Bad Faith
Public rights, private faith, and the true meaning of Easter
A couple days ago, I came across this Washington Examiner op-ed whining with the utmost sincerity that the Fairfax City Council had passed an official proclamation declaring March 31 Transgender Day of Visibility which also happens, this year, to be Easter. This is not remarkable—TDoV has been recognized on March 31 since it was launched by Rachel Crandall-Crocker 15 years ago, Easter (having been bastardized from pagan traditions dating back to the Neolithic era) is recognized on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring Equinox, and the Washington Examiner is written primarily by (I assume) aging schnauzers dragging their inflamed bums across the keyboard for some momentary relief.
March 31 is also Cezar Chavez Day (every year), the 22nd day of Ramadan (this year), and the birthday of Selena (RIP). With only 365 days on the calendar and lots to celebrate, commemorate, or memorialize, this is just a thing that happens. As a means of manufacturing outrage, it struck me as particularly weak sauce destined for little traction.
Within 48 hours—following Joe Biden’s TDoV statement proclaiming “transgender people are part of the fabric of our nation”—the “controversy” had been boosted by the campaign of Donald Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, failed cooking show host Caitlyn Jenner, and a long litany of other ideologues who enjoy nothing more than writing headcanon of their own fictional victimhood where trans activists are, somehow, an inescapably powerful political force rather than a marginalized population with twice the rate of poverty and twice the risk of early death.
Like the decades-long “War on Christmas,” this openly bad-faith controversy is meant to construct a reality where a lack of Christian dominance is the same as Christian victimhood, fostering pluralism is the same as oppression, and declining church attendance is the fault of the same secular conspiracy that invented trans people (some of whom, it should be noted, are Christian themselves) instead of a willing exodus caused in no small part by the association between Christianity and anti-LGBTQ beliefs—a PR problem many Christians, such as the organization behind those “He Gets Us” campaigns, are keen to fix even as they fund and support anti-LGBTQ causes.
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The construction of this false reality is not limited to social media or Fox News—it is the primary modus operandi of the conservative legal movement which routinely invents scenes of its own oppression to blast holes into the country’s civil rights laws. The far-right Alliance Defending Freedom is the premiere playwright of this psychodrama, crafting artificial scenes of anti-Christian discrimination to wage war against protections for queer people using the same legal strategy of “religious exemptions” pioneered by a previous generation of anti-Black segregationists.
Consider 303 Creative v. Elenis, the Supreme Court decision last summer allowing a Christian website design business to turn away gay people despite never having designed a website, much less been asked to do so by a gay person. As The New Republic and The Washington Post found, ADF has a habit of representing businesses that were “created” shortly before the ADF challenged LGBTQ legal protections on their behalf as a means of weakening the reach of the Supreme Court’s opinion legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide:
An examination by The Washington Post of court filings, company records and other materials found that two of the three vendors cited in ADF’s September 2021 petition had stopped working on weddings, and the other did not photograph any weddings for two years. Three additional vendors represented by ADF in similar lawsuits elsewhere also abandoned or sharply cut back their work on weddings after they sued local authorities for the right to reject same-sex couples, The Post found.
Like the crocodile tears being spread over TDoV and Easter, these scenes are created by whole cloth to create an illusion of scarcity and contested interests in the public square. They are Sunday school dystopias of a secular regime where Christians who reject queer people have their children taken away and are marched off to re-education camps. They fear this (mythical) regime because it’s precisely the regime they’re enforcing against trans people and our families, right down to threatening to remove transgender youth from their parents’ custody and, once in foster care, “re-educating” them. They cannot fathom a world where people of varying beliefs and ways of life coincide because their fear is not oppression but the loss of cultural and political Christian dominance.
It’s why these contests are so frequently focused on battles between the legal right to privacy and the legal right to the public square. The right to same-sex marriage—like the right to abortion, contraception, and same-sex sexuality itself—has been grounded by the U.S. Supreme Court in the right to privacy. But invariably, we live in a society where nearly any private act has some public baring, whether it’s the pharmacist who wants to deny you access to birth control, the doctor who wants to deny you an abortion, or the wedding business that wants to deny the legitimacy of your love for your partner.
Back in 2020, however, the Supreme Court affirmed the first public right to a queer identity when it recognized discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity as de facto sex discrimination and, thus, barred in employment settings by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. While largely innocuous in the eyes of most people—who had actually assumed it was already illegal to fire someone because they’re gay or trans—the Court’s ruling in Bostock was greeted as apocalyptic by the right-wing legal movement precisely because it put gender fluidity and non-normative sexualities into a public sphere where they believe patriarchal Christianity should be dominant.
It’s why Senator Josh Hawley—husband to ADF attorney Erin Hawley who argued at the Court this week against the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone—called the Bostock decision “the end of the conservative legal movement.” If their ideology is forced to share space—in the workplace or on the calendar—with the recognition of any ways of living or being outside of it, its mission is already lost.
Consider the recent week-long fever over a Space Camp near Huntsville, Alabama. After a post on Facebook identified one of the staffers at this camp as transgender, at least three sitting members of Congress demanded she be fired—despite having no claim or evidence of wrongdoing. She’s literally just a trans person sharing “space” with others whose mere existence in public represents, as Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville put it, “a progressive agenda.” Because any given transgender person challenges the Biblical, essentialist gender roles at the heart of Christian nationalism, any given transgender person must be eradicated from the public square the Supreme Court’s own four-year-old legal precedent be damned (this Space camp employee was ultimately transferred to a different location).
Ultimately, however, that’s not enough. Having barred her from the public sphere, the Christian nationalist legal movement would also like the opportunity to govern her private life by denying her the opportunity to access gender-affirming medical care using the same legal precedents and pseudoscientific agitprop that have allowed them to ban abortion and, they hope, contraception along with it. The ADF and their allies know the border between private and public is porous at best, and liberation in your private life enables (though importantly does not guarantee) liberation in your public life. To act as the oppressor in the former, they must portray themselves as the oppressed in the latter.
In order for that to be convincing, however, the politicians and pundits alongside them need to help portray the wolves as the sheep, to help conservative Christianity identify as a victim by helping it pass as one. It’s why they’ve eagerly lept on this week’s idiotic spat over Easter knowing full well that Transgender Day of Visibility is March 31 this year and every year for the past fifteen, that its overlap with Easter this year is just a dumb coincidence, and public recognition of it is no more a threat to Christianity as most Christians perceive it than a neighborhood yard sale is a threat to Walmart.
But as I noted earlier, church attendance and religious affiliation is waning partly because most people see through this charade and don’t want to be associated with it. Facing the prospect of becoming a demographic minority, the white Christian then imagines they will be treated with the same coercion, discrimination, and subjugation they seek to enshrine when it impacts non-white non-Christians. ADF knows this well—nominally a “religious liberty” organization, they defended Trump’s Islamophobic travel ban and have recently started dipping their toes into litigation against workplace DEI initiatives and affirmative action. Disguised as debates about “religious liberty” or “free speech” or the sanctity of a bastardized pagan holiday, they are battles waged on behalf of power by those for whom power is a birthright.
“As an exercise of interpersonal or state violence,” writes the historian Jules Gill-Peterson writes in her new book (which I reviewed here), “trans misogyny operates through the logic of the preemptive strike.” In this way, trans misogyny is simply one iteration of a tool white supremacist patriarchy wields every day to justify and foment violence in the home, in the street, in schools, in prisons, or at the border. It marks any expression of agency in defiance of their power as a threat precisely because it’s power they’re defending and power concedes nothing—whether it’s as vital a private right as abortion or as ineffectual a public right as “trans visibility.” To point out that nothing is being taken from them is meaningless, because ultimately what they’re defending isn’t just the dominance they have; it’s the dominance they believe they’re owed.