My guess are Hamas militants haven't helped the cause, either, leading many to equate all militant behavior with the vilest of militants:
Militant LGBTQ activists ill-equipped to handle growing backlash
Support for the LGBTQ community has declined, and activists have themselves to blame
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New polling data shows that support for LGBTQ rights is dropping precipitously in Canada — and while many queer activists will inevitably blame the far right for this development, the fact is that they themselves helped sabotage their own public support. Their abrasiveness and militancy has alienated the public, and though a strategic shift is needed, I fear that community leaders will fail to understand this until it is too late.
According to this year’s edition of the Ipsos LGBTQ+ Pride Report, which polled adults in 26 countries, support for queer rights has decreased across the globe since 2021. Several metrics suggest that the starkest changes occurred in Canada.
This year, only 49 per cent of Canadian respondents believed that people should be open about their orientation or gender identity (down 12 points from 2021), while support for LGBTQ people publicly kissing or holding hands fell to 40 per cent (down 8 points). Fewer Canadians want to see openly gay or bisexual athletes (50 per cent, down 11 points) or more LGBTQ characters on screens (34 per cent, down 10 points).
Canadians have been souring not just on visibility, but legal rights, too.
Only 54 per cent of respondents supported LGBTQ-inclusive anti-discrimination laws that guarantee equal employment, housing and educational opportunities. That number was 63 per cent just three years ago. And while same sex marriage and child adoption remains popular — at 75 and 70 per cent, respectively — these rights also saw concerning drops in support (down 7 and 11 points).
There has clearly been a global backlash against the LGBTQ community over the past two years — with accusations of pedophilia and “grooming” surging after decades of hibernation — but this is the first time that polling data has quantified its impact on Canadian attitudes.
The LGBTQ community needs to pivot. Hard and fast. Yet the militant activists who currently dominate the community seem ill-equipped to understand, let alone address, the rising challenges that threaten to undo decades of progress. In fact, they arguably are a major reason why this backlash exists in the first place.
Broadly speaking, you can conceptualize activism in two ways: war or public relations. Both approaches can be productive, depending on the context.
Radical activism, which tends to be warlike, was useful at the advent of the modern LGBTQ movement. The 1969 Stonewall riots helped queer people burst into the public sphere, for example. Yet the long march towards equality was primarily driven by activists who operated more like publicists or diplomats, and who cleverly built empathy for their cause. Though riots are often romanticized, you cannot build enduring social support by throwing bricks.
When gay men died en masse during the AIDS epidemic, scorned and abandoned by their families, activists responded by producing an enormous quilt to memorialize them. Each square of the ever-growing quilt told the story of an extinguished life. When the project was first publicly displayed in 1987, half a million people came to see it. And from this curiosity and mourning, solidarity grew. It was provocative, yet not confrontational.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, mainstream LGBTQ activists emphasized the common humanity they shared with everyone else. Members of the public were reminded that their loved ones, whom they cherished and were similar to, might be gay. By the early 2010s, same-sex marriage was even strategically re-branded as “marriage equality.”
This approach proved to be remarkably successful. For decades, public acceptance grew. People were charmed. Opponents won over. Positivity and patience, even in the face of adversity, simply worked.
It helped, too, that this style of activism operated on liberal notions of social justice, wherein individual liberty, neutral civil rights and equality under the law were heavily promoted. Such a framework made it easier for skeptics to accept the LGBTQ community, because it implied that no one was getting special treatment and that mutual non-interference between competing social groups was an end goal.
But then same sex marriage was finally legalized across the entire United States in 2015. Having won their ultimate symbol of legitimacy, the more conventional members of the LGBTQ community, including a large part of the professional class, drifted away from activism.
The voices left behind were marginalized, militant and resentful of their abandonment. As their influence within the LGBTQ community rapidly grew, they radicalized institutions and supplanted the rhetoric of “love is love” with the more antagonistic “Queer as in f–k you.”
Concurrently, western social justice advocacy was, at the macro level, being poisoned by a new moral-political framework, popularly referred to as “woke culture,” which prioritized sanctimony over persuasion. The progressive victories of the 2010s seemingly convinced many activists that their enemies were on the cusp of being permanently vanquished, for they assumed that history irreversibly marches forward. This intoxicated them.
Overconfident and arrogant, they decided that there was no need to persuade others — in fact, non-believers should be grateful for the opportunity to join the coming revolution. “It’s not my job to educate you,” was a common refrain of the late 2010s, muttered by activists who harshly policed allies through strict rules and hierarchies, and demanded compensation for the “emotional labour” of advancing their own rights.
Why these people felt clever for raising new barriers against the dissemination of LGBTQ-inclusive ideas will forever remain a mystery to me — though I suspect many of them saw their own morality as a kind of social capital which they could hoard. To make a religious comparison, they stopped behaving like humble evangelists preaching in the town square, and instead became high priests who jealously guarded access to the scripture.
While their bullying behaviour suppressed public criticism of progressive causes, it did nothing to address people’s underlying beliefs. Denied outlets to ask questions or discuss concerns, public discontent grew more pressurized, like a cyst filling with pus. Even moderate progressives, queer or not, silently bottled themselves.
Critics of the LGBTQ community caught onto this. By the late 2010s, new narratives percolated throughout the internet — ones where the queer community was portrayed, perhaps not unjustifiably, as lording and belligerent. As the open-hearted values of the “love is love” era were hard to besmirch, opponents argued that either the LGBTQ community had abandoned these ideals or had only superficially believed in them.
A backlash was fomenting. And it started much earlier than many realize.
Every year since 2014, GLAAD’s annual “Accelerating Acceptance” study has polled Americans about LGBTQ issues. Their reports show that support for queer rights improved between 2014 and 2016, before entering a period of prolonged stagnation. Buried within this research is a very important finding: younger Americans grew far less comfortable with the LGBTQ community toward the late 2010s.
The 2019 Accelerating Acceptance report found a considerable drop in respondents between the ages of 18 and 35 who could be considered “allies” (meaning that these people expressed very high levels of comfort with LGBTQ interactions). Between 2016 and 2018, the rate of “allies” in this population dropped from 63 to 45 per cent — the collapse was catastrophic among young men, whose “allyship” rate almost halved. But GLAAD never published age breakdowns after that report, making further generational analysis impractical. However, the aforementioned Ipsos polling data showed that male Gen Z respondents were less supportive than their Millennial counterparts with respect to many LGBTQ issues, suggesting that the trends of the late 2010s have only continued.
By 2020, the anti-LGBTQ backlash was finally noticed by the mainstream. Faced with a complex problem, progressive voices simplistically blamed the “far right” — an amorphous enemy which they failed to define, and which provided a convenient explanation for seemingly all of society’s ills. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, emphasized the toxicity of the Trump administration — even though the backlash was seemingly more pronounced among younger generations, where Trump was least popular.
Instead of looking outward, they should’ve introspected.
While more extreme conservative voices contribute to anti-LGBTQ sentiments, their messaging would have had far less traction had queer activists done their jobs better. By recklessly alienating the public for years, these activists provided opportunities for people like Daily Wire provocateur Matt Walsh to tap into unarticulated public resentments.
If the queer community could return to the diplomatic and image-conscious activism of previous generations, it would starve anti-LGBTQ activists of the outrage they feed upon.
But instead, queer activists only urge more militancy. Their revolutionary theatre is too emotionally satisfying. Their echo chambers, unassailable. Their grandiose pretensions conceal a certain fecklessness — for they claim that they want to secure their rights by any means necessary, but consider conversations with outsiders too exhausting. They take credit for the LGBTQ community’s victories, but accept no blame for its losses.
This is neither new nor unexpected. I wrote an extended essay about this exact topic four years ago, for IN Magazine, making many of the same points I’ve made now. Little has changed since. While there is growing dissent within the LGBTQ community, critics of radical activism are locked out of queer institutions and largely ignored by the mainstream media.
In 2021, a fellow gay writer and I lamented the coming troubles, which we could see from a mile away. We understood that every minority group is, at all times, held hostage by the caprices of the majority, so it confounded us that our community leaders would antagonize the public so thoughtlessly, like poking a sleeping tiger. We were afraid then, and our fears were justified.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/adam-zivo-militant-lgbtq-activists-ill-equipped-to-handle-growing-backlash
