Wait a Minute, There are Conservatives Who Actually Think They're NOT Homophobic?

You don't get to claim an exemption for all the harm you cause with your ill-considered vote

Recently I had a guy protest when I claimed that conservatives hate the LGBTQ+ community. He called that a “straw man” argument.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around his position.

Does he really think that conservatives don't hate the LGBTQ+ community? That's his argument? He believes that even though attacking people for their sexuality represents a major part of conservative policy?

I mean, it's not like conservatives hide it. Attacking the trans community was one of their main points during the 2024 election cycle. Conservatives get angry about bathrooms to the point where it's been suggested they want to perform humiliating gender checks on your children before they are allowed into the restroom.

Personally, I don't want conservatives digging around in my daughter's underwear. I specify conservatives, because they're the only ones calling for it. Don't pretend they're not.

Conservatives attack the concept of same sex marriage. They're trying to get it repealed. How is that not an example of hate?

If somebody dedicated their life to destroying whatever union you had with your marital partner, you'd probably feel as if that person hated you. If some jerk decided to break up my marriage because my wife is an immigrant, you're darn right I'd call it hate.

Conservatives are probably going to try and do that next. They might consider my wife to be of a “different race” because conservatives like to deny scientific facts. Conservatives try to make absurd claims like there are only two genders.

They say a lot of things that are verifiably false and hate is the only reason I can think of that might explain their actions.

Conservatives protest the idea of pronouns.

Conservatives celebrate bakers who refuse to make cakes for same-sex couples.

Conservatives defend clerks who refuse to issue a marriage license even though that's their job.

All of these things are examples of hate. If you claim to be a conservative, you can't realistically try to suggest that you've never heard of any of these things. They've all been national news in one way or another. Harassing the LGBTQ+ community is fundamental to conservative ideology.

In fact, it's fair to say that harassing the LGBTQ+ community is the main thing that conservatives do. For conservatives to come around afterward and act like they're stunned that they're associated with hatred against the LGBTQ+ community is astonishing to me. It's gotten to the point where “conservative” and “homophobic” are synonyms.

Update the dictionary. Whatever the term meant in the past is no longer relevant. That's what it means today.

The worst part is that keeping pressure on the LGBTQ+ community is about the only promise that conservatives manage to keep. People might vote for conservative politicians because they promise to bring the price of eggs down, but the price of eggs just reached a record high.

If you voted for a conservative, you have to own that you voted for hatred. You don't get to exempt yourself because you bought into a promise that candidate never really intended to fulfill. It's not like this is a new development. This has been going on for about forty years.

Why can't you own it?

If you're a conservative who has a LGBTQ+ child, you have to recognize you've voted for candidates that have supported policies that hurt your child.

This is probably why your child no longer talks to you. Let's not deny reality here. If somebody supported a candidate that wanted to dissolve my marriage, I wouldn't talk to that person either. That's pretty easy to understand.

What's hard to understand is how anyone would deny this.

If you're one of those people who says, “I don't support everything about that candidate,” you still have to take accountability for the bad things that candidate does. If you helped to put that person in power, you have to own everything they do, not just the stuff you happen to agree with.

That's not how life works.

You don't get to pretend that the awful things people do don't exist. All that tells me is that when they do something awful, it doesn't apply directly to you. But, for the life of me, I can't understand why so many parents are blind to the pain certain politicians inflict on their children.

There's a hate movement in the United States that challenges the right of the LGBTQ+ community to exist. That's awful. Just because you're not a part of that community doesn't give you a right to deny that deplorable reality. We have to stand up for everyone. We can't allow transgressions against the innocent.

Let's come together and put an end to hate. It's not one of those things you can ignore and hope it goes away.

Conservatives at every level vote to inflict pain on the LGBTQ+ community. That's what's happening. That needs to stop. They must know it's wrong, or they wouldn't deny that's what they stand for.

If that's not what conservatives want, then why does that language so often appear in the bills they write and the advertisements they pay for?

Don't insult my intelligence by claiming this isn't true. Your actions are clear for anyone to see.

Just accept that if you say you are conservative, you're declaring yourself to be homophobic. Voting conservative inflicts harm on the LGBTQ+ community. Conservatives call them the “alphabet people.” They use all sorts of horrible language to “other” the members of that community so they can treat them as sub-human. I can't think of a single example of conservatives standing up for the LGBTQ+ community.

They might say they stand up for them, but examine what they actually do.

So, to act as if it's somehow wrong to say conservatives are homophobic is stunning to me. How do you possibly justify that? It seems like conservatives live in a perpetual state of self-denial. They want to only take credit for good things, and they're completely blind to the bad.

It's time to grow up.

It's time to recognize that if you choose to give power to an awful person, it means you are affiliated with the consequences. It makes you an awful person by extension. It seems like there's this sense of entitlement among conservatives where they demand they should never be held accountable.

If you don't practice accountability, you never grow.

How are our kids going to learn accountability, if half of our population stubbornly refuses to model it?

How would you feel if our country suddenly started treating conservatives the way conservatives treat the LGBTQ+ community? If you sincerely think you treat them fairly, you should have no objection to implementing that idea.

If you feel conservatives do help the LGBTQ+ community, supply some evidence. Put your anger aside and show me the work you do.

But they won't supply it. Instead, they'll get angry. They'll get self-righteous. They'll become defiant.

Somebody left a comment on one of my articles calling it a straw man argument to say that conservatives hate the LGBTQ+ community. As far as I'm concerned, it's pretty clear that everything that conservatives do hurts that group of people.

If we're being honest, we should also mention how that's not the only group of people that conservatives are dedicated to tormenting. They attack immigrants too for one thing. If you want to object to something, object to the mistreatment of innocent people.

Conservatives love to inflict pain. I don't see evidence of them doing anything else. It's shameful.

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