Rep. Boebert can’t hide behind ‘prayers’
The rampage that left five dead and at least 17 injured at the LGBTQ venue Club Q in Colorado Springs last weekend is estimated to be one of 615 mass shootings in the U.S. this year. Given how practiced we are at this ritual in American life, it’s no longer a surprise when Second Amendment-worshiping politicians offer “thoughts and prayers” after these tragedies. It’s beyond even the snicker of irony; the hypocrisy has become banal.
But I felt a special kind of revulsion when Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert offered her own platitude, tweeting in part: “This morning the victims & their families are in my prayers.”
A quick reminder for those of you not acquainted with Rep. Boebert’s brand of leadership: This is the same congresswoman who, among a laundry list of homophobic and transphobic statements, said “Take your children to CHURCH, not drag bars” — part of an ongoing campaign of rightwing harassment against drag queen story hours across the country this year. Club Q had plans to host a drag brunch the next day in honor of Transgender Day of Remembrance.
Boebert also previously accused Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, a transgender woman, of trying to “groom” children by providing gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Boebert and her ilk use “groom” and “groomer” often when talking about LGBTQ people, playing on a decades-old trope that equates us with pedophiles or promotes the notion that we “recruit” others into our community.
Even more recently, Boebert alleged during an interview that the anti-LGBTQ discrimination legislation known as the Equality Act was biased … against straight people.
Mr. Nice Gay is sitting this column out: I don’t have it in me to manage my anger at politicians like Boebert, who embolden acts of homophobic violence with their anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. I am taking off my earrings in a gesture that invokes the generations of queer trauma and rage that exist in every LGBTQ person who ever had a moment they thought they were in danger. I feel the fightor-flight instinct personified in the still-unnamed transgender performer at Club Q who struck the shooter with her high heel repeatedly as Richard M. Fierro and other club patrons stopped the spree.
I don’t believe for a minute that the hate-mongering, pandering Rep. Boebert has enough of her soul left to pray.
The LGBTQ community has seen religion used as a justification for violence and persecution against us many times throughout history. With that in mind, some of us have complicated relationships with religion. But every queer person I know has some version of a prayer they say when there’s an act of violence, a piece of discriminatory legislation or some new state-sanctioned campaign of hate. We may not call it prayer or invoke a higher power, but it’s the same intention.
We try to manifest those in harm’s way out of danger, and we hope for our own safety. We don’t want the hate speech, the curtailing of rights and the violence to touch us in our big cities/blue states/safe spaces. Those safe spaces have long included LGBTQ bars and nightclubs like Club Q and Pulse, the site of a mass shooting hate crime that killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in June 2016.
It’s no surprise that with the increase of antitrans, homophobic, racist and antisemitic political talking points from the extreme right, instances of violence and bias-motivated mass shooting have been on the rise. The words and agendas of politicians like Boebert, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene aren’t the bullets that shot up Club Q, but their dehumanization of LGBTQ people is the seed of that violence.
It’s hate-mongers like them who are the real groomers.
The hypocrisy of “thoughts and prayers” has become banal.