Brush & Nib Bigotry
The Arizona Supreme Court grants a license to discriminate.
Happy Bi Week! Every year, Bi Awareness Week is an opportunity to remember the unique experiences — and challenges — that bi people face!
For example, you might keep in mind that not every same-sex relationship is a “gay” relationship, or that when bi people are in a particular kind of relationship they’re still bi. When we erase or negate people’s experiences as bi, we do a unique kind of psychological harm to them, and it’s important that both straight and gay people work as allies to dismantle this kind of stigma.
There’s a ton of LGBTQ news today! I’m also going to toy with the format a bit, giving a bit more attention to some stories, then rounding up some other “quick hits” worth your attention, so make sure you scroll down to catch all of them. Let’s get to it!
Anti-LGBTQ bigots win Arizona Supreme Court challenge
In a 4-3 opinion Monday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in favor of Brush & Nib, a Christian calligraphy studio that was fighting for the right to refuse service to marrying same-sex couples. The two women who run that shop had not actually refused anyone service yet, but they brought a case with the Alliance Defending Freedom to challenge Phoenix’s law that would require them to serve all couples if they provide wedding-related services.
Despite losing in lower courts — even in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling — the Arizona Supreme Court carved out a special exemption for the studio when it comes to “custom wedding invitations.” Even though a wedding invitation for “Alex & Alex” might look identical regardless of the Alexes’ genders, the majority found that forcing the calligraphers to make that invitation for two Alexes of the same gender violates their free speech. They are also now permitted to post a public statement describing their intent to refuse service to same-sex couples.
This is obviously nonsense, as is evident from the majority’s regurgitation of ADF’s frequent talking point that the plaintiffs “serve all customers regardless of their sexual orientation.” Clearly they don’t if they’ll make wedding invitations for some and not for others. Such a precedent opens a Pandora’s Box for the Court to have to interpret whether future anti-gay business owners’ products and services are speech or not. Is a buffet line the caterers’ speech? Is an arrangement of chairs an event coordinator’s speech? And in any of these cases, why don’t those same supposed speech and religion protections allow for racial discrimination?
If you’ve never read through a legal opinion before, this might be a fun one to try. You’ll see how the majority claims that selling a “customized” product makes it speech, and then you’ll read the dissent pointing out that making distinctions based on the customers’ genders to sell an identical service is clearly discrimination.
This ruling is thankfully on the narrow side, but it could signal a big sea change in similar cases and a swift erosion of equality under the law for same-sex couples. If you thought winning marriage was the end of the fight, you were sorely mistaken.
What Justice Kavanaugh can teach us about transphobes
The latest sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh this week have reminded us just how far we haven’t come since the rise of the #MeToo movement. Ben Shapiro was literally trending on Twitter today for claiming that Kavanaugh couldn’t have shoved his penis in women’s faces or we’d have heard visual descriptions of that penis! (Is that even a thing? Being able to describe other people’s genitalia in detail?) It’s just a sad state of affairs.
But the specificity of the latest allegation also sheds light on the hypocrisy of people who oppose transgender rights. Some of the same people defending Kavanaugh by downplaying his alleged assault also claim that transgender women violate women’s rights simply for coexisting in the same locker room. Media Matters’ Parker Malloy noticed, for example, such blatant hypocrisy from The Federalist’s Bethany Mandel:
If you’re fine with a cisgender guy putting his penis in your face without your permission, but you’re not okay with a trans woman minding her own business and using a facility responsibly like everybody else, you might be a transphobe!
Rugby legend Gareth Thomas comes out as HIV+
Gareth Thomas retired from rugby in 2011, but he was one of the biggest athletic stars in the UK. This weekend, he shared in a very personal video that he is HIV-positive, and explained that he came out specifically because he was being blackmailed over it.
For more on the anti-HIV stigma that is clearly still so prevalent, I hope you’ll watch this really thoughtful interview my friend Mark S. King gave to the BBC. Mark is one of the best bloggers on HIV advocacy — he’s lived with HIV as long as I’ve been alive — and I think this interview really sets listeners up to understand what Thomas has been going through and how to have some of these conversations.
Another casualty of Straight Pride
One of the straight counterprotesters who defended the LGBTQ community at last month’s Straight Pride parade claims that a police officer broke her arm and forced her to go to a hospital for her injuries. After a kerfuffle erupted, she recalled that a police officer “grabbed my head, shoved me backward onto the sidewalk, and I shattered my arm.” She added, “He got on me, pressed his knee into me, and started punching me in the head.”
Pulse survivors promote conversion therapy in Orlando
Adding insult to injury, two survivors of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting held a rally in favor of conversion therapy this weekend, just a mile and a half away. The small gathering featured members of a new ex-gay group called the Changed Movement, which is trying to revitalize conversion therapy efforts.
Meanwhile, Orlando’s first gay city commissioner opened up about her own experiences in conversion therapy. Patty Sheehan described the experience as “abusive” and said it took a significant chunk out of her life to recover from it. “Do not, as a young person, do what I did,” she explained. “It took me years, a lot of substance and alcohol abuse and personal suffering and bad relationships for me to be able to self-accept.”
The over-censorship of queer content
One of the biggest ongoing problems on the internet is how often content about LGBTQ people is perceived as “adult” or “sexual.” A new survey by the cybersecurity firm CHEQ finds that over 73% of LGBTQ news articles have been blacklisted for advertisers! No wonder queer media is in such dire straights!
But the problem isn’t the actual content. Procedures that flag inappropriate content were oversimplified, and LGBTQ content was over-represented as a result. Simply mentioning terms like “lesbian” or “bisexual” were enough for the content to be flagged.
SNL decides not to hire racist, homophobic bigot after all
That happened quickly — which is good, aside from the fact it shouldn’t have happened at all. Last week Saturday Night Live announced that it was adding Shane Gillis to the cast, then a whole bunch of really bigoted clips came out of him, he offered a bullshit sorry-if-you-were-offended/I-was-being-edgy apology, and now he’s off the show.
“We were not aware of his prior remarks that have surfaced over the past few days,” an SNL spokesperson said, admitting they really didn’t do their homework. “The language he used is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable. We are sorry that we did not see these clips earlier, and that our vetting process was not up to our standard.”
Let’s be clear, folks: This is not “cancel culture” run amok. Regardless of whether you think SNL is as funny as it should be, it’s definitely still super-mainstream and has a big impact on society. Shane Gillis doesn’t “deserve” a spot on the show just because he may have proved in the audition process that he’s got the comedy chops.
Becoming a cast member means he also becomes a representative of the show, and he benefits from its multi-decade reputation. Someone who thinks “edgy” comedy is just spouting a bunch of racism and homophobia is not worthy of such a privilege, nor does SNL have any obligation to tarnish its reputation (even more) by affiliating with him. Good riddance!
About that incident in a Nebraska coffee shop
There’s been a lot of national chatter over the past week about an incident that played out in a Lincoln, Nebraska coffee shop. Cultiva Coffee employee Natalie Weiss, who is transgender, realized that one of her regular customers was Marilyn Synek, who works for the super anti-LGBTQ Nebraska Family Alliance. Weiss confronted Synek on her bigotry and told her she was not welcome at the shop — and was subsequently fired for it.
This has made Synek the bigot look like a victim and a martyr while the transgender woman who just lost her job has been painted as the villain. While I do think Weiss chose a poor strategy, she wasn’t wrong on the facts, and there was arguably more Cultiva Coffee could have done to defend her. I can’t help but think that the resulting narrative ignores the distinct privileges Synek has and disadvantages Weiss faces, starting with the most obvious that it would be legal to fire Weiss for her gender identity under Nebraska law — thanks in large part to Synek’s advocacy against such protections.
At the very least, I hope you’ll read and consider Weiss’ thoughts on everything that went down, as she shared this week with Out Magazine. An excerpt:
As a trans person, if you react to [bigotry], you're the strange one. You're the one that's being impolite. The other person — the nice, white, cishet person — gets to walk away feeling superior and smug about the interaction. It's absolutely exhausting. I belong to several trans support groups here in southeast Nebraska and those stories are ubiquitous. There are some days where we snap or we get really depressed and we hide ourselves in our room for a day or two or we don't talk to anyone and just don't go out and see anyone or anything. We have to just totally close ourselves in. There are some days that are a lot easier to get through than others.
Quick Hits!
(Let me know what you think of this format. Are you still interested in the stories even if I don’t offer much context?)
The New York City home of queer author James Baldwin has now been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Radio host Set Dunlap, whose New Orleans radio station called him a “faggot” on Twitter, shared some additional thoughts about the experience:
Far-right extremists tried to interrupt a Pride march in Belgrade, Serbia, but failed to prevent the celebration from taking place.
Here’s a baptist preacher in Illinois who thinks it’s “insane” that anybody respects queer people.
Actress Cara Delevigne reveals in a new interview that Harvey Weinstein told her she’d never make it in the entertainment industry as a gay woman and that she should “get a beard.”
In the latest tale from the I’m From Driftwood series, Shareef Hadid Jenkins talks about how being diagnosed with HIV helped him build a better relationship with his homophobic Muslim father.
Actress Angelica Ross (Pose, Her Story) will make history as the first trans women to moderate a presidential forum, hosting GLAAD’s upcoming townhall in Iowa.
Check out the trailer for the new documentary about closet-case and Trump-fixer Roy Cohn, due out this week:
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Until next time, stay platinum!
(Brush & Nib/Joanna Duka and Breanna Koski photo credit: Alliance Defending Freedom.)