#Craig Olsten

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mira Lazine for Assigned Media:

For years, a beloved talking point among the far-right is the ‘gay agenda.’ It goes back decades, and has the implication that there is some greater conspiracy behind LGBTQ+ rights advocacy, forcibly turning innocent people and their families into an evil gay cult. There has never been any real evidence to support this, of course, and the concept of a ‘gay agenda’ has always been extremely nebulous at best in its exact claims. Nevertheless, its impact cannot be understated. The ‘gay agenda’ is a precursor to the modern variation of the ‘trans agenda,’ and both serve the same purpose in promoting a right-wing populism, serving as a small but important rhetorical tool for convincing the masses that marginalized peoples are out to get them. A great example of this comes from some of the most prominent people to popularize these terms - Alan Sears and Craig Olsten.

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Sears used to be the president of the ADF, and his influence permeated into cases the group advocates for. As the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) details, they’ve advocated for the criminalization of same sex marriage and for the right to discriminate against gay people on religious grounds. The concept of the gay agenda permeated into the broader homophobic advocacy sphere. ADF has used this term in opposing gay rights in Belize, and the organization has openly described itself as opposing the ‘homosexual agenda.’ Other organizations have widely used this term as well. ProPublica details how the Family Research Council has weaponized this concept in their work taking down laws criminalizing hate crimes. The term is widely used among conservatives �� the Daily Caller used it in a headline just within the last week, the Evangelical Christian magazine Decision Magazine published an article focusing on the concept, and multiple schools have faced parental and faculty complaints about specific books harkening to a ‘gay agenda’ that seeks to indoctrinate kids.

These terms slowly became more normalized among mainstream culture, with it becoming a more acceptable view among the right-wing to refer to a vague agenda among gay people. The agenda is believed to be inducting kids into a cult that forces them to adopt a “lifestyle” that perverts traditional, Christian values. In other words, the exact thing we hear used against trans people today. The gay agenda is really just a precursor to the modern concept of a “trans” or a more general “LGBTQ+” agenda. Sometimes this uses the same exact terminology as the ‘gay agenda’ claims, but even when it does not it ties back to a vague conspiracy among the left-wing to harm people’s children and change the foundation of society.

We can see how normalized this type of terminology is through individuals like Chaya Raichik, also known as Libs of TikTok. She talked about an “agenda that’s being pushed” in regards to kids identifying as trans, referring to “the Left’s agenda to groom your children.” The conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation has been releasing articles talking about how a trans agenda is trying to take over America, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who is notorious for promoting QAnon conspiracy theories alleging a pedophile cabal is running America, said that queer people are groomers aligned with the “pro-pedophile” Democratic Party.

Anti-trans Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) famously said that if you oppose specific bills of his that ban discussion of LGBTQ+ topics around children, you’re a “groomer,” a particularly dangerous formulation during a time where QAnon conspiracies were running wild. Elon Musk has also boosted these conspiracies, and has used his platform as the CEO of Twitter to normalize discussions of them on the website. The link between the concept of a gay or trans agenda and conspiracies about pedophiles running America is prominent, as the SPLC writes, with anti-LGBTQ sentiment as a core element of these conspiracies. While the grooming conspiracy and QAnon are not intrinsically the same, they do share strong links - enough that they elevate each other and can become indistinguishable in how the rhetoric plays out.

These conspiracies thus tie into other forms of bigotry. The SPLC continues in saying that anti-Semitism is a core element of QAnon, tying into concepts of all-powerful ‘blood cabals’ that seek to indoctrinate children to harm them in some way, often alleging that they’ll get sexually abused.

Mira Lazine writes for Assigned Media about the history of the right-wing’s obsession with conspiracies about the “gay agenda”/”homosexual agenda”/”trans agenda” to whip up anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment.