A Pride Month letter to our allies
Right-wing groups have infiltrated digital rights activism.
It’s time to take our movement back.
The following is an open letter from queer and transgender staff members at Fight for the Future.
To our allies in the fight for human rights and tech justice:
Every Pride Month, we celebrate LGBTQ+ people’s strength, resilience, and diversity. For the last few years, however, a specter has loomed over the marches, fairs, and festivities. Even as cultural acceptance of queer identities remains strong, a moneyed and powerful anti-LGBTQ+ movement has moved from the margins to the center.
The prospect for the coming years looks dire: members of this backlash now occupy the highest rungs of power in the United States. They are enacting policies that directly target queer and trans people’s safety, healthcare, legal recognition, and access to government services. These policies, in turn, are linked to a rise in hate crimes, an increase in youth suicidality, and a mass migration away from the most repressive states.
The people responsible for this dramatic rise in anti-LGBTQ+ activism are not hard to locate. They are the leaders of a right-wing network that was born in opposition to the civil rights movement and the Equal Rights Amendment.
This network’s central figures include NCOSE (formerly Morality in Media), the Heritage Foundation, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), and Phillis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Through model policies, litigation, and grassroots organizing, the Religious Right is banning books like Gender Queer and All Boys Aren’t Blue, revoking healthcare from transgender kids and adults, banning or criminalizing bathroom use, and protecting torturous practices like conversion therapy.
These groups are successful, in part, because they are shapeshifters. And, troublingly, they have infiltrated movements for digital rights and online safety.
These groups have begun lobbying for Internet bills like the Kids Online Safety Act, the App Store Accountability Act, and various age-gating laws. They cloak their bigotry in the language of concern, but they are not innocent advocates for children’s digital safety.
We write you because you have appeared in coalition with the above-listed groups in your public-facing materials. And we write you in a time of urgent need. Help us unmask these groups and eject them from our movement.
If you receive this letter, we ask of you three things:
- Commit to never again working with the following anti-LGBTQ+ Religious Right groups: the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly Morality in Media), the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Heritage Foundation/Heritage Action, the Institute for Family Studies, Concerned Women for America, the Family Policy Alliance network, and the Eagle Forum network.
- Apologize to your supporters and followers for previously working with LGBTQ+ hate groups.
- Make and publish organizational plans for integrating input from LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations into your public policy work.
The last time the Religious Right held so much political power was during the Reagan and Bush I administrations. During that time, their hatred and homophobia led to the decimation of an entire generation of queer and trans people from HIV/AIDS. Although the names within these organizations have changed, their mission remains clear: they wish to eradicate queer and trans people from public life, and they do not care if we live or die.
Let this Pride Month be the start of tech justice movement that unequivocally rejects anti-LGBTQ+ hate. Examining our coalitions closely and taking accountability for past relationships with the Religious Right is a powerful first step.
In solidarity,
Fight for the Future