Indiana GOP Push "Christian" Fascism

Hoosier Republicans waste public resources bullying our children

I was going to write about Ukraine this weekend. Friday marked one year since Russia invaded their sovereign neighbor, and the twelve months hence have seen the conflict split both the American left and right along unusual lines. As an opponent of imperialism, no matter the identity of the guilty party, I’m struck by the amount of support for christofascist Vladimir Putin’s war by members of the nominal anti-war left. I will return to this topic next week, events permitting, but first we need to address the faux-Christian fascism on display in the Indiana Statehouse this week.

On Monday, Representative Michelle Davis (Fascist- Greenwood) introduced HB1608, Indiana’s very own version of Florida’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law. The bill, in its original form, would “prohibit all Indiana schools and their third-party vendors from providing any instruction in kindergarten through third grades with the intent to ‘study, explore, or inform’ students about six topics: gender fluidity, gender roles, gender stereotypes, gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation.” At first glance, this may seem like a reasonable prohibition of sexual education in K-3 classrooms, but it is not. First of all, sex-ed is not being taught in any Indiana K-3 classrooms. Furthermore, State Senator Gary Byrne (Fascist- Byrneville) gives away the game with his own bill, SB413, which would extend this prohibition all the way through 12th grade.

The goal of such legislation is not, nor was it ever, to protect young children from explicit descriptions of sex acts. The purpose of the bills is to prevent educators from even mentioning that LGBTQ people exist. Timmy has two moms? Off limits. Teacher has a picture of their same-sex spouse on their desk? Illegal. Gay character in a book? Banned. Pep band playing YMCA at the high school basketball game? Well, that one might slide. The point is to instill in educators a fear that any discussion that so much as acknowledges queer existence might incur the full wrath of the law, expose them to litigation, or threaten their license and their livelihood. Having lost the battle over gay rights at both the US Supreme Court and the court of public opinion, reactionary Christian extremists are using the state legislature to stuff our LGBTQ neighbors and children back in the closet, lest their precious snowflake offspring “catch it.” You see, these folks do not accept the scientific consensus that sexual orientation is biologically determined, but believe same-sex attraction is a choice and a sin. And surely, if exposed to its existence, their little brood of breeders will be enticed by all the rainbows and glitter and shun Jesus in favor of a deviant lifestyle because it just seems so gosh darn fun.

And it gets worse. Davis’ bill would also force teachers and school administrators to “out” their gay and trans students to their parents, even if the child feared the repercussions of such an outing. According to the Trevor Project, only 37% of LGBTQ youth and 32% of transgender or nonbinary youth identified their home as an identity-affirming space. Additionally, queer youth are significantly more likely to report emotional or physical abuse at home. One in six have been threatened with or subjected to conversion therapy, a controversial form of “treatment” that is opposed by every major medical and mental health organization. These vulnerable kids, finally able to be themselves at school, could be sacrificed to their abusive parents if this law were to take effect.

Now, thankfully, the bill did not pass in its original form. The version that passed the Indiana House of Representatives 65-29 - including a yea vote from my representative and store-brand Ted Cruz lookalike Dave Hall (Fascist- Jackson Co.) - simply banned sexual education through grade 3 (which, again, wasn’t happening) and kept the above “accessory to child abuse” clause. Additionally, the bill not only allows educators to misgender and deadname trans students, but it specifically forbids schools from punishing teachers and staff for doing such, and requires written parental permission in order for the school to address a child by their preferred name/pronouns.

According to Indiana Youth Institute (IYI), there are approximately 3,350 transgender students aged 13-17 enrolled in Indiana schools. This is out of a total grade 7-12 student population of over 516,000. That is to say, Republican legislators in this state have seen fit to spend their time and our tax dollars singling out 0.006% of students, the very kids already subject to bullying and abuse by peers and parents alike. Hell, last year, they overrode Governor Holcomb’s veto to ban transgender girls from playing girls sports in the state, despite the fact that it would have affected ONE student since 2017. That’s hours spent in committee, two floor votes each in the House and Senate, a trip to the governor’s desk, and countless state funds spent on legal services to harass ONE. SINGLE. KID. It’s not like a dozen years of Republican supermajority rule in Indianapolis have benefitted our schools to the point where there is nothing else to worry about. Indiana ranks among the least-educated states in the union, among the bottom quarter in both teacher pay and per-student spending, and according to one metric is the single worst state in the country for “brain drain” - the outflow of college-educated residents to other states.

I’ve seen it all too often first-hand. For the better part of fifteen years, I managed a popular restaurant near the Indiana University campus. The majority of the employees I oversaw were college students. Year after year, class after class, I watched the most intelligent, driven, talented, empathetic Hoosiers get the hell out of Dodge before the tassel on their mortarboard quit swinging. Why would young, educated people remain in a state that told them in so many words that they, their friends, and people like them weren’t welcome?

But wait, there’s more. This session, the Indiana GOP wants to double down on the already-terrible voucher program. As if spending $240 million subsidizing religious education and private school parents in the 2021-22 school year wasn’t bad enough, Senator Brian Buchanan (Fascist- Lebanon) has introduced a bill that would expand the state’s Education Scholarship Account (ESA) program to every student in the state, a gambit that could cost more than $300 million annually. How should the average Hoosier taxpayer feel about funneling upwards of half a billion dollars a year to private schools of questionable quality, many of which are grooming another generation of religious zealots to persecute our queer kids? They’re building a wall between education and accountability, and they’re making us pay for it.

Let’s not pretend we don’t know exactly what’s going on here. The “school choice” movement has deep roots in the backlash to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. There’s a segment of the population that would rather tear down public education entirely than let their precious snowflakes encounter racial or sexual minorities. There’s another segment of the population intent on privatizing any and all government functions, including education. This unholy alliance has been working together to destroy public education since Brown. The racists get their segregation and the profiteers get their taxpayer money. And this phenomenon wasn’t limited to the Old South. Indiana was the last non-Confederate state to ban segregation at the state level and Gary, Muncie, South Bend, and Indianapolis schools all found themselves before the court for failing to appropriately desegregate their school districts. To this day, Indiana still suffers significant segregation in its classrooms.

Call this what it is. This is fascism. It was fascism even before Mussolini gave it a name. It didn’t suddenly appear and disappear between the World Wars. It went underground. Hid. Hibernated. Twisted and slithered and manifested itself in different ways. Make no mistake: in Indiana, it was there all along. Extending all the way back to the “Know Nothings” of the 1850’, through the KKK in the 1920’s, William Dudley Pelley’s Silvershirts in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, to the John Birch Society founded in Indianapolis in 1958, the same white, native-born, evangelical Christian extremism has long held a prominent place in our state.

It’s still here today. The hoods have been replaced by red caps, silver shirts supplanted by Punisher tees, Birch newsletters giving way to the right-wing media griftosphere. And if you think I’m being an alarmist, have a peek at this warning from the US Holocaust Museum and see how many boxes your local Republican politician checks. I see five checks just from this education discussion alone. It may no longer be fashionable to openly discriminate against Catholics, Blacks, and Jews, but fascism always finds a new scapegoat. Today it’s trans kids and LGBTQ families, tomorrow the teachers and educators who support them, the day after that - public education itself.

The game plan comes from the same authoritarian playbook they’ve been using for centuries. My favorite Hoosier author, Jared Yates Sexton, sums it up thusly:

“Educational control is the fundamental component of an authoritarian regime. Whether it was the post-Napoleonic reactionary regime that attempted to stave off further revolutions in Europe, the Confederacy in the United States, or the Fascists of the 20th century, it has always been the first target of the Right in terms of reinforcing and pushing control.”

And I bring this thing full circle all the way back to our buddy Vladimir Putin. For years, Putin’s right-wing Christian nationalist government has used disinformation, organized crime, support for fringe groups, and global corruption to attack democracy itself. In America, these efforts have been focused on exploiting existing deep divisions in our society. From elections, to higher education, to religion, to vaccines, to homeschooling, Russian money and misinformation flows through our system, our very freedoms turned into a weapon used against us. As Rachel Maddow brilliantly lays out in her podcast Ultra, this is the exact same playbook used by Hitler’s Germany in the leadup to US entry into World War II.

The global far-right: Putin, Orban, Erdoğan, Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Meloni, Modi, Trump and others, guided by neofascist thinkers like Aleksandr Dugin and Steve Bannon have adapted the authoritarian playbook for the 21st century. Imagine Goebbels, but with cable and satellite TV, internet, and social media, These autocratic ideals, after being laundered through think tanks, foundations, and complicit media, bubble up in statehouses around our country, including ours. Whether the Indiana Republican supermajority knows they’re reading from the same old totalitarian instruction manual, or whether they’re useful idiots (very useful; very very idiot) I do not know. But I do know that it is time for the conscientious parents, teachers, and students of this state to hold our gay and trans neighbors close - tell them we see them, value them, and support them - and let them live openly and authentically. It is the fascists that need to be stuffed back in the closet.