Internal refugees and the return of the ballot measure wars

Transgender folk are fleeing to blue states. This didn't begin with Trump coming back into office; aggressive persecution in red states revved up the push out at the beginning of this decade.

Silvaria Lysandra Zemaitis provides a statistical picture.

The American Transgender Refugee Crisis
If this were occurring abroad, to an ethnic minority, we would call it ethnic cleansing. 

... Annualized, what we are seeing is a displacement rate of roughly 15% a year. And because trans people are largely not fleeing blue states (which means that the pool of leavers would actually be the 47% of trans adults who live in the 29 states with at least one restrictive law), the rate among trans people in the states doing the persecuting is closer to 29%. Nearly a third, in a year.  

... the sheer scale of this movement is breathtaking. Hundreds of thousands of trans people have had to flee persecution within the borders of the United States ....

... To put this in perspective, the last time an American subgroup migrated at these rates was the Great Migration, in which roughly 6 million Southern Black people fled Jim Crow violence and repression. This occurred over a period of decades, in the face of political repression, systematic violence, and legal apartheid. In its fastest decade, the 1940s, 1.5 million left the South—against a Southern Black population of roughly 10 million. Black America fled Jim Crow at about 1.5% a year, at a time when baseline inter-state mobility was higher than it was today. Trans America is fleeing red-state persecution at ten to twenty times that. ....

This should be seen as appropriately alarming to every decent person in the country.

... trans people who cannot afford to run are forced to hide.

Since November 2024, 55% of transgender adults report taking steps to be less visible as an LGBTQ person in their community—at work, at school—compared to 24% of LGBTQ people overall. This is what “eradication” looks like in practice. Instead of forcing the trans person to leave the state, the fascists are forcing the trans person to leave themselves. ...

To subject some of us to this level of terror -- along with migrants and all people of color -- is simply not okay.

• • •

In general, many Democratic politicians know they have to hold the line on trans rights -- however little actual sympathy they may feel. But those who break ranks with trans rights should feel heat. It's sad to see this happening in Ohio where there's an actual contest for governor: Top Ohio Democrats retreat on trans issues, leaving some transgender activists feeling abandoned.

I can begin to understand Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur's defection; she's ancient, a good labor stalwart, and yet uniquely continues to hold a district that has been redrawn many times by Republicans to make it more hostile to her. But for the Democratic candidate for Governor, Amy Acton, to adopt a transphobic trope about "boys playing in girls sports" crosses the decency line.

• • •

Meanwhile, it seems that the trans haters are experimenting with the ballot box. In five states --Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Washington -- citizen initiative petitions have put anti-trans measures up for a vote this fall. This feels awfully familiar to anyone who lived through the gay marriage wars of the early 2000s. For a long time during that period, fear and ignorant revulsion enforced by initiative succeeded across the country -- until it didn't. Before the Supreme Court got around to upholding gay marriage, very blue states had legalized marriage and then voters in Colorado repealed one of these bans which they had passed a decade earlier -- marking the turning tide.

Erin in the Morning warns of this new danger from the transphobes and other all purpose MAGA zealots.

... For transgender people who have sought refuge in blue states to escape the bans spreading through Republican-controlled legislatures, these measures represent a new and more direct threat: the possibility that their neighbors, not distant lawmakers, will vote to strip their rights.

Erin's description of the Washington state proposition suggests to me that it might well encounter successful opposition. 

... a ballot initiative funded by conservative hedge fund manager Brian Heywood would institute a K-12 sports ban—and require every girl who wants to play to have her sex verified by a doctor first. The measure’s language is explicit: to be eligible, a student must provide a statement from her health care provider “that verifies the student’s biological sex, relying only on one or more of the following: the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.” That requirement applies not to transgender students specifically but to every girl in the state who wants to play any sport with a sex-separate classification—from basketball and soccer to cheerleading, bowling, and golf.  ...

Yeah, sure -- subject every girl child to physical sex verification! I can imagine some resistant kids and parents. 

Washington state has a proud history of fighting terrible initiatives. I'm pretty hopeful about the voter's finding their way to turning down this one. 

The Missouri trans-hate initiative is a sneaky one. Republican pols have added the anti-trans stuff to an anti-abortion measure as a sweetener. Considering Missouri voters passed a citizen measure protecting abortion rights a couple of year ago, they've got resistance to overcome. Might transphobia get a new batch of abortion restrictions across the finish line? Read about Missouri trials and tribulations here.

• • •

Something delightful to close this catalogue of horrors; how about a little joy? Here's Dylan Mulvaney, a transwoman who appeared in a beer commercial and has been subjected to unrelenting persecution by MAGA bigots ever since, delighting in being herself: 

What is it that I have that they don’t? Oh my God, freedom. I am free in a way that they will never have the privilege to experience. And they want to use their power to take away my freedom. But what they don’t understand is that my freedom has zero contingency on what they can provide for me, because my freedom is fully dependent on the moment that I acknowledged my real, authentic self, and every day since. And sharing that with the world? It’s just icing on the cake. But they don’t want me to be able to share that, because it would mean young people realizing that if someone like me can be themselves and find success and freedom, then they can find success and freedom for themselves too.

You go, girl! 

Would you want Donald Trump deciding what your doctor can do for you?

 

Young trans and non-binary folk and their friends rallied yesterday outside Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto where institutional cowardice is retreating when faced with the Trump administration's bigotry. 

By way of the San Francisco Chronicle: 

The Trump administration has pushed to limit access to gender-affirming care for youths. In January, the president signed an executive order that directs federal agencies to prohibit hospitals and medical schools that receive some federal grants from providing gender-affirming care to children.

... Some Stanford patients received notifications this month that surgical procedures were being canceled, according to one parent of a child undergoing care for gender dysphoria at the gender clinic. ... The child had been receiving care at the clinic for more than a year, and the abrupt cancellation of the procedure is leaving the family scrambling to figure out how to get the care elsewhere. ...

... “The fear is we were totally blindsided by this and it has no legal basis, so I have no confidence or trust,” the parent said. “How do I know the other care will continue? That’s the biggest impact for us. The trust has been kind of taken away.” 

 

For all the fear in the moment, communities which have been rejected often remember they are FABULOUS!

Learning from the students -- in Idaho

The school district in West Ada thought it was getting rid of the dread menace of D.E.I. when administrators ordered teacher Sarah Inama to take down a poster reading "Everyone is Welcome Here." This is what followed:

 

Enjoy. There's learning happening here.

A catalogue of religious deplorables

I've written in the past about how an earnest white evangelical historian sought to understand how his co-religionists could be so enamored of such an ungodly charlatan as Donald Trump. John Fea found fear. Sarah Posner is an investigative journalist who has long explored the intersection of religion and politics; her historical portrait of this catalogue of deplorables is not nearly so charitable.

Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump is a story about the raw hunger for power that animates the leaders of white evangelical Christianity. According to Posner: 

"... as a 'Christian,' Trump was a work in progress. But God had a plan. Trump was a strong leader, a rich man, a successful real estate mogul. Trump might still be a 'baby Christian' in the eyes of some evangelical leaders who decided to back him, but he was nonetheless anointed for this time and place. ... Trump was the strongman the Christian right had long been waiting for. 

"... Trump did not just deliver policy, in a quid pro quo with a voting bloc that fueled his election. He delivered power. ... For the Christian right, Trump is no ordinary politician and no ordinary president. He is anointed, chosen, and sanctified by the movement as a divine leader, sent by God to save America."

White evangelical leaders have spent decades whining among themselves in a self-imposed cultural wilderness, their moral pedestals challenged by the country's fitful and as yet incomplete embrace of racial and gender justice. Even our incomplete progress looked to them like mortal danger to their positions. So they went looking for friends -- and found a lot of unsavory characters. They hooked up comfortably with racist right wing "intellectuals" who glossed bigotry as "conservatism," with direct mail grifters and talkradio shouters, and nowadays with eastern Europe's "illiberal," anti-Semitic, autocrats. They come across as both con artists preying on their sheep and suckers themselves, marks for an array of unethical swindlers. Their partnership with Donald Trump is a perfect match.

Posner's book makes this unappetizing crew more interesting than I would have thought possible (if no more attractive) because there is hardly a major Christian right leader with whom she has not sat down for an amicable professional interview over tea or a lunch. These people are talkers and they've talked to her.

She balances these personal portraits with deep research into the history and web of connections between little magazines with forgettable titles, institutes, think tanks, pseudo-academic foundations and other components of right wing infrastructure that have come together behind Donald Trump. 

 

It's hard to write about these people without sounding as if you have become a conspiracy theorist: their networks are a roiling mixture of enduring racism and nationalism with ephemeral jealousies and intramural squabbles, all outside the ken of mainstream society. The good people at Political Research Associates struggle with this constantly. Posner does a creditable job of describing this unattractive stew.

 

And she has a warning: even if we evict Donald Trump in November, these people have dug into positions of power over decades and aren't going away. The impeachment moment early this year only reaffirmed their devotion to their strongman.

"However his presidency ends, the fundamental damage it has inflicted on our democracy will not be healed overnight. His 'base' is not an accident of his unconventional foray into politics, or a quirk of this particular political moment. The vast majority of white evangelicals are all in with Trump because he has given them political power and allowed them to carry out a Christian supremacist agenda, inextricably intertwined with his administration's white nationalist agenda."

Allah's version

Jack Mills writes books about Scripture that are unlike anything else I know of. He treats the divine person as revealed in what believers hold as sacred writings as a literary character, a Someone with personality, temperament, virtues, and idiosyncrasies. In 1996, Miles applied his technique to the Lord God of the Hebrew bible in God: a biography, which was both an unlikely best seller and a Pulitzer Prize winner. His subsequent epilogue, Christ: a Crisis in the Life of God, seems to have been more controversial, no huge shock. I appreciated its resolute departure from the more vengeful strains of Christian atonement theology.

Last year Miles published his third volume of literary interpretation of the Abrahamic scriptures: God in the Qur'an (God in Three Classic Scriptures).

Miles certainly has the academic chops for his tripartite endeavor in scriptural exploration. He started out as a Jesuit seminarian attending Xavier University in the U.S., moved on to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, finally, Harvard. He's been been an editor at the Doubleday publishing house, the executive editor at the University of California Press, and literary book review editor at the Los Angeles Times. Of late he's taught at UC Irvine and edited the Norton Anthology of World Religions. I should add that aside from the Norton volume, I've read them all in audiobook and highly recommend the medium for these exercises in imaginative erudition. You won't get every nuance by ear, but their breadth and audacity come through wonderfully.

I also have to warn readers of this blog post that I'm going to be quoting a lot; it will read more easily on a laptop screen than a phone.

Writing about Allah in the Qur'an, Miles confronts the difficult stumbling block that non-Muslim readers always meet: this scripture admits of no human author, narrator, or intermediary, being the direct speech of Allah via the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad. According to Islamic understanding, it cannot be translated from Arabic. He offers a work-around:

Over the centuries, the view most often taken of the Qur'an by Jews and Christians alike has been the view classically taken by Jews of the New Testament -- namely, "What's true is not new, and what's new is not true." Non-Muslims have disbelieved and dismissed what Muslims believe of the Qur'an -- namely, that it is God's last word to mankind, the crown of revelation, restoring what Jews and Christians had lost from or suppressed in their scriptures by oblivion or corruption.

My invitation here to Jews and Christians and the many others who disbelieve the bold Muslim claim is that, as a modest exercise in literary appreciation, they temporarily suspend their disbelief while together we attempt engagement with God as the central character of the Qur'an, and with the Qur'an as an elusively powerful work of literature.

My invitation to Muslims is that just as they might pray in a mosque on Friday but study its dome as students of architecture on a Tuesday, so they too might play along with this "Tuesday exercise," this literary engagement with just a few selections from the Qur'an read in conjunction with marching passages from the Bible.

As Miles tells it, what Allah is doing through the Qur'an is correcting known stories. Consequently, Allah has no need of linear narratives of episodes in creation history or of stimulating any narrative suspense or uncertainty.

In the Qur'an, when Allah instructs Muhammed about what His Prophet is to say about these biblical subjects, He is clearly speaking to someone who knows this subject matter already in a general way and needs only to have his understanding refreshed, corrected, or completed. ...

What Allah requires of mankind in the Qur'an is, above all, that they should acknowledge His divinity, submitting to him as the one and only God. The Arabic word ’islam means “submission”; the Arabic word muslim ... means one who has submitted. ... As the Qur’an understands religious history, Adam was a muslim in his time; Abraham was another muslim; Joseph a third; and so forth down past the muslim Christ to Muhammad. But a key part of the message of the Qur’an is that the never-changing message of ’islam has been lost or corrupted over the intervening aeons.

... Where the Qur’an coincides with the Bible, then, it unfolds not as a full retelling of the Bible story, as if that story had never been told before, but rather as a set of selective corrections and expansions of an already received account. Where more corrections is called for, Allah has more to say in the Qur’an.

Miles discusses at length the qur'anic account of Adam and Eve and then of humanity's expulsion from the garden of paradise. In Allah's telling, this behavior is not about humanity's permanent fall from a state of innocent grace, but simply the first instance of human disobedience to Allah which has teaches its own remedy.

... True, Adam and his wife [not named] must “descend” from the heavenly garden, but because they have promptly and plainly admitted and repented of their sin, merciful Allah does not condemn them to eternal punishment in hell. In the Qur’an, Adams does not blame his wife the way he does in Genesis. The two of them confess together, neither blaming the other, and neither attempts to blame Satan. Accepting their repentance as sincere, Allah simply precipitates them into earthly existence where, after living a normal human lifetime and dying at its end, they will await His Last Judgment as indeed will all their descendants. They have every prospect, in other words, of eventually ascending to the heavenly garden from which he has sent them down. In effect, he has forgiven them this first sin. True, they must pay a price, but as they begin the life that awaits them down on earth, He has given them a pardon and an immediate second chance.

.... we have all the power we need to resist [Satan’s] deceptions and stay on the “straight path.” If we do succumb, we know that just as Allah gave Adam and Eve their second chance, He will give us ours. Allah is like that: He can be counted on. He is not colorfully or dramatically unpredictable. He is not like you or me nor even, quite, like Yahweh. Agony awaits us if we defy Him, but He is on our side if we let Him be. ...

No wonder Allah is described as "the merciful, the compassionate" in Islamic usage.

This book concludes with a list of how Allah corrects and amends the Jewish and Christian scriptures:

that when God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise, He warned them that Satan would tempt them. (In the Bible, no such warning is given.)

that when they succumbed to temptation but then quickly repented, He forgave them and explained that after a lifetime on Earth, bearing only the trials and tribulations that ordinary human life entails, they could return to Paradise. (No such forgiveness or distant hope is proffered in the Bible.)

that when one of Adam’s sons slew the other, God condemned the murderer but coached him toward compassion by sending a raven whose scratching on the ground prompted the remorseful killer to bury his dead brother. (No such solicitous counsel is offered in the Bible.)

that when God sent a destructive flood, he warned those in its path beforehand and provided an ark on which, had they accepted Prophet Noah’s warning, they could all have floated to safety. (No such warning is given in the Bible.)

that when God chose Abraham as His prophet, he instructed him in monotheism before sending him against Abraham’s idolatrous father and his tribe. (In the Bible, God’s command to Abraham is peremptory and linked to fertility rather than to monotheism.)

that when God sent Moses to Pharaoh with the same prophetic message that He later conveyed to Muhammad, Pharaoh initially scoffed but in the end converted and accepted God as the only god. (In the Bible, God takes control of Pharaoh’s mind and bars the gate against any such conversion.)

that when God send Jesus as a prophet to the Jews and they sought to kill him, God rescued him and took him to Himself. (In the Bible, Jesus dies saying, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?")

Far be it for me to bash the Bible. The Bible is my scripture. The Qur’an is theirs. In writing this little italicized meditation, I hope only that by exercising your imagination this much, you may find it a little easier to trust the Muslim next door ...

That last remark demonstrates Miles' hope in this mind-stretching book. He's clearly appalled by contemporary European/American ignorance and distortions about the beliefs and civilization of our Muslim neighbors. Some of this volume comes off as a slightly heavy-handed apologia, for example in an exhaustive demonstration that Jewish and Christian sacred writings are no less blighted by celebrations of holy carnage as is the Islamic scripture.

Fortunately in this country we enjoy increasing resources for discovering that Islamophobia is unnecessary and just false. Our Muslim neighbors turn out to be quite ordinary humans, like the rest of us. Miles has made his contribution toward our evolution here; we can all do our part.

Yet another test of what kind of country this is

Today the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether to uphold President Trump's Muslim Ban 3.0. Though somewhat more carefully drawn than previous versions, this executive order essentially blocks entry into the United States by most people from the Muslim-majority countries of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. The government says they are acting to keep out people who threaten our security. But Trump hasn't been shy about saying that he'd really like "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." Just before issuing this version of the ban, he tweeted that the restrictions "should be far larger, tougher and more specific - but stupidly that would not be politically correct!"

It remains to be seen whether this Court wants to make the country party to ugly religious bigotry by affirming Trump's ban.

Meanwhile Muslims in this country live within a climate of increasing threat. The Council on American-Islamic Relation's annual civil rights report documented

a 17 percent increase in anti-Muslim bias incidents nationwide in 2017 over 2016. This was accompanied by a 15 percent increase in hate crimes targeting American Muslims, including children, youth, and families, over the same period.

Of particular alarm is the fact that federal government agencies instigated 35 percent of all anti-Muslim bias incidents recorded in 2017. This represents an almost unprecedented level of government hostility toward a religious minority within the United States, and is counter to the American value of religious freedom.

What's it like for US Muslims these days? Too much of this:

• Virginia: “It just feels like a nightmare. Just a bad dream and we’re gonna wake up from it,” said an American Muslim couple whose apartment was broken into and vandalized while they were out of state visiting family. They received a call about the break-in and returned home to find “f*** Muslims” written on the wall, their Quran torn to shreds, and all their valuables gone."

• California: Two American Muslims who were cousins were held at gunpoint by an automotive body repair shop employee. The employee made several derogatory comments, including “go back to Afghanistan,” “all you [people] are alike,” and “get out of our country.” He then pulled out a gun and accosted the two American Muslim customers.

• Michigan: An American Muslim family had their children taken by Child Protective Services. They requested that the children be placed in an American Muslim family’s home but were told that none were available. The children were instead placed with a strictly practicing Christian family. The American Muslim family was threatened with complete separation from their children if they refused to consent to their children attending church services with the foster family.

• Ohio:The U.S. government denied a Muslim man, married to an American Muslim U.S. citizen, an immigrant visa for nine years. During the course of their unusually delayed application process, the couple had four children together and the Muslim applicant missed an opportunity to accept a full scholarship to earn his doctoral degree in psychology at an American university. This caused extreme hardship to his family. The U.S. Consulate refused to provide the couple with any reason for the visa delay, other than to state that it was in “administrative processing.” CAIR Ohio’s Columbus chapter filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem. Consequently, the Consulate was compelled to grant the man his immigrant visa. In December 2017, he was able to join his wife and children in the U.S. after a nine-year wait.

• Oregon: Vandals spray painted “ISIS” in large red letters on the walls of the Abu Bakar Islamic Center in Portland. New Jersey: The Islamic Center of Passaic County received a spate of eight phone calls containing death threats over the course of 24 hours. The callers used profane language and stated they would kill the attendees and “burn [the] mosque down.”

Globalization, an interconnected world where cultures and faiths and social structures meet and sometimes collide, is scary. It's also here, a fact. Freedom of (and freedom from) religion is one of the pillars that can made a global society work. No wall can roll back the global reality. In its better moments, this country has held up religious freedom as a core principle. Is that true today?

Trump pollution

A short follow up on how Donald Trump is polluting the very air we breathe.

Bloomberg columnist Francis Wilkinson describes his place in the U.S. mosaic:

I'm hardly an obvious target of Trump's demagogy and contempt. I'm not a Mexican "rapist" who hopped a fence. I'm not a female "pig" whose dimensions don't conform to the demands of a pageant sash. I'm not a Muslim, accused by Trump of knowing, and keeping silent about, the murderous plans of home-grown terrorists. I have no physical disability capable of triggering Trump's unerring instinct for gratuitous cruelty.

I'm a college-educated, white, heterosexual American male born in the latter half of the 20th century -- about the most privileged species on earth. ...

Without any special thought except liking the name, Wilkinson and his Indian-American wife gave his daughter a name (undisclosed in this article) that is heard in this country as "Muslim." He wonders whether they would have made the same choice for their daughter in the time of Trump.

The point is not that any member of my family -- least of all me -- is a particular victim of Trump's ugliness. It's that bigotry has second-level effects, indeed third-level and fourth-level and so on, that are impossible to predict, measure or contain. Demagogy seeps into social crevices and institutional arrangements in ways both conscious and unconscious.

Vaclav Havel wrote: "Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance."

Something like the reverse is also true. A vicious strain of politics can ripple through apolitical corners of society, invading sanctuaries, altering morality, subtly poisoning relations and peoples. The histories of authoritarian and totalitarian politics, of the sort that for decades dominated Havel's Czech homeland, are full of such encroachments.

Trump's greatest reach, of course, is inside the minds of his own supporters. ...

Even when the Donald is repulsed, the taste among his enthusiasts for venomous grievance will endure.

This is a country which teaches all too many people to keep their heads down and their opinions to themselves. Amid the cacophony of TV shouters and social media, that's hard to recognize, but really, what is it when the parents of Black kids have to give them "the talk" and immigrant children have to fear that ICE will snatch away their parents? The Donald spreads a whiff -- an intimation only -- of that everyday backdrop of fear to the comfortable. No one is the better for it.