The Expression of US
See the Signs
I’ve heard the myth that a frog in a pot of water slowly heated, will boil to death. It’s not true, but it’s an apt metaphor. While comparisons to the Holocaust and WWII are often not accurate, there is a reason the comparisons are made. It’s about the descent into fascism. One of the best books on the rise of Nazi fascism and how WWII crept in around the world, is The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust, by Edith Hahn Beer and Susan Dworkin.
I had read The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, and Night, by Elie Wiesel, but often the books that tell the horrors of the Holocaust don’t really illustrate what it was to be in a relatively free society, and slowly see it get chipped away. In The Nazi Officer’s Wife, you see that Edith Hahn Beer was living in Austria, and dating a young man who was reading this book called Mein Kampf, by a rising politician in Germany. Nothing happened overnight, but slowly her rights were being curtailed, curfews imposed, and gold stars required. It didn’t directly affect everyone, so it kept creeping in.
So how does a free society recognize the signs of creeping fascism, before it’s too late? Do we need to wait for our society to look like WWII and the Holocaust before we will say “Ok, this is bad”? Can we pay attention, speak up, and do our civic duty to ensure our democracy is protected? That’s the question some are asking today, and many more should be asking.
What we can see, is the rhetoric coming from the right. It’s the same playbook that fascism uses, which is grievance politics. This is when issues that really exist in society and for a particular group of people are lamented. A scapegoat is then blamed for that problem. The scapegoat is often a marginalized group of people. Blame Democrats for inflation, while the ones leading the allegations simultaneously work to cut social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Say they want to decrease spending, but they end up cutting services for our veterans and making health care more expensive for the middle class and low-income wage earners. All this while they plan a tax cut, but most of it will go to the wealthiest people in the country, who are conveniently direct or dark money donors.
When the middle class continues to struggle, keep blaming the Democrats. Once Republicans have power, they can blame immigrants, Black people — especially in cities where it will all be in code i.e. “crime” “thugs” “felons”, and then we can just blame the LGBTQ community for deteriorating our precious “traditional values”. What does that even mean? Traditional values. Every person born male must check certain boxes, behave one way, and wear specific clothes. Same for women. Know your place, ladies. I mean, come on. Are we still going to be this myopic about individuality?
What do you see when you look in the mirror?
What do you see when you look at the United States? Not what do you want to see, but what do you see that we actively are? This is not about the promise of our country, but what the actions of elected officials, the results of our elections, and the effect that is having on our democracy. Do you see a healthy democracy? Do you see our civil liberties being safeguarded by the elected officials in our government, or do you see laws being imposed that chip away at our freedoms? We talk a lot about our freedom and our rights. The 2nd amendment is talked about an awful lot. It’s vitally important to many people. What I don’t see being talked about as much, is the 1st amendment.
People often attempt to envision what the founders of our country intended for us when they wrote the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I know I struggle with this too. Did they mean everyone should be able to stockpile guns, with no regulations? No training? Did they envision that we would move past the musket, and have semi-automatic military assault-style weapons, like the ArmaLite rifle, on the street? Did they foresee mass shootings at churches and in schools? I don’t think so, but I’m also not a constitutional attorney. I can read our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and everything that our founders wrote on the topics of freedoms and rights, and still not be able to definitively say what they intended. I envy the people who think they can, though I find part of being a citizen requires enough humility to know that no one person has all the answers. That includes ourselves.
One simple thing I notice is that our Bill of Rights doesn’t start with the 2nd amendment. It starts with the 1st. Does that denote its importance? This seems to me, to at least mean something. But why am I bringing this all up? Many state legislators, and even Republicans in Congress, are openly attacking the right of expression in this country. Again, I don’t have a law degree, so I have to look at this from the perspective of a private citizen. That’s ok though because that’s what most of us have to do. It is our civic duty to be informed about what our elected officials are doing. We the voters are the ultimate check and balance on every branch of government, at every level of government.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It doesn’t actually say “freedom of expression” in the 1st amendment, but legal scholars and the Supreme Court have grappled with this inferred concept in the language of the 1st amendment, and how it translates to our right to express ourselves, not just in speech but in other mediums. This can include how we produce art, how we dress, and even how we love.
In the 1973 Miller v. California decision, the Court established three conditions that must be present if a work is to be deemed “legally obscene.” It must 1) appeal to the average person’s prurient (shameful, morbid) interest in sex; 2) depict sexual conduct in a “patently offensive way” as defined by community standards; and 3) taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Attempts to apply the “Miller test” have demonstrated the impossibility of formulating a precise definition of obscenity. Justice Potter Stewart once delivered a famous one-liner on the subject: “I know it when I see it.” But the fact is, the obscenity exception to the First Amendment is highly subjective and practically invites government abuse. (https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-expression)
So it seems that Republicans across the country are now seeking to abuse the subjectivity of what is considered offensive or obscene. Based on the legislation being proposed and passed across this country, it looks like the Christian right is imposing its preference for what expression should be allowed in this country at all. Here’s the Status of Anti-Drag Bills Across the U.S.
Many Americans love the art of drag and the drag community. Many Americans love trans people and the trans community, but one group of people fear drag queens, drag kings, and trans people and are seeking to marginalize people who express themselves in a manner that doesn’t fit their preferred binary roles of men and women.
What have you done for US lately?
How do we protect the rights of drag queens, drag kings, and trans people? How do we protect the right of expression, in spite of those who might consider it obscene, even if many of us do not find it to be obscene but rather full of love and beautiful expression? How do we find a middle ground? And more to the question, how do we reach people who do not feel this directly affects them? That’s the crux here. This is a chipping away of civil liberties, of the freedom of expression, and yet it targets only one subset of people. So how do we translate that threat as something that will eventually affect everyone?
My instinct is that we must live and let live. Banning people for their expression is an authoritarian and fascist maneuver that to me is a dangerous and slippery slope. Once you ban one group of people from expressing themselves freely, what is to say another group won’t be targeted tomorrow? What will be next? Will Muslim people not be allowed to wear hijabs or niqabs? Will Jewish people not be allowed to wear yarmulkes? Will women not be allowed to wear suits, and required to always appear in dresses or skirts at a certain length? Where does it end?
More to the point, when we limit expression, what does that look like for our society? Without the ability for people to cross genders in their expression, we wouldn’t have the brilliance of David Bowie, the gender-fluid genius of Prince, Robin Williams’ fantastic Mrs. Doubtfire, and so much more. Back in the days of Shakespeare, only men appeared on the stage. That meant that men played the female roles too. Would Republicans have banned Shakespeare?
“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.” ~ Hamlet
So what might we agree on? As much as the Christian right might disagree with the expression of drag queens, drag kings, and trans people, there is no law requiring that they be a drag queen, drag king, or trans person. That would be an imposition and a restriction on the freedom they have to express themselves how they choose. These new laws seeking to outlaw drag and trans people from being allowed to exist in our communities are also a restriction on the freedom every person should rightly have to express themselves how they choose.
While the Christian right is attempting to impose its religious doctrine across this country, I wonder if they have considered the door that this opens. If their religious doctrine can be imposed, then so too can the religious doctrine of Judaism that says life begins at birth, not conception. So too can Muslim doctrine and Atheism for that matter.
No one group of people can summarily decide for the country what is freedom of expression, or what crosses the line into obscene. Certainly not one faith or religion either. I think it must come down to the voters. This is a local election year. A year when most people don’t pay attention to elections or politics. I hope people will pay attention this year though. I hope people are starting to see that all politics really is local. It’s a saying for a reason. Voters have power in every election, and they have the most power in local elections. The power is not just in voting, but in supporting candidates who will support the rights of the whole community and will represent the community to the best of their ability.
Voters can knock on doors, make calls, and help ensure that all voters know about the election and that they know what is at stake. It’s not just drag story hour, which is a great way for community members to come together and bring color, creative expression, and literacy into kids' lives, but it’s more than that. It’s fighting against the banning of books, the censoring of comprehensive education, the criminalization of bodily autonomy, and the restriction of the most fundamental right to vote.
We have a choice, we can either let others decide what happens for all of us, or we can choose to come together, and demand that our elected officials not divide us apart. we can get involved to make sure we aren’t just watching our communities from the sidelines, while they turn slowly towards fascism and against the fundamentals of our democracy. We can show up and be part of our democracy in a most fundamental and powerful way. We can participate in the conversations, and in the movement towards inclusion, freedom, and democracy. We can refuse those who would gaslight what freedom means, and we can reclaim the fundamental tenets of our rights.
How will you express what you want for your community and your country? Will you be silent, or will you use your voice, cast your vote, and participate in your democracy?
