Drag, the Abortion Pill, Blue Cities in Red States

• Why conservatives are so upset by drag;
• The Comstock Law, an antiquated precedent conservatives use to justify things they don’t like, like the abortion pill;
• And how people are fleeing blue states for red states — but into blue cities.

Slate, Dawne Moon and Kelsy Burke, 17 Apr 2023: The Deep-Down Truth of Why Evangelical Christians Can’t Stand Drag, subtitled “Conservative Protestant theology is a mess of paradoxes when it comes to gender expression.”

There are bills in so many states — Nebraska, Tennessee, Florida — concerned with drag shows, as indirect attacks against transgender people,

compared to the myriad social problems facing America, focusing so much energy on drag seems absurd, at least if you’re on the left. Irreparable harm results when preschoolers see … drag queens wearing princess dresses and reading Hop on Pop at the local library? Really? It all feels like a stretch, even for religious conservatives.

My aside comment: it’s occasionally but not often mentioned in discussions about the conservative bills how people, including children, of previous generations, seem to have survived exposure to “drag” of various sorts. Bugs Bunny drag cartoons. The movies Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, and Mrs. Doubtfire. Why are today’s children apparently so much more vulnerable?

The articles goes on to explain its title. Essentially, an expansion of my comments yesterday about the conservatives’ binary view of the world, where exceptions to black vs. white are considered outrages against the order established by their God.

So why do these bills garner such emphatic support among those on the Christian right? As sociologists who study conservative Protestants’ discussions of faith, gender, and sexuality, we believe the answer lies not so much in claims about drag performers and trans people (distinct but sometimes overlapping groups) as it does in conservative Protestants’ own sense of themselves.

In a 10-year ethnographic study of the religious experiences of LGBTQ and allied conservative Protestants conducted with Theresa Tobin, Dawne Moon has noticed a number of seeming paradoxes: The all-powerful, all-loving creator of the universe is threatened by trans and intersex people’s existence, even though Jesus had no problem with eunuchs. Pastors at a megachurch turned a blind eye to a married straight man hitting on women at church, but confronted a gay man, whom they required to be celibate, because someone had reported seeing him “on a date” (meaning eating at a restaurant with a friend who was a man). And “Lisa,” a 29-year-old lesbian from Texas, told us that growing up, she learned that being gay “was the one thing that you never, ever wanted to be as a Christian. To me, I felt like the church thought it was the worst sin ever. Higher than murder or something.” Lisa and many others we spoke with learned from church that murderers can be forgiven, but being LGBTQ is uniquely unforgivable.

Thus the paradoxes, well-known to those of us who notice that most Christians behave in no way like Jesus. Then the fundamental binary nature of the world, in their view.

All of these paradoxes make more sense when you realize that for a lot of conservative Protestants, rigid gender roles are not just the traditional default, but a commandment upon which all of creation rests—more important, in practice if not on paper, than the Ten Commandments, including loving God and neighbor. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor James M. Hamilton Jr. has said that complementarity—the belief that God assigns different, “complementary” roles to men and women through biology—is like gravity in a story about a plane crash: the force that makes everything possible and gives life meaning. In the same book, STBS President Albert Mohler calls gender complementarity “the Bible’s most fundamental revelation about what it means to be human.”

As I’ve said many times, thinking of the world in terms of black and white makes life so much simpler to deal with.

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About the ruling against the abortion pill…

Politico, 14 Apr 2023: Opinion | Can the 19th Century Law That Banned Walt Whitman Also Ban Abortion by Mail?, subtitled “The 19th-century Comstock laws came up in a recent ruling that could determine the future of telehealth abortions.”

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 14 Apr 2023: Don’t celebrate the latest abortion pill decision — it’s an assault on all reproductive rights, subtitled “The 5th Circuit judges nodded approval of a 19th century federal law that was used to ban books and birth control”

Vox, Ian Millhiser, 12 Apr 2023: A 19th-century anti-sex crusader is the “pro-life” movement’s new best friend, subtitled “Anthony Comstock, the 19th-century scourge of art and sex, is suddenly relevant again thanks to Donald Trump’s worst judge.”

This topic aligns with my observation that the law is fundamentally flawed in its inability to correct past errors, rather forever relying on precedent.

From the Vox article:

The Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, is a relic of an era when free speech, medical privacy, and other rights that modern-day Americans take for granted effectively did not exist.

Nearly every word of this law, which is named after the Gilded Age anti-sex crusader Anthony Comstock, is unconstitutional — at least under the understanding of the Constitution that prevailed for nearly all of the past 60 years. The Comstock Act purports to make it a crime to mail “every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance,” or to mail any “thing” for “any indecent or immoral purpose” — vague words that inspired a century of litigation just to determine what concepts like “obscenity” actually mean.

And now, this puritanical law is back in vogue with the anti-abortion right wing.

Once something is written into law, it can be forever cited as precedent. As if society cannot grow and change its mind about conclusions based on the ignorance of the past. The reversal of Roe v. Wade used similar precendents. (There are a great many antiquated laws that are still on the books that everyone simply ignores. Laws on the books don’t matter unless there are political reasons to enforce them.)

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A couple more items, about the same broad topic.

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NYT, David Brooks, 13 Apr 2023: Why People Are Fleeing Blue Cities for Red States

Why are these red states growing so rapidly? The short answer is that they are more pro-business. In a study for the American Enterprise Institute, Mark J. Perry compared the top 10 states people were flocking to in 2021 with the top 10 states people were flocking from.

The places they are flocking to have lower taxes. The 10 states that saw the biggest population gains have an average maximum income tax of 3.8 percent. The 10 states with the biggest population loss have an 8 percent average rate.

The growing states also have fewer restrictions on home construction. That contributes to lower housing prices. The median home price in those 10 population-gaining states is an average of 23 percent less than that of the 10 biggest population-losing states.

Ah, but the headline elides a key fact:

When you look inside the red states at where the growth is occurring, you notice immediately that the dynamism is not mostly in the red parts of the red states. The growth is in the metro areas — which are often blue cities in red states. A study from the L.B.J. Urban Lab, for example, found that Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth accounted for 71 percent of the jobs created in Texas in 2019.

And this is completely consistent with the tendency of red states to redistrict — gerrymander — congressional districts in order to slice up pieces of blue cities to be overwhelmed by red counties. And for politicians from red districts, as in Tennessee, to vote away representatives from blue cities. But if this trend continues — as I expect it to do so — this will just be another example of the integration of differing social populations into broader groups. And how the extreme conservative religious populations will eventually be diluted out of existence.

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And that’s enough for this evening.