Sex, Schools, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories
At a Moms For Liberty event last week, Donald Trump falsely (and preposterously) asserted that public schools are performing surgeries on children in order to force them to be transgender.
“Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s gonna happen with your child. And you know, many of these childs [sic] 15 years later say, ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’ They say, ‘Who did this to me?’”
Trump’s lies reflect the right’s recent preoccupation with transgender youth, but they grow from a longstanding fixation on schools as sites of sexual predation and gendered chaos. Rooted in decades-old movements against both racial segregation and LGBTQ equality, today’s sex panics yet again posit outrageous lies in order to promote discrimination.
Take, for example, the widely circulated myths in the 1950s and 1960s about school desegregation leading directly to interracial sex. Then as now, particular interpretations of Christian theology tied public school policy to the future of the white Christian family.
Warnings about interracial sex, or “miscegenation,” were at the heart of Christian opposition to school integration. As historian Jane Dailey has explained, theological warnings against interracial sex dated back at least to the pre-Civil War era. She writes, “Buckner H. Payne, a Nashville publisher and clergyman…insisted in 1867 that the tempter in the garden [of Eden] was a talking beast—a black man—and his interactions with Eve the first cause of the Fall.” Payne warned that “God will exterminate” any white man who allowed his daughter to marry a Black man. Payne’s ideas were never mainstream, but they circulated into the twentieth century.
As the modern civil rights era dawned in the 1940s and 1950s, pro-segregation Christians learned that God had sent a flood because too many people in Noah’s day were crossing the color line. From the Tower of Babel to the Israelites’ forty years of wandering in the desert, Biblical stories of God’s wrath were reinterpreted as punishment for interracial sex. As Dailey notes, such narratives “[made] the case for segregation as divine law.” (Dailey points out that even moderate and liberal Protestants who supported civil rights often did so with reassurances that interracial sex and marriage would not ensue from school desegregation.)
These interpretations of Christian texts might strike today’s reader as outlandish. It’s important to recall, though, that in the mid-1950s a U.S. Senator, Theodore G. Bilbo (noted for his virulent racism), described “miscegenation and amalgamation” to be “sins of man in direct defiance with the will of God[.]” In a federal court case in the 1960s, a Virginia judge wrote for the majority that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red…The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” Those arguments can help us understand why so much of the opposition to Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a Supreme Court case about school desegregation, decried the decision as a conduit for interracial sex and marriage: their religious education had taught them that racial “mixing,” whether in school or in the bedroom, was against the Word of God. Walter C. Givhan, a state senator in Alabama, notoriously said that Brown would “open the bedroom doors of our white women to Negro men.” That image was meant to be an ominous one, of innocent white women vulnerable to Black sexual aggression. Some of Brown’s Christian opponents claimed that integration would cause syphilis outbreaks.
Moms for Liberty carries on this tradition with its tirades and conspiracy theories about the effects of LGBTQIA content and gender-affirming policies in public schools. It’s a nasty heritage, rooted not only in sex panics but in attempts to impede racial justice in the name of Christian virtue.
Source
Dailey, Jane. “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown.” Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (2004): 119–45.
FIERCE DESIRES HQ
Thank you to everyone for helping me celebrate the publication of my new book! Use this link to order your copy of Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America, or head to your local bookstore!
Rebecca Mead reviews the book in the Sept. 2 issue of The New Yorker.
Kate Tuttle has a review in today’s Boston Globe and Becca Rothfeld reviewed it in the Washington Post.
We had a wonderful book launch party a few days ago at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia. Thank you to everyone who turned out, asked a question, bought a book, or complimented me for coordinating my clothes with my book jacket.
Saturday, September 7, 4:30 pm, I’ll be at the Swarthmore Campus and Community Store chatting with Leanne Krueger, a Democratic leader in the PA General Assembly who is a champion of women’s and LGBTQ rights.
A book reading in conversation with my amazing sister, Sarah Davis, on Thursday, September 12, 7pm, South Euclid–Lyndhurst branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library
Please visit the “Events” section of my website for additional events and details.