Nashville — Last year, two families in Wilson County, Tennessee, as plaintiffs in a federal civil rights lawsuit against Tennessee’s law prohibiting transgender students from using gender-identified bathrooms. I signed it. However, as WPLN News reported last week, both families then left the state, believing that their children were not safe here long enough to pass the proceedings. The district judge dismissed the proceedings as the plaintiff was removed.
In many respects, this development tells us more about the state of human rights in the Red States than the proceedings and the laws it disagrees with. When people devote themselves to justice, sue the state in which they live, and are forced to leave anyway, it serves as a clearer reminder that fighting institutional prejudice always comes at a cost.
When the so-called bathroom bill in Tennessee came into force last year, junior high school student Aimee Allen’s son responded by blowing liquids and avoiding school bathrooms altogether. Allen, a former teacher who did extensive research on transgender issues while the bill went through the legislative process, sought to educate state legislators about the damage the law would do to already vulnerable children. She also tried to talk to someone in the governor’s office. All her efforts were rejected.
Unreliably, she enrolled her child in a private school. When the school went wrong, the family moved to Massachusetts.
The boy is happy at his new school. His mom is also happy. “For me personally, moving here was just this sigh of relief,” Allen told WPLN’s Marianna Dried and Salted. “Similarly, I can go back to being just a human, not an activist mom, do you know?”
Now, news coverage from the Red States tends to focus on the legislative failure of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade case, which is understandable. The news is horrifying. The wording of the law is so vague that doctors are afraid to treat life-threatening conditions in pregnant patients. The woman was forced to carry a baby that could not survive outside the womb. Abortion is prohibited, with the exception of rape and incest, even if the victim is a young child.
However, Red State is scrambling to defeat the “Handmaid’s Story.” Neighboring states are not the only human rights crimes that legislators commit against their citizens. In Tennessee, a new law came into force on July 1 that fully explains the point. One measure criminalizes the homeless by making them a felony, or felony. — Camp on public property. The other prohibits transgender athletes from participating in school sports. Yet another requires public schools to block online resources that are “considered harmful to minors.”
Keep in mind that on the far right, there are many things that are considered harmful to minors, such as gender and gender-related materials. In fact, this is the only database-affected forbidden law that most public schools in the state have access to.
“When I’m asked if I miss Tennessee, I say I miss my friends,” Allen told WPLN. “But Tennessee broke my heart. She’s a great place full of horribly many wonderful people if she pays attention to what the legislature is doing.”
Allen is right.Tennessee teeth It’s a great place and full of really great people. Most of them pay no attention to what the Republican Caucus of the Tennessee Parliament is doing. Nearly 79% of Americans (including 65% of Republicans) support legislation that protects LGBTQ people from discrimination, according to a survey by the Independent Public Religion Research Institute. “In states where the anti-LGBTQ + bill is pending, about two-thirds of people support expanding LGBTQ + rights rather than limiting them,” a statement from the March Human Rights Campaign said. I am saying. After all, most Americans today can be confident that they know what’s really harmful to minors and what’s just a dog whistle aimed at the far-right enthusiast.
When the state is headed by enthusiasts, many of the people who live there are governed by the laws they strongly oppose. And for the time being, a country has been created in which the citizens of the Red States do not have the same rights and civil liberties as the citizens of the Blue States, without the help of the US Supreme Court.
All of this is a challenge for those who are paying attention to what is happening in the legislature, especially those with children whose well-being and security are further destabilized by laws targeting already vulnerable students.
Recently, I often think of Ruby Bridges, a first grader who integrated a public school in New Orleans in 1960. The little Ruby had to be accompanied by her new school, William Frantz Elementary, by the United States Marshals Service to protect her from the formed white mob. Every morning along her route. Ruby, who had a marshal just outside the door, spent the whole day in the classroom where she was a student.
The other five black children were also selected to enroll in William Franz Elementary School in 1960, but only Ruby’s parents remained on the course. And even with federal protection, they certainly thought of changing their minds countless times during the dangerous first year of integration.
This has always been a far-right strategy to spread hatred. It drives silence for acceptance and change, and a disappointing abandonment of oppressed people. That is the strategy they are currently using for the most vulnerable citizens.
“The South, home to one-third of LGBTQ Americans, is ready to be the epicenter of the next wave of intensive attacks on our legal rights,” said Southern Equality, a nonprofit advocate. The campaign was the week mentioned in the last statement. Although it is illegal to exclude transgender children from public schools today, legislators throughout the Red States make it nearly impossible for them to stay. At least not for families who have the means to leave. Many people don’t.
Last year, ironically they didn’t recognize, the Mama chapter for Liberty in Williamson County, Tennessee challenged the children’s version of Ruby’s experience as a pioneer in school integration. They ban the teaching that the book “should feel discomfort, guilt, distress, or other form of psychological distress just because of an individual’s race or gender”, a new Tennessee law. Claimed to be in violation of.
Ruby Bridges has grown to be a strong voice to end racism, but our children should not be held responsible for challenging the unjustified situation. Nonetheless, the strong minority of southern white conservatives today does not want their children to know what the southern white conservatives have done in the past. Perhaps future Southern Caucasian conservatives do not want their children to know what Southern Caucasian conservatives are doing today.
But justice is justice, whatever they believe in the opposite. The people who have been driven to limit the rights of LGBTQ citizens are again a minority, but being a minority does not prevent youth from suffering. The only thing that stops them is a backlash from voters who admit injustice when they see it — and not only the parents of vulnerable children.
Contributor Margaret Renkl is the author of the books Graceland, Finally: A Note on Hope and Heartache from the Southern United States and Late Migration: The Natural History of Love and Loss.
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