Pride Month Is a Great Time to Tell People How Radically Different Biden and Trump Are
We've all heard the anecdotes, the hand-wringing about polls, the focus group freak-outs, and the cynical person-on-the-street interviews. There are voters out there, especially 18-29 year olds, who claim to see no difference between Biden and Trump. "We have a choice between two dementia patients," a friend's teenager told me she saw on Instagram recently.
Shout it from the rooftops of TikTok: there is a huge gap not only between Biden and Trump, but between their two parties. And given power again, Trump and the GOP will do everything they can to eviscerate the rights and freedom of LGBTQ Americans.
I know this because I've been reporting for years on the Christian right, its relationship with the Republican Party, and their joint assault on LGBTQ rights. I reported on what they did with power during Trump's first term. I've reported on their activities in statehouses and in the courts. I've read the relevant parts of the blueprint Trump allies want for a second term. I know this movement, and its relationship with Trump.
Withholding your vote from Biden because you've been convinced there is no difference between the two candidates, or as a "punishment" for your disagreements with him will not actually punish him, but the people to whom you want to be an ally. Withholding your vote from Biden isn't a power move, it's a move that cedes power to the other side. And the other side has a lot of money and is organized, disciplined, and relentless.
I realize that might be hard to see or believe. Trump doesn't come across as organized or disciplined—quite the opposite. He purposefully creates an impression that he can't be bothered with policy minutiae. Reporters far too often dutifully quote his campaign's spokespeople denying his agreement with the detailed policy proposals publicized by allies and alumni of his first term.
What's more, people wrongly believe that because Trump is an apparent libertine, he cannot be allied with the Christian right. Since he's the furthest thing from a "good" Christian, how can moralizing rightwing evangelical Christians favor him?
I have a really hard time getting people to believe this, but evangelical leaders say that God sometimes chooses an unlikely figure to lead a nation at a critical juncture in its history, and Trump is the leader God has anointed to rescue and restore America the Christian nation.
Trump and the Christian right are tied together. MAGA is a Christian nationalist movement. Trump can't come close to winning without the white evangelical vote. White evangelicals have his back when things go sideways. They had his back during his impeachments, and had his back for his 2020 stolen election lies. They had his back on January 6. They will have his back again in 2024. They are already priming their base to reject any Trump loss as "rigged." They don't even believe Biden is the legitimate occupant of the Oval Office.
Christian right influencers are willing to destroy democracy to achieve their goals, because they lead an anti-democratic movement that believes in Christian supremacy and unequal rights. They have already succeeded in overturning the right to abortion, and have the same plans for LGBTQ rights. They have been planning and playing a long game to similar to their 50-year campaign against Roe v. Wade, to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage, and Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state anti-sodomy laws. That's why they have been so intent on stacking the courts. But in the meantime, just as they did with abortion, they will chip away at the rights guaranteed by Supreme Court precedent until they concoct a case to take direct aim at the precedent itself.
Even before Trump solidified the court's six-justice conservative majority, it was trending towards privileging the "religious freedom" of rightwing Christians over the equal rights of LGBTQ people. Trump's court is now bending over backwards to give anti-LGBTQ Christians exemptions from state nondiscrimination laws because they claim a wedding vendor business they haven't even opened yet might get a request from a same-sex couple. A few years ago this was a laughable legal theory. Now it's Supreme Court precedent.
State legislatures have been the incubators for the Christian right's anti-democratic aspirations. In just one example, Republican lawmakers, trained by a program of the Christian right powerhouse Focus on the Family, crafted laws banning gender affirming care for minors. These laws were not the brainchild of a single lawmaker or fringe state. They were part of a coordinated effort, which includes equating gender affirming care to child abuse, barring trans kids from playing sports, and casting preferred pronouns as an a totalitarian threat to religious freedom, to make trans existence miserable and untenable.
With Biden in office and a Democratic majority in the Senate, 197 Biden-nominated judges have been confirmed to the federal bench, including one to the Supreme Court (Ketanji Brown Jackson). If Trump were to return to the presidency, and if Republicans regained control of the Senate, the judiciary would be at further risk of more corrupt, extremist judges. If Trump were able once again to install his cronies at federal agencies, they would try to undo policies protecting the rights of LGBTQ people in health care, foster care and adoption, education, and more.
At the beginning of his first term, Trump appointees floated a draft executive order envisioning an entirely new legal structure granting rightwing Christians wholesale rights to discriminate against LGBTQ people. Trump never signed this expansive order, but it remains, seven years later, a roadmap to how his loyal base would reorder a legal system based on equal rights to one of Christian supremacy. It may be uninspiring to face a choice between two octogenarians. It's time, though, to find some inspiration in voting for the candidate who won't turn our country into a theocratic dictatorship.