Americans are “frustrated and anxious,” former Vice President Mike Pence said. The country is “in a precarious position,” said North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. And Glenn Jacobs, a former pro wrestling star and current mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, said “these are tough times.”
Related: ‘We can’t rest or give in’: Pence reiterates support for tough restrictions on abortion
What could be the cause of such distress? For Republican presidential candidates who spoke in Washington DC on Friday at a large religious right rally, the culprit was American society’s acceptance of transgender people and the broader LGBTQ+ community.
The language and images are extreme and full of conspiracy theories.
“We are facing the greatest challenge this country has ever seen, certainly in my lifetime,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley told the crowd of hundreds gathered for Faith & Freedom’s annual Road to Majority Policy conference. Coalition.
He described the challenge as “a new Marxism rising in this country,” a Marxism that tells Americans, among other things, “That there is no man and woman, that there is no not two genders. There are 2,000 genders and it tells our children that the way God created them is wrong.
“These new Marxists want to give America a new religion. They want to impose the woke religion on us. It’s the religion of transgender, critical race theory and open-border multiculturalism, and they’re ramming it down our throats,” Hawley said.
Held in the hotel where Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt, the audience of hundreds seated in his ballroom heard from several top Republican presidential candidates, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott and former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson.
Their appearances came at an inflection point for cultural conservatives. A year ago, they had seen their long-held dream of overturning Roe v Wade come true when the Supreme Court overturned the precedent after 49 years, allowing states to ban abortion. But in the area of LGBTQ+ rights, the movement has recently appeared to be on the back foot, with Congressional Republicans in 2022 helping to pass legislation protecting same-sex marriage nationwide, building on the Court’s creation of the right. supreme in 2015.
In response, groups opposed to the rights of the gay, lesbian and transgender communities have orchestrated a well-funded backlash to the expansion of rights – a backlash that is encouraged by extremists, has seen gay rights eroded in many states of the United States and includes a growing threat of violence.
“God hates pride. He hates pride in January, February, March, April, May and in June,” proclaimed conservative preacher John Amanchukwu at the start of the event, in reference to LGBTQ+ Pride Month which sparked laughs and crowd cheers in Washington.
The fallout has particularly affected the trans community in America. So far this year, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) reports that 15 gender-affirming healthcare bans for transgender youth have been signed into law, along with seven bills allowing or requiring sexual abuse of transgender students, as well as than a handful of other measures targeting drag performances or the school curriculum. In total, more anti-gay bills entered state houses in 2023 than in the past five years, according to the HRC.
Earlier this month, pollster Gallup reported a decline in public support for same-sex relationships, driven primarily by Republicans. Approval of the issue now stands at 64%, down from 71% last year, with just 41% of Republicans approving, down 15 percentage points from last year.
Last week, rights groups Glaad and the Anti-Defamation League found that at least 356 hate incidents directed at LGBTQ+ Americans occurred between June 2022 and last April, including a mass shooting in a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs that killed five people.
At the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, speaker after speaker made clear their determination to continue the campaign against trans-Americans.
“We will end the gender ideology that plagues our schools and ban chemical and surgical gender transition treatments for children under 18,” Pence said.
As governor of Florida, DeSantis has overseen a campaign against what he calls “woke ideology,” including a bill he signed earlier this year that bans gender-affirming care for minors, restricts its access to adults, and allows the state to temporarily remove trans children from their parents.
Polls show DeSantis a distant second behind Donald Trump, who maintained his lead in the Republican primary field by offering voters a familiar mix of conspiracies, charisma and promises to continue the policies he pursued over the course of his first term as president.
DeSantis refrained from attacking the Republican frontrunner in his speech, instead promising the Faith & Freedom Coalition audience that as president he would implement his policies in Florida across the United States.
“We will fight revival in schools, we will fight revival in businesses, we will fight revival in the halls of government. We will never surrender to the awakened crowd. We’re going to leave the woke ideology in the dustbin of history where it belongs,” DeSantis said.