I live in Kent County, Michigan. Nearby Ottawa County has repeatedly been in the news—even nationally—because a rightwing cabal called Ottawa Impact, led by a youthful big-man-in-charge named Joe Moss, took over its board of supervisors in 2022 and has behaving as expected.
The article depicted in the photograph with this blog post is one of two articles about the Ottawa County in today’s Grand Rapids Press.
When I posted a link to this article on Facebook, I wrote: File under “Kulturkampf.” (Yes, that’s a German word with a history running from nineteenth-century Germany through the twentieth century and down to the present American culture wars.)
The article describes how Ottawa Impact supervisors are using a dog whistle / slogan (“Protect Childhood Innocence”) to promote eliminationist-homophobic public policy.
My related thoughts:
1. Of course the innocence of young children should be protected. Childhood should not be sexualized. I hope we all agree on that.
2. The threat to children’s innocence does not come from health departments and schoolteachers. These are public agencies that have to try to help children (and adults) cope with the sexualization that is already out there; they are not generating the sexualization.
3. Parents who fail to control their children’s access to the Internet and are unaware of what their children are already seeing on the Internet are among those who are cheering for this “protect childhood innocence” slogan. Parents’ whose heads are stuck in the sand are more dangerous to their own children than health officers and educators who are left trying to reduce the harm resulting from the negligence of naive, reality-denying parents. Yes, your sweet, innocent 10-year-old boy has seen porn on the Internet, and has not mentioned it to you. Why are you letting this happen?
4. People who talk a lot about “parental rights” should consider talking more about parental responsibilities, and also should stop trying to pass their parental responsibilities (e.g., to protect their children from Internet trash during non-school hours, and positively to raise their children with particular religious values) on to pubic schools and teachers.
6. Here’s what I mean by “eliminationist homophobia” (and yes, I am deliberately echoing the phrase “eliminationist anti-Semitism” from the history of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century): dislike of LGBTQ people and the determination of rid public space of all traces of them.
7. Eliminationist homophobia tries first to deny that LGBTQIA+ people exist. That is to say: it insists that people who experience same-sex attraction (or whose gender self-awareness does not match their gender assigned at birth on the basis of anatomical observation, or who have ambiguous anatomy) are not naturally the way they are but rather are the way are because of their own wicked decisions.
8. When eliminationist homophobes are not allowed to deny that LGBTQIA people exist, they drop back to insisting that their existence must not be acknowledged in any way in textbooks or other curricular materials.
9. So, for example, there are most certainly families in our society in which two dads or two moms are raising children. But eliminationist homophobes will insist that if a story problem in a math book for third graders refers to such a household, the textbook must be banned because it is trying to sexualize childhood or groom children for sexual exploitation. But the textbooks—as long as their references to demographic realities are roughly proportion to reality—are merely reflecting reality.
Most eliminationist homophobes would be aghast at any suggestion that they are promoting genocide, but from the hateful speech that we hear from some of them, even in public places such as our school board meetings, I believe that some of them, if given access to a button which if pushed would instantly obliterate 400 million people (a very crude estimate of the number of people in the world who identify as LGBTQ), would quickly and gladly push that button.
10. Here’s an opinion of mine that you may find provocative, but it’s something that LGBTQ people worry about—and so do I. Most eliminationist homophobes would be aghast at any suggestion that they are promoting genocide, but from the hateful speech that we hear from some of them, even in public places such as our school board meetings, I believe that some of them, if given access to a button which if pushed would instantly obliterate 400 million people (a very crude estimate of the number of people in the world who identify as LGBTQ), would quickly and gladly push that button. That being the case, they must be seen as constituting sleeper cells that would spring into action if our political situation were to deteriorate to the point where a leader of their mindset were to gain such a secure grip on power as to be able to state openly the “final solution” to the “gay problem.” There are nations in Africa that have passed legislation authorizing the death penalty for homosexuals, and there are American politicians who decline to condemn them. I don’t think we will ever reach that point in the USA; but if we think we don’t have neighbors who would like us to reach that point, we are kidding ourselves. And what these people would be doing now, in circumstances in which they cannot openly advocate for a “final solution,” is precisely this: using misleading slogans, dog-whistles, and disinformation to try to eliminate the recognition of the existence of gay people, and of their right to exist, from materials used in the education of our children.
11. We live among people in our community whose interpretations of their religious texts and traditions do not permit them to acknowledge the fact that some people are gay, just as in the past some interpretations of Christian texts and traditions have not permitted acknowledgment of the facts of evolution, or of the roundness of the earth, or of the fact that earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. These people would be offended by the suggestion that their refusal to acknowledge and accept the existence of gay people, and their right to exist, within God’s good creation is inherently genocidal. I understand where they are coming from (having been there earlier myself). Some of them believe that with sufficient prayer, therapy, etc., gay people can become straight. They are mistaken. Sorting out how to allow them freedom of religion while protecting everyone’s (especially LGBTQ people’s) human rights is one of the most difficult challenges of our day. We must find the best possible ways of saying: your freedom to believe things that are not supported by science, not believed by the general population, and (I would add) not believed by people who understand your own religious texts and traditions better than you do, does not entitle you to establish public policy based on those beliefs. We (a coalition of nonreligious and religious people who do not support eliminationist homophobia) must organize well and vote them down.
12. Ottawa Impact and similar groups are, as far as I can see, predicated exactly on the insistence of cognitive minorities (people who believe things that most of us do not and cannot believe) on their right to impose policy based on their distinctive beliefs on the entire population.
Verba Sparsa 
One thought on “Eliminationist homophobia in Ottawa County”