there’s a goddamn virus that has killed a million Americans — name your issue — but until it affects them personally, it simply doesn’t exist. And even when it does, they still deny it. Vehemently.

Long ago, we came to the conclusion that the only recourse was to outvote them. But even that doesn’t work, not when the very structure of government is built to privilege a minority of voters. And there are far too many people who still insist, despite all evidence, that we live in a representative democracy, to tackle that fantasy.

Vote Harder, we’re being told by the people running the show. We did. We have. And it hasn’t made a fucking difference. Tell us the truth, for once, because your fanciful civic lies are just making shit worse.