This is the first post in Queerty’s “Looking Back, 2015” year-in-review series. Enjoy!
Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself. This political truism certainly applies to some of our own worst enemies, many of whom had awful, self-inflected wounds in 2015. And the world took note, punishing them by heaping loses upon them.
Here are five antigay activists whose over-the-top shenanigans actually helped advance the LGBTQ cause…
Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sen. David Vitter
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Oh, how the mighty of Louisiana have fallen.
Failed “religious freedom” fighter Gov. Bobby Jindal’s crappy leadership skills led to his funders finally cutting him off and resulting in his withdrawal from the 2016 presidential race. Now he’s back for a bit in the governor’s office, where his approval ratings have fallen to a historic low of 20 percent. (Ouch!) Even the state’s Republican voters disapprove of their governor, who has slashed education, health care and environmental funding to service the state’s massive deficit, triggered primarily by GOP tax cuts for oil companies and the wealthy.
Meanwhile, the bad bedroom behavior of “family values” politician and admitted prostitute patron Sen. David Vitter resulted in the state just electing a Democrat for governor to replace the aforementioned horrible Jindal. John Bel Edwards is set to take office on January 11, and he’s already pledged to issue an executive order protecting LGBTQ government employees and contractors from workplace discrimination as soon as he gets there.
Jindal and Vitter’s hypo-crazy was too much even for the solidly Republican state voters.
Thanks, fellas!
Related: The Best Responses To Gov. Bobby Jindal’s Antigay Executive Order (So Far)
Gov. Mike Pence
The Indiana governor made his state the guinea pig for “religious freedom” laws when, earlier this year, he signed a bill making it legal for businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people. As a result, he and his fellow Republican state lawmakers’ suffered a major national backlash that ultimately ended with their approval ratings tanking and them doing a 180 by adopting a law that extended protections based on sexual orientation for the first time in the state’s history. Not only that, but other states that had been considering similar “religious freedom” bills quickly changed their minds.
The moral of the story: Sometimes stubborn social conservatives actually do learn from each other’s mistakes.
Related: Five Ways That Indiana’s Antigay Law Actually Made Things Better For Us
Kim Davis
While we’re on the subject of “religious freedom,” the thrice-divorced, born again county clerk from Kentucky became Public Enemy #1 this year when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality. Her perpetual lawbreaking backfired when a Washington Post/ABC poll found that the vast majority of Americans believed she was in the wrong and that she should stop “invoking God’s authority” to discriminate against same-sex couples.
Score one for the gays!
Related: Even Westboro Baptist Church Thinks Kim Davis Is A Fool, Pickets Her Office
Antonin Scalia
The grumpy, 79-year-old Supreme Court Justice has become so relentless in his hatred of all things gay that it’s almost laughable. In the past, he’s referred to same-sex marriage as “an overcooked meat loaf” and questioned whether LGBTQ people really exist. In his dissent of last June’s ruling on marriage equality, he channeled his inner six-year-old with an epic tantrum, calling the ruling a “social upheaval” and the Supreme Court, in general, a “threat to American democracy.” Then he accused his colleagues of being “pretentious” and “egotistic” before comparing their thoughts to the “mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” Yet despite everything Scalia says and does, LGBTQ folks have more rights and visibility today than ever before. It would appear his polarizing antigay sentiment is having the opposite effect on people than what he intends.
Time to change your strategy, Antonin. Better yet, time to retire.
Related: Has Justice Antonin Scalia Become A Caricature Of Himself?
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Grant Mealey
Well “bless” them â?ºï¸
Xzamilio
It reminds me of part of this song that someone (I can’t recall her name) sings when talking about bigoted conservatives:
We are the true Americans. We are in the right.
God loves the Republicans, especially those of us rich and white.
We don’t approve of homosexuals, or a woman’s right to choose.
We tell you what a family is. We don’t want truth. WE WANT FOX NEWS
Damon Robbins
1EqualityUSA
Republican, Ronald Reagan, gave the U.S. Scalia. He’s the gift that keeps on giving. Let’s not let that happen again.
Will Glitzern
Republicans…
Giancarlo85
As everyone said… Republicans. I cannot fathom why some dumbass gay people vote republican. The log cabin self hating type. Conservatives in general disgust me. All their views are repugnant.
Maude
“Love Is A Many Splendid Thing”
just sayin’.
Berkleyguy
And they made a total mockery of Christianity. And we wonder why 65% or the 18-34 year olds are unchurched. It’s not rocket science
GayEGO
Scalia should be put in the past like Reagan, he has been brainwashed by his religion.
Stache
I feel really sorry for Piyush though. He really tried to appease his base. If only he was white enough for them we could have a President Jindal. Ha. Fuck that little rat haired weasel.
James
The biggest scum bags in the country who will go down in history as monsters akin to Hitler.
moldisdelicious
Sorry but why is it that so many gay people in america are shocked at how homophobic american society is at all levels? Did you expect it to disappear or something? Folks are acting like it wasn’t yesteryear that it was illegal to even have sex. Not saying that we don’t have a right to be outraged. Just surprised that so many people are acting like this society changed or something when it’s more or less the same. Then again, hate to say this but I often see this same disillusionment coming from people who never really experienced prejudiced or discrimination like that. Sorry but this is reality. Having a couple of rights signed into law doesn’t mean you’re safe or people aren’t haters.
Bauhaus
Nino won’t ever retire. That bigoted curmudgeon gets-off on his villainy. His evil-doing is the only thing keeping him alive.
btrmale
I’m in Louisiana. Can’t wait to see that greasy faced Indian out of office. He moved the state backwards at least 20 years.
He’s so bad republicans voted for a democrat who won. Hope he vetoes everything Jendal did.
silveroracle
I get sick of hearing about this lot. Can we just talk about something nice instead or is that impossible?
Chris
They are caricatures who could be villains in a Dudley Do Right movie.
philipcfromnyc
Actually, Justice Scalia’s jurisprudence first really backfired in 2013, when he penned his vitriolic dissent in United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. ___ (2013) (this was the decision striking down the heart of DOMA). Scalia was foolish enough to demonstrate, by rewriting parts of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the majority, just how the logic of Windsor could be extended to state prohibitions against the recognition of same sex marriage. Scalia took lengthy passages from Kennedy’s majority opinion, struck out those words pertaining to the federal government, and substituted therefore words pertaining to the state governments. Thus, wherever Kennedy had used words invoking the US (federal) government, Scalia struck out those words and used words such as “the states,” to demonstrate that Kennedy’s logic applied with equal force to state statutes prohibiting same sex marriage.
Federal judges up and down the country took note of this, and struck down state statutes and state constitutional amendments prohibiting same sex marriage by adopting Scalia’s logic — absolutely the last thing which Scalia thought would happen, and certainly not what he had intended! So we should give thanks to him for his ode to same sex marriage in 2013.
But his dissent in 2015 was even worse. Having lost the argument on its merits, he resorted to slanderous and angry insults directed towards Justice Anthony Kennedy and his prose. For example, he referred to “the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion,” a “naked claim to legislative — indeed, super-legislative –power,” a “judicial Putsch,” the opinion as being “couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic,” filled with “showy profundities that are often profoundly incoherent,” filled with “inspirational pop-philosophy,” etc.
In short, Scalia threw a temper tantrum — one which will forever be preserved in the archives of the US Reports. He did not even to begin to address the substance of Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the majority — instead, he merely resorted to crude slander, like a teenager drawing graffiti on the walls of the school bathroom.
Yet what is remarkable is that he claimed, up front, to care little about the subject under debate! (“The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me.”) What truly irked him was the fact that a majority of nine “lawyers” (his word) were from the East or West Coasts, with only one from the middle of the country, thereby not representing the nation as a whole — yet these nine “lawyers” wrote opinions which were binding on the entire nation.
He also argued — seriously — that the only interpretation of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses which is valid is the manner in which those Clauses were interpreted back when they were ratified in the late 1800s. He argued that the Court had derived meaning from those Clauses which had escaped the nation during the intervening 160 years, as though those Clauses should have been interpreted as being strictly static in their protective ambit. Under this interpretation, the Equal Protection Clause would never have been used to grant women heightened scrutiny; it would never have been used to grant gay men and lesbians ANY degree of scrutiny; etc.
Scalia drew back the curtain himself, and revealed the wizard to be nothing more than a disgruntled, out of touch, right-wing fanatic incapable of understanding the difference between a statute and a Constitution…..
PHILIP CHANDLER
dwes09
@Berkleyguy: YOU may wonder why so many are “unchurched” (a meaningless term really), but rest assured that “we” do not (most of us at least).
dwes09
@moldisdelicious: You are missing the point here. Progressives HAVE changed, liberals have changed, and even some on the right have struggled with their sexism, misanthropy and ignorance. But the levels of society that cling to hatred and division are essentially ALL very right of center.
You fail to acknowledge (or perhaps recognize) that. It is not that American society refuses to change or accept social progress, it is the regressive elements of it: essentially the Republican party.
Giancarlo85
@moldisdelicious: Sorry, but you’re quite wrong.
Some states are stuck in the dark ages, but most of this country is moving forward. Sometimes it’s like pulling thorns out of your ass after you trip on a cactus… painfully slow but it’s getting done.
Republican anti-gay anti-Americans pricks and the few log cabin traitors (who are totally silent right now) that support them offer nothing for this country. I just wonder where are those gay republicans? I see that Kieran was on lately… but haven’t seen the other braindead suspects.
Giancarlo85
By the way, every single poll has shown Americans have shift to popular support of gay people. Now if only a few more Americans could avoid the cancerous tentacles of the ISIL-like republican party, we would truly advance as a country.
NateOcean
Kim Davis’s picture, with mouth agape, makes me wonder about all the man-parts that have been wiggling around in there. Al least three that we know of.
Then comes Scalia’s picture with him biting his inflamed blood red tongue. Is it infected? Can Syphilis cause that? Because Tertiary Syphilis Dementia would sure as hell explain some of his opinions.
But my favorite is prostitute enthusiast David Vitter. The guy gets off playing the part of an infant in his sh*t-filled diapers. And in the height of hypocrisy, this “family values” guy knocks up his prostitute gal-pal and pressures her to get an abortion. She, instead, puts the kid up for adoption. So in this scheme of life-choices, Vitter’s decision comes in second to the more practical and common-sense choice of a common street whore. Congratualtions!
Sam Oropeza
Dumbasses
martinbakman
Truthfully, Scalia isn’t too upset about us, as long as he gets to hand over the country to the rich.
philipcfromnyc
@moldisdelicious: No, American society is NOT the same. I arrived in the USA in 1986, when I was in my very early 20s. Since then, I have seen changes occur with respect to the attitudes of most Americans that have made me genuinely proud to be an American. There were dreadful setbacks — for example, the DADT military policy which forced members of the armed forces to create fictional boyfriends and girlfriends, to watch every pronoun in case they slipped, and to be on constant guard lest they be outed inadvertently (it was illegal for a member of the armed forces even to tell members of his or her own family that he or she was gay — that constituted a “disclosure” for the purposes of triggering separation proceedings, and while I am not aware of any cases in which this occurred, mothers could be put on the stand and be forced to testify against their own children, under oath). In fact, DADT created an atmosphere in which EVERYBODY was suspect, because it was made clear by the policy that gay men and lesbians were serving in the armed forces, albeit in silence.
But DADT was repealed back in 2010 — it seems like only yesterday.
Then there was the Colorado debacle which gave gay men and lesbians a powerful tool, in the form of a Supreme Court opinion, against discrimination. In 1992, the citizens of the state of Colorado voted into existence, via the referendum process, an amendment (referred to as Amendment 2) to the state constitution which repealed all local ordinances, policies, statutes, executive orders, and other measures which prohibited heterosexuals from discriminating against gay persons in employment, access to housing, and access to places of public accommodation (e.g., restaurants, hotels), whilst leaving intact these policies insofar as they prohibited gay persons from discriminating against heterosexuals. In other words, the “immediate effect” of Amendment 2 was to repeal ordinances in cities such as Boulder, Denver, and Vail which protected homosexuals from discrimination in these areas; the “ultimate effect” of Amendment 2 was to prohibit the enactment of any similar, or more protective, measures ever again (absent repeal of Amendment 2; anybody who has attempted to repeal a state constitutional amendment knows how difficult this is). In other words, Amendment 2 “fenced out” gay men and lesbians, and removed consideration of measures intended to prohibit discrimination against members of this group from the normal political process.
The District Court for the City and County of Denver issued first a preliminary injunction, and later a permanent injunction, prohibiting Amendment 2 from ever taking effect. Appeals by proponents of Amendment 2 to the Colorado Supreme Court were met with blistering contempt; it soon became obvious that this measure would not survive scrutiny under any level of review. Then the US Supreme Court issued certiorari, causing many gay rights activists to fear that the Colorado Supreme Court would be reversed.
To the contrary, the US Supreme Court UPHELD the judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996). Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion for the majority, creating important legal steps for subsequent gay rights litigation. His opinion was widely viewed as going a long way towards overturning the Court’s disastrous and embarrassing opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), in which the Court upheld state sodomy statutes which made it a crime for gay persons to have sex in the 25 states which had “anti-sodomy” statutes on their books.
In 2003, the US Supreme Court decisively overturned Bowers in the case of Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). Not only did the Court overturn Bowers — the Court came as close to issuing an outright apology as the Court can ever do, declaring that “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today. It ought not to remain binding precedent. Bowers v. Hardwick should be and now is overruled.”
The result of this decision was that the sodomy statutes of approximately 14 states which still had them on their books were declared unconstitutional and hence unenforceable. This, of course, led the way to gay marriage becoming a distinct possibility.
In 2013, the US Supreme Court handed down US v. Windsor, 570 U.S. ___ (2013), thereby striking down the misnamed “Defense of Marriage Act” (DOMA), which operated to deprive gay couples who were legally married in those states which permitted same sex marriage of every single federal benefit, privilege, and protection routinely granted to opposite sex married couples (more than 1,137 such benefits had been identified). This opinion was written in tones (again by Justice Kennedy) using logic which could be applied with equal force to state prohibitions against same sex marriage.
Then, on June 26 of this year, the US Supreme Court handed down Obergefell v. Windsor, 576 U.S. ___ (2015), mandating that the states (and all US territories) recognize the right of same sex couples to marry.
One might argue that this merely describes the behavior of the US Supreme Court — however, opinion polls undertaken by organizations such as Gallup and the Pew Research Center placed support for same sex marriage at an all time high of 60% just days before Obergefell was handed down, and subsequent polls indicated that this trend was sustained following the handing down of this decision.
The very concept of same sex marriage would have been laughed out of court back in 1986, when I arrived in the country. In fact, in Baker v. Nelson, 409 U.S. 810 (1973), the US Supreme Court dismissed an appeal filed by two gay men whose lawsuit seeking the right to marry had been turned down by the Minnesota Supreme Court — the US Supreme Court dismissed the appeal “for want of a substantial federal question.”
Since I arrived in the USA,at least 23 states have enacted statewide measures to prohibit sexual orientation discrimination at the statewide level in areas such as employment, housing, and access to places of public accommodation. For example, the state of New York enacted the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) way back in 2003.
Furthermore, not all states recognize gay marriage as the result of the Supreme Court’s holding in Obergefell. The states of Maine, Maryland, and Washington all voted, through the referendum process, to legalize same sex marriage back in 2012. State legislatures in Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Minnesota, Hawaii, and Illinois had all legalized gay marriage through the respective state legislatures before Obergefell was handed down. Others (e.g., New Mexico, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Iowa) had done so in response to state supreme court rulings.
I was alive and here to watch all of this unfold. Along with the changes to the law, I have seen significant — even groundbreaking — changes in the attitudes of persons towards gay men and lesbians. Older persons tend to be the most stubborn, and tend to believe that sexual orientation is merely a choice, and that a person’s sexual orientation, crudely put, is merely the sum of a number of sex acts. However, younger persons tend to be far, far more accepting of gay men and lesbians, particularly as relates to the concept of gay identity. They “get it” in that they understand that a person’s sexual orientation is inextricably intertwined with that person’s sexual desires, behaviors, and activities — they understand that a person’s sexial orientation is not chosen, and they are much more accepting of gay persons (furthermore, longitudinal and observational studies have confirmed that this increased acceptance does not fade away as these younger persons grow older).
So I have seen HUGE changes since 1986, when I couldn’t come out to anybody at work. By the mid-1990s, everybody with whom I worked at a major international investment banking firm knew that I was gay, and nobody had the least problem with it.
It was only in 2006, when I worked for a company owned by an ex-South African like myself, that I encountered anti-gay bigotry of the first order. I worked as a consultant, on loan to a Chicago consulting firm by my agent in California. My manager was a permanent resident from South Africa (whereas I am a US citizen from South Africa) and a devout Christian who had put all of his children through missionary school. By performing a Google search, he determined that I am gay. Despite the fact that the users in Wyoming (we were writing a child support enforcement system for the users in Wyoming) really liked me and wrote glowing reviews of my work, my California agent called me one day to inform me that my manager at the Chicago firm had abruptly called my agent and informed my agent that I was no longer welcome on the premises. Furthermore, he flatly refused to discuss the reasons for my dismissal with my agent. I was deeply hurt by this, but I take solace in the fact that the manager who did this to me was not a true American — he was a permanent resident from South Africa who had not taken out US citizenship.
I could have sued, but I was employed by my agent in California, and I had absolutely nothing against my agent in California, so I simply dropped the matter.
In short, I have seen massive societal changes — changes in which it is no longer a mark of shame to declare that one is gay. To the contrary — I am proud to make this declaration, and to tell the world that I am still standing.
PHILIP CHANDLER
philipcfromnyc
@martinbakman: Scalia actually stated, in the opening passages of his dissent, that “[t]he substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me……{I]t is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage.”
Then he goes on and on, for some nine pages, to mount vicious personal attacks against Justice Kennedy’s writing style. He also argues that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment would never have considered same sex marriage to fall within the ambit of either the Due Process Clause or the Equal Protection Clause. What this misses is the fact that the Court is interpreting a CONSTITUTION, not a set of dry, dusty statutes, and that a CONSTITUTION is, by definition, an instrument which takes societal changes into consideration with the passage of time.
It was only in the 1970s that the Court recognized “quasi-strict scrutiny” under the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses, and applied this level of scrutiny to gender-based classifications.
As Justice Kennedy opined in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), “Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.”
Justice Scalia’s approach to constitutional adjudication would have made Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) impossible to sustain.
Scalia has proved to everybody just how far to the right he really is. Fortunately, he is already 79 years old, so I don’t expect that he will be around for too much longer….
PHILIP CHANDLER
gaym50ish
These people expect to go down in history as heroes, when in fact historians will remember them as bigots.
Jindal should take a lesson from two other Southern governors, George Wallace and Orval Faubus. Wallace ranted against racial integration and tried to block a door at the state-supported university to prevent it. Faubus defied a court order and called up the Arkansas National Guard to prevent school integration in Little Rock. No matter what positive things those men accomplished as governors, they will always be associated with bigotry.
Kim Davis and her supporters, including Mike Huckabee, could take a lesson from fellow Christian Anita Bryant, who in 1977 proclaimed, “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore they must recruit our children.” (Her ignorance was unbounded.) The orange-juice industry that she served as a pitchwoman didn’t want to be embroiled in the controversy, and they soon gave her “a day without sunshine.” She was Miss Oklahoma, a Miss America runner-up and a singer of hit songs, but she will always be most associated with her bigoted “Save the Children” media campaigns.
Scalia will be remembered simply as a buffoon who should never have had a seat on the highest court in the land. He may expect to be remembered as a hero who fought for “traditional values,” but historians will not be so kind to him.