To stimulate sales for Pride Month (June), Target stores around the country put up displays of LGBTQ-centric clothing. Customers in some stores were offended and showed their displeasure by knocking down the Pride merchandise, angrily confronting sales clerks, and posting threatening videos on social media. Target’s response to the vandalism and intimidation was to remove entirely some of its Pride merchandise, and move other items from displays at the front of the store to less-prominent areas.
“Since introducing this year’s collection, we’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and well-being while at work,” Target said in a statement last week. “Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior.” In other words, Target gave in to the wishes of a loud minority of bigots and bullies who created those “volatile circumstances.”
And we let them.
There were no major counter-protests of Target’s actions from LGBTQ activists. There were no cries of outrage from those of us with LGBTQ friends, co-workers, and family members (which is all of us). We just let it happen. Oh well, who needs a rainbow T-shirt, anyway, right?
This is how fascists take over a country: one small victory at a time. They are the would-be thought police, the Christian Nationalist Taliban, afraid of anything that challenges their tiny-minded view of the world. They are easily manipulated by leaders who stoke their fears and bigotry.
Sadly, there are now plenty of would-be autocrats in this country eager to lead the charge — one small victory at a time: They ban books about Black history, even about heroes like Rosa Parks. They prohibit the viewing of Michelangelo’s sculpture of David. They try to fire a teacher who shows a fifth-grade class a Disney movie suitable for 8-year-olds. They want to force every pregnant woman to give birth. They shoot cases of beer. They make white-supremacist noises on social media and cable news. Their game plan is to intimidate a pliant majority and fire up their own ignorant base in the process.
It’s time to say enough, time to stop conceding ground that was hard-won over decades to racists, bigots, misogynists, and other assorted morons seeking to force their prejudices upon us and our children. It’s time to emulate a group in Florida that fought back when the Escambia School Board banned a book called And Tango Makes Three, a true story of two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who lived in New York’s Central Park Zoo and raised an adopted chick. The book was banned at the insistence of one parent who said she was concerned “a second-grader would read this book, and that idea would pop into the second grader’s mind … that these are two people of the same sex that love each other.”
A group of parents, book publishers, authors, and PEN America stood up and said, “Enough.” They filed suit against the school board, alleging that the ban restricted books “based on their disagreement with the ideas expressed, an orthodoxy of opinion that violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments. … State censors are spiriting books off shelves in a deliberate attempt to suppress diverse voices. In a nation built on free speech, this cannot stand.” Hopefully, a judge will agree.
But lawsuits are just one tool in the toolbox. Confrontation at every turn is how this hateful stuff gets stifled. Bullies understand the power of numbers and volume. Progressives need to show out in numbers and stand up to these repressive tactics at every opportunity.
The only reason Governor Bill Lee called for an August special session to deal with gun reform (of the mildest possible sort) is because thousands of outraged citizens filled the streets of Nashville for days at a time after the Covenant School shooting. Now, the Tennessee legislature, which has essentially gerrymandered true democracy out of existence, is trying to cancel the special session, saying it’s a “publicity stunt” that will incite “the national woke mob.”
As a member in good standing of the National Woke Mob™, I say it’s well past time for us to get “incited.” And stay woke. We’re all Targets now.