This morning, I woke up earlier than I wanted to, fed the baby, walked the dog, chatted with my wife and procrastinated over some work. Yawningly mundane, right?
Wrong. According to the Texas Republican party, my same-sex marriage is an “abnormal lifestyle choice”. What’s more, “abnormal” people like me should not have any “special legal entitlements” related to being LGBTQ+. That position is spelled out in section 143 of a far-right platform officially adopted at the Texas Republican party’s recent convention in Houston.
Delegates didn’t stop there. The new platform oozes hatred and is riddled with conspiracy theories. It is vehemently anti-transgender, asserts that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected and demands that the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in elections, be “repealed and not reauthorized”. The mask hasn’t slipped – it has been ripped right off.
While this platform doesn’t carry any legal weight, it signposts the direction in which the Republican party is going. “The platform is largely symbolic, but important as a measure of ideological drift,” a political scientist told the Texas Tribune. It is the latest evidence that the lunatic far-right fringe in the US is getting a lot more loony and a lot less fringe. It is very frightening.
It is not the hatred on the right that frightens me the most, though. What really scares me is what is happening in the centre. While the far right is busy publishing plans to roll back civil rights, centrists and liberals can’t stop fretting about whether kids these days are too “woke” and agonising about “cancel culture”. While Republicans are signalling all the ways in which they want to dismantle democracy, Democrats are obsessing about “civility” and fetishising bipartisanship and compromise.
Our rights are not going to be stolen from us – they are going to be politely compromised away.