Make America Great Again Trump Pass Law
Throughout history, information technology tends to be the example that folks have a tough time accepting modify. It seems similar in every era, many people tin can't help merely feel like things used to be improve. Of course, not everyone feels this way — you lot can't really argue that the past was better than the present to groups of people who have rights and privileges at present that they one time weren't afforded in the by.
Looking back, it can be hard to call back that the strides American culture has fabricated toward equality had to be fought for in the moment. And the very fact that equality has to be fought for is prove of the fact that information technology was (and is) opposed. It feels important to go on that in listen when considering the cultural debates of today.
Recently, we've seen lots of instances of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-trans legislation, from a Texas law preventing trans kids from participating in schoolhouse sports to so-called "Don't Say Gay" bills that would place restrictions on how educators talk to kids about sexual orientation and gender identity. The justifications for these pieces of legislation audio a lot like some of the justifications for anti-LGBTQ+ legislation from the 1960s and '70s in the U.S. So, allow'due south consider why that is, and why that comparing is and then important.
The "Nostalgia Trap"
Stephanie Coontz is a scholar of history and family studies who, in 1992, published a book called The Mode We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. She argues that there are two kinds of nostalgia. I is nostalgia for, as she put it more than recently, "a longing to reproduce a feeling once experienced with friends or family unit." This kind of nostalgia, she writes, is really adept, and tends to lead people to act "more warmly toward others, including strangers."
On the other hand, there is a more troubling kind of nostalgia in which folks experience "the longing to reproduce an idealized piece of history." This kind of nostalgia tends to lead people to "identify more than intensely with their own group and to judge members of other groups more negatively." It's this 2nd kind of nostalgia that is evoked in the language around many of the recent anti-LGBTQ+ bills existence passed in states around the U.South.
Information technology comes down to a question virtually whether instruction and give-and-take is the same thing as encouragement, or, worse, indoctrination. For example, the "Individual Freedom" bill that was passed by Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida has been criticized, in part, for its vagueness, because it prohibits that an individual "should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin."
The trouble is that information technology'southward impossible to control how someone is going to feel when they learn data that makes them uncomfortable. Is information technology okay to teach facts that make people uncomfortable? The vagueness of the bill means that the lines between education and so-called "indoctrination" are blurred.
Anita Bryant and "The Moral Atmosphere"
Dorsum in the 1970s in Florida, a similar conversation was happening around the idea of whether state protections of civil rights for gay people might exist infringing on the rights of parents. In 1977, Florida passed a bill that banned discrimination based on sexuality in housing and employment. After, a adult female named Anita Bryant — a vocalizer and one-time Miss Oklahoma — formed a group called Save Our Children and managed to get the constabulary overturned.
She did and then using pretty inflammatory language that sounds a lot similar the language of these debates today. Bryant said that it was her right, every bit a parent, to control "the moral temper in which my children grow up." Her feeling was that equal rights for gay people to work every bit educators infringed on her right as a parent to command what her children learn and who they learn it from. Save Our Children'south statement that "Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit," was an articulation of a similarly inflamatory thought that the mere existence of people with different sexual orientations constituted an attempt infringe on someone else's rights.
Elsewhere in the 1970s, every bit bipartisan momentum gathered nationwide for the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), folks mobilized against that as well. Phyllis Schlafly and the Hawkeye Forum argued that the ERA would actually be bad for women — that information technology would infringe on their "traditional" rights. Schlafly said, "What I am defending is the existent rights of women… A woman should have the right to be in the home as a married woman and mother." Both of these arguments brand employ of the idea that expanding equality to more people might negatively bear on the freedom of people who are happy with the condition quo.
What'due south Happening At present?
It's so of import to pay attending to the arguments of the past, because it allows us to encounter more clearly the arguments of the nowadays. And in the present, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, as we said to a higher place, is proliferating. Every bit of March of this year, almost 240 bills had already been filed across the U.S., most of them targeting trans people.
Similarly to the anti-LGBTQ+ movements of the '70s, these bills seem to constitute an attempt to hold onto the traditional views of the past without because the fact that the traditional views of the by may take left many marginalized groups out. Theorist Judith Butler recently pointed out that these laws are evidence that "Parents and communities desire to exercise forms of censorship to stop their children from knowing about how the world is being organized and how different people are living their lives."
This kind of censorship ignores the fact that change is, in many means, inevitable. The historian Julio Capó Jr. suggested recently that Anita Bryant's efforts in the '70s, though successful in the brusk term, accidentally inspired a movement. "It got people to see themselves every bit a voting bloc. It got them to see that their very existence and their rights were very much under attack in a different way than we had seen in the decade prior." Those people kept fighting for their rights, and in the coming decades they largely succeeded.
Though the language around the anti-LGBTQ+ laws of today and those of the 1970s is in many ways similar, i's of import to note that the target has shifted toward the perceived threat of rights for trans people equally opposed to gay people. Already, groups are mobilizing to fight for equality in the face of these new laws and to assist the people who are impacted by them, much like they did in the past. It's a cliche to say that history repeats itself; information technology'southward also true.
Source: https://www.ask.com/culture/todays-laws-vs-1970s-america?utm_content=params%3Ao%3D740004%26ad%3DdirN%26qo%3DserpIndex
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