They just can’t help themselves.
There’s no need to demonize and dehumanize any group of people in a legislative process stacked in Republicans state lawmakers’ favor from the get-go. Those are the spoils of 20 years of gerrymandering, packing courts with partisans and voter suppression.
Florida Republicans hold a super-majority and have all the votes in the Legislature necessary to pass whatever bill they and their autocratic agenda-setting leader, Gov. Ron DeSantis, could possibly desire.
But they carry the bully gene in their souls.
They’ve now advanced to quash the most vulnerable among us with evil verbal attacks that have no place in society, much less the Florida House.
At a committee hearing Monday, Rep. Webster Barnaby, a Deltona Republican, railed against transgender people, calling them “demons and imps” and “mutants from another planet.”
Disgusting behavior on many levels, but the lack of decorum and civility is especially galling because he’s targeting vulnerable people — misunderstood transgender people, who have the highest suicide rates in the country.
Thoughts of suicide
According to the National Institutes of Health, “82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth.”
Trans people are our children, our brothers and sisters, our aunts and uncles, our cousins, our friends and our fellow humans.
Let them be who they want to be.
They need understanding, not scorn that puts a target on their backs. They need acceptance, not rejection that makes them feel less-than.
If Barnaby had any shred of empathy, he would have anticipated that transgender youth would surely read his ugly words, amplified on social media.
“We have people that live among us today on planet Earth that are happy to display themselves as if they were mutants from another planet. This is the planet Earth with God-created men, male, and women, female,” Barnaby said.
So proud of himself, he piled on: “That’s right, I called you demons and imps who come and parade before us and pretend that you are part of this world.”
And Barnaby calls himself “a conservative Christian,” by the way. Persecuted in ancient times, his type of Christian should know better.
But Barnaby’s diatribe sure sounds like Florida is drawing on the tactics of the 12th century Catholic Inquisition for rhetorical inspiration to push their legislative initiatives.
Didn’t Jesus set an example of how we treat others by being kind and of service?
Aren’t we all supposed to be God’s children — or is there an exemption in the Bible for transgender, non-binary and gay people? Why are they persecuted by allegedly Christian lawmakers, low dwellers on the human scale?
Barnaby should enlighten us, but after boldly hurling insults, he’s remaining mostly mum.
Justifying cruelty
All the cruelty, in order to justify a needless bill that criminalizes transgender men and women’s use of bathrooms that don’t line up with the gender they were assigned at birth. Florida Republicans have been obsessed with passing it since 2015, when disgraced Rep. Frank Artiles, of Miami, introduced it. People called it “a joke,” and it failed to take off.
If the new anti-trans bill becomes law, it may turn out to be somewhat irrelevant, as so more businesses install unisex bathrooms. But queasy Republicans most likely will come after those, too, to please a base suffering from an incurable case of homophobia.
Because somehow God tells them to be only either boys or girls. And He tells them to be as intrusive as possible in blocking the sacred human journey of figuring out for ourselves who we are.
Under political pressure, the Florida Board of Medicine barred minors from starting puberty blockers or hormone therapy, a move doctors and therapists who specialize in transgender healthcare have denounced as dangerous.
They banned books in schools that helped trans and gay children not feel so alone, dubbing them pornography. They enacted laws prohibiting discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-3, arguing that children were too young for such exposure.
But, as alert people in education knew, their intent all along was to expand “Don’t Say Gay” to all grade levels, as they’re doing this legislative session.
Barnaby’s words didn’t come out of his mouth in a vacuum; they were spoken in collusion with widespread anti-gay momentum, made acceptable by the state’s elected GOP officials.
His colleagues and the governor emboldened Barnaby’s ire. He felt he was in a safe space in those chambers.
But he wasn’t.
His words were captured by the Florida Channel airing the proceedings for the nation to hear, and after widespread backlash, the Volusia County representative, elected in 2020, issued a lame apology.
“I would like to apologize to the trans community for referring to you as demons,” he said.
Insufficient, to say the least.
His voters should recall him, but they won’t, as 56.4% of Volusia County voted for the Republican Party during the last presidential election, marching in unison with the party’s increasingly anti-LGBTQ+ platform.
Ultimately, Florida Republicans want to mandate who we should be in this life. It’s not only un-American and unconstitutional — it’s also none of their business.
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