It Could Happen Here - The War on Trans People: Part 1, Evangelicals & Gay Marriage

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

In part one we look at the right-wing crusade against gay marriage and learn the history of the Evangelical organizations that lead the charge on anti-LGBTQ+ hate and political action. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, this is Garrison Davis from It Could Happen Here.

For this week of episodes, the team has put together a special group of episodes all focused on the broad topic of the escalating war on trans people. We'll cover historical background, the international TERF movement, and all the new anti-trans legislation trying to be made into law here in the United States. We won't have time to cover everything. It's only five episodes, but we tried to cram more stuff in,

and, you know, we don't want to make the episodes all two or three hours. So I'm sure we'll cover all these topics more in the future, but we tried to create five episodes here that kind of cover a lot of our bases. five episodes based on a kind of upsetting topic. So we tried to keep them more information-based and throwing in some jokes here and there, you know, but it is still not a fun, fun topic. So keep that in mind, but we've tried to space things out and not make them too long and not too depressing. So without further ado, here is episode one of the War on Trans People. of the war on trans people. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and in the case of this week, getting very angry at people

doing really shitty things to a specific subset of the population. All right, Garrison. Wait, isn't that every week? Well, no, sometimes we talk about other stuff like 3D printed guns guns but that ties in garrison take it from here i'm done for the week yes so welcome to could happen here we're talking about well one of the big it could happens here is it could happen here yeah in in relation to the

ongoing uh war on queer people in general um and yeah, that sure seems to be like it's happening. So here, here right now. But before we get to the actual right now points, I do want to do a little bit of background on how it's kind of gotten to this point in the past few decades and the various precursors to the current moment that has seemed to be really focused on trans people specifically. But for a long time, a lot of the focus was on protecting, quote unquote, the sanctity of marriage, which was one of the big talking points. And to help us talk about this fun and engaging topic. I asked on Kieran and Eve from the Kitchen Table Cult podcast to

assist us in this horrible endeavor. Greetings. Hi, and I'm sorry. Hi, yes, we are gays who grew up in that universe, so hello. Yes, as was I, as was probably a few other people on this call.

Yeah. We all have varying experiences growing up in the evangelical movement while also realizing, huh, maybe we are not straight and or cis children. So, yeah, but we're going to be talking about the escalating war on gay marriage and how that kind of moves over to trans people at a certain point. And specifically talking about kind of the combination of religion

and politics. Because this is something I've discussed before on my two-part Focus on the Family episode. And this really is going to tie into a lot of that stuff. It's a lot of the same people. But I would love for everyone else to kind of fill in the gaps where I have stuff missing, because I definitely have a good point on the Family Research Council side of things, and I would love for people to fill in the gaps on the other kind of stuff.

But yeah, we're going to start off by talking about Family Research Council and that whole kind of side of things. Oh, hey, Josh Duggar. How's it going? Oh, yes. Josh Duggar is coming up. Don't you worry. Both research and families, so this seems unproblematic.

I'm going to just mute things from now on, and, yeah, you guys continue. In terms of all of the save the children rhetoric, yes, Josh Duggar will be coming up. So, yeah. But I do want to actually open up with a quote from Mike Rosebush, who was the vice president of Focus on the Family from 1995 to 2004. And then a few years ago, he came out as gay and as a so-called affirming Christian who loves Jesus and endorses rights for gay people.

He left Slash Got F fired from Focus on the Family. Is he side A or side B? Is he in favor of the celibacy model or is he chill with marriage? He seems to be excited about fucking. Oh, okay. So he's side B. We like side Bs.

It is definitely the better side. But I want to start off with a quote by him just to kind of set the stage for how this type of thing kind of really got started for combining the evangelical kind of biblical

worldview with political organizing. So anyway, I'm going to read a quote here. Dobson, even more so than Focus on the Family, and that's James Dobson, by the way. Dobson, even more so than Focus on the Family, as an organization, strongly encouraged all evangelicals to support and express their values in the public arena. As background, before about 1970, evangelicals often confined themselves within their own cloistered communities. Political involvement was viewed as a secular enterprise and suspect at best, and this changed during the Dobson era. He and others encouraged evangelicals to learn and apply the biblical worldview.

The evangelical person was coached in applying the apologetics debate method in publicly sharing the biblical worldview. Voting in every local and national election became seen as a Christian's duty. So at Focus, I learned that the evangelical leaders like Dr. Dobson considered the Republican Party to be the political machine best equipped to endorse a biblical worldview. In delighted harmony, Republican Party strategists salivated to win elections by securing the evangelical vote. Thus, a mutual agreement was formed. The plan became that evangelical leaders would introduce a hot button issue onto ballots at every local and state election. Evangelical ministers would provide voting guides on how to influence evangelicals to vote for the

only correct Christian choice. In turn, the elected Republican candidate... I remember those. Oh yeah, oh yeah. In turn, the elected Republican candidate would champion the corresponding biblical worldview, and this strategy worked. And what was the most reliable hot button to place on the local and state voting ballots, something that would ensure evangelicals in mass to show up to vote?

Yep, anti-gay rights bills. Gay rights were viewed by evangelicals as a threat to the biblical family and society in general so yeah that's kind of how i want to open up in terms of kind of the shift in like the 70s and 80s and especially in the 90s from kind of evangelicals being pretty divorced from like political mainstream action to them becoming a crucial part of the republican machine and this kind of circle that completes itself at this at this like at this point afterwards because yeah this combined with a whole bunch of save the children rhetoric and like saving the family like like the unit of the family as a sacred thing to protect it's really like that that idea really

carries over now into into the trans stuff uh because obviously they kind of lost a lot of the stuff they wanted to do on gay marriage after a long a long fight you know decades and decades but it's still the same core idea at the heart of it yeah i just want to put an evergreen footnote on all of that and say thanks and fuck you to phyllis schlafly for getting us down that road yeah yes yeah that was like blame can definitely be passed around yeah like like originates there like i mean like before all of that like the evangelical church was not even united on the idea of abortion being bad. Like, we have come so far to merging these universes in this really fucked up little marriage that they got going on.

No, and you cannot divorce the ideas of, like, the escalating war against abortion, and then also, like, with the save the children, like, protect the family idea, these these are the these are the same issues like these these do go together in terms of people you know making this like fake version of the family that they are swearing to protect uh whether that be from gay people or that be from you know women's bodily autonomy or you know women's rights or like like feminism all of it's in the same is in the same package it's like that meme of like two pictures and pims like these are the same picture like

it's literally yeah it's the same exact rhetoric and it's just like reskinned slightly to for whatever topic of the day the the The other big thing I want to mention before I get into Family Research Council is the 2004 book Marriage Under Fire by Dr. James Dobson, which was definitely one of the other key points in escalating the idea of the culture war and that type of more like

almost like tactical rhetoric it's all yeah it was definitely it was definitely a turning point was this around the same time when Fireproof came out? oh I think so yeah it had to have been it was close yeah Fireproof and all that came out between like 2004

and 2006, 2007 so that was all around the same time period because they were losing, like you said earlier, they were losing the battle against gay rights. Yeah, because that was around the time Queer Eye was coming out. That was when they were starting to get nervous that maybe they could not stop this particular forward slide. But yeah, on the back cover of their...

Robert, do you have something to say? No, I was just thinking back to that period of time when it seemed positive progress in that regard, seemed inevitable and unstoppable. That was nice. I think the note on martial language

as used for this is really important here. This is a battle. It is under fire. Like, that is something that was definitely employed to the fullest. On that point, I'm just going to read a little bit of the back cover of Marriage Under Fire. Here we go. In this succinct analysis of the issue, Dr. James Dobson presents a compelling case against the legalization of marriage between homosexuals and the dire ramifications our nation could face. Same-sex marriage will destroy the fundamental principles of marriage, parenthood, and gender.

Families will be increasingly unstable as their definition expands to incorporate multiple moms or dads, in quotation marks. Moms or dads In quotation marks Legalization of gay marriages Will lead to polygamy And other alternatives to one man one woman unions The divorce rate will be higher Making our children less safe Marriage under fire provides the foundations

Of a battle plan For the preservation of traditional values In our nation Our response cannot be clearer The well being of the family and thus our nation hangs in the balance. Now's the time to speak out in defense of marriage and the American family. So yeah, it is

particularly the battle plan, right? You know, one thing I really loved during this time was the like libertarian Christian response to this kind of conversation where they're just like or we could just, you know,

not have marriage be tied to the state at all. You know? Oh yeah. Yes. That was great. I do remember that. This is the, like,

this is the backup plan for like, okay. If like, if marriage, you know, gay marriage goes forward, then we can just like do that. If we want to,

you know, just like completely eliminate. No, absolutely. Yeah. I, I absolutely remember that, that type of rhetoric even even yeah even around like 2013 when like the supreme court cases were going forward they were like really set on like this is like you know last resort we have to make sure that make sure that it like like like church marriage is just completely separate which even that still is the case in like a lot of places. Like churches still,

in a lot of states, like reserve the right to not marry people. And you can only, you can do it through the courts, but not through the church. There's also the subtext in that that I think should be unpacked,

which is that the multiple moms and dads kind of image that's given is not a signal of like the non-traditional family being bad but more of a um there was this myth that was pushed really hard in the conversion therapy circuit that like if you didn't have a good father figure you were gonna be gay yeah you're you know if you didn't have a good relationship with your mom you're gonna be gay so like having this as like this these coded statements in there are giving the clue of like we're trying to stop the cycle we're trying to not create more gay kids yeah um and

that's why this is important yeah i was reading a lot um earlier today from the heritage foundation because i remember them being a key part of... I'm so sorry. They definitely are the other big part of this. It was so bad. And their whole thing was like, you have to have a mother and a father. Otherwise, everything is terrible. And then you get gay kids. And that also

goes into the whole other theory that was like, well, which I think Robertson either made up or repeated was like, well, people who are gay were abused as children. Yeah, that is that is definitely. And then, of course, all these all these evangelicals are also all like beating their kids. Yeah. It's like, well, which came first?

Were you abusing your child because they were gay or because you make them gay? I mean, I was and I i am but i don't think they're related in the sense that you being gay is is the is is the well i mean one of the triggers for the parents but it's not the causal relationship runs the opposite direction right anyway um we are gonna take a break and hear from all of our lovely sponsors who don't support child abuse, probably. Well, I mean, unless it's unless it's. Which which does, you know, does run that island off the coast of Indonesia where you can hunt children for sport. But we prefer not to see that as abuse and more to see it as...

Robert, I think you have to bleep that. No, no. Garrison, we're not going to bleep an ad. That's what sponsors this show is **** Child Hunting Island, which... Yeah, you cannot say that. Is it designed to just make more gay kids? Well, it's designed to make happier billionaires, Eve. Oh, okay.

Yeah. There's nothing Elon Musk loves more than hunting children on a private island reserve off the coast of Indonesia. And like Elon Musk, you too can hunt children if you buy...

Anyway, here's the act. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist

and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend, and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Yes, we are back.

And now we're going to move on to probably the most unfun portion of the show today. FRC, the Family Research Council, I'm going to actually talk about what they are and what they did and how they're kind of important in the evolution of rhetoric and various other stuff. So yeah, Family Research Council emerged from a 1980 White House conference on families that James Dobson kind of co-led

with the President of the United States. So that's fun. Yeah, so he met and prayed with a group of eight Christian leaders at a Washington DC hotel, ultimately leading to the creation of the Family Research Council under the direction of Gerald Regener. That's how I'm going to say it. That's how I'm going to say his name because he doesn't deserve respect, so I'm not going to Google it. And it became a division of Focus on the Family in the late 80s under Gary Boyer. There's a whole bunch of complicated tax stuff because Focus on the Family can't get too political because then it'll sacrifice their

tax-exempt status. There's a whole bunch of really shady stuff happening between Family Research Council and Focus on the Family proper. They're not doing any lobbying. Yeah, in terms of who runs what and what crossover there is with the Family Research Council and focus on the family proper. They're not doing any lobbying. Yeah. In terms of who runs what and what crossover there is with the leadership, they're basically

the same organization, but they are legally separate and kind of have different operating strategies. But they really are like... To be fair, lots of orgs do this. This is not unusual. No, it's not unusual, but it's important to know they basically are like

like they are they are very linked like they are like like sibling organizations so yeah this is uh this is uh the uh gary boyer the guy who took over in the late 80s of what was also the under was the undersecretary of education and a domestic policy advisor to president reagan um so again already like fully fully tied into the Republican machine. So Boyer brought in several anti-LGBT researchers who pumped out defamatory material about queer people. Robert Knight was a longtime conservative writer and journalist and the kind of major propagandist against LGBTQ rights. He served as the FRC's Director of Cultural Affairs in the 90s up until the early 2000s.

While working there, he wrote, along with some Focus on the Family editors, a 1999 booklet called The Homosexual Behavior and Pedophilia. This is a very common thread in all their stuff, is that

gay people were abused as kids and gay people therefore are wired to also abuse kids. It's part of this cycle that they co-opted a whole bunch of research on it that they misrepresented that all of the researchers who did the actual stuff was like, no, you're totally

wrong. It's this fallacy bingo right here. Yeah. I talked about this a little bit more in depth in the Focus on the Family episodes for Bastards, in terms of the actual research they used. But yeah, it is. One of the remarkable claims inside the 1999 booklet was the assertion that, quote, one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws

and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the prophets of a new sexual order. So that's great for the late 90s. I heard that as prophets with an F-I-T-S. That is, yeah. Not prophets, P-H-E-T. P-H, yes, P-H. This is just libertarianism.

Basically, yeah. Yeah. Basically, yes. For some reason, you cannot find this pamphlet on the FRC website today. I wonder why. Shocked. Yeah. So Boyer left the group in 1999, and then FRC had two presidents emerge, and one of them kind of resulted in becoming the effective power of the rights mailing lists in terms of getting political change. Yeah.

Kenneth Connors was a Florida attorney and a leader in the pro-life movement. He served as president in the early 2000s. During his kind of tenure, FRC's agenda focused mostly on abortion and then also a traditional marriage of other stuff was like religious liberty which means christian supremacy not actual religious liberty um and then like uh like uh protecting parents rights right protecting like parental choice um which we'll talk we'll talk more about in the future like how do they define traditional marriage is this involving like dowries and land transfers and treaties i i believe they just i believe they want one man and then one woman and uh the woman doesn't

really need to actually want it but as long as the man wants it then it's fine um i think that's and are they like the catholics where they believe it has to be for the purposes of procreation I mean they're part of the mainstream evangelicals there's definitely there's like the courtship idea so yeah they are they are for that but it's

I don't know it is it's a very like patriarchal thing I'm playing dumb here but like because these are these are like important distinctions that need it depends on congregation to congregation right like like the kind of the stuff that i grew up with wasn't super focused on tons of on having tons of kids actually um in fact they kind of preferred just keeping it capped off at two kids because you know the more you had, the less loyal you were to the church

because you had to focus more on your kids, actually. So it does really depend on congregation to congregation. I think Family Research Council tried to keep themselves open to lots of interpretations so lots of people could glom onto their stuff. So they didn't get super specific around the role of child rearing and that kind of thing. I think it's important to note around this time or a little before it was when pope john paul's

theology of the body was coming out which is this tome um that's basically getting into like why you know the death penalty would be bad and why abortion is bad and there's all this like sanctity of the body and the body existing and then like the sanctity of sex as for the purposes of procreation pleasure that was definitely a key point in the yes in the atmosphere at this time that was definitely a key point is that sex is just for making kids like that is definitely like a big a big part of it which like they don't actually really believe but they say right because like if you look at all of like the all of the extra like the people like all like these leaders like are not like faithful to their wives by any chance they're not an accidental side effect kids are

the point no yeah um but i think it is like it is interesting like the amount of stuff that's around like parental choice and like parent rights which will come up over the course of the next episodes of the series i'm i'm right now writing episodes about the current like uh book bannings going across the country and a lot of that is tied to like this idea like parents rights over their children um like they decide what their children gets to read so this is all we don't know anything about that i've never heard of that before in my life that's definitely not also tied up with a bunch of the stuff happening in florida right now that's in my life. That's definitely not also tied up with a bunch of the stuff happening in Florida right now.

That's definitely not the right. It's definitely not related to Mike Ferris at all. Yeah, no. Yeah. I mean, really like, yeah,

I mean, this is sort of what we're getting at is that the, the, the modern anti-trend stuff is they're just playing all of the sort of greatest hits of the NDA stuff, like the bathroom stuff. And the CRT stuff. Yeah.

It's all the same. I don't worry. I'm planning to tie this up in a nice little bow. Sorry for jumping ahead. Just give me like 15 minutes and I'll do it. So, yeah. Up next, we're talking, starting in

2003, they changed leaders again and this is where they really kind of evolved into their current form with Tony Perkins who became president of the Family Research Council in 2003. Prior to that, he served two terms as a Louisiana state representative in the 90s. And even when he was president of Family Research Council, he served two years as state representative. He's also a former police officer um and a television news reporter so overall just sounds like a quite quite the dude um yeah he he authored a whole

bunch of you know like all these guys writing tons of like christian books that get published by like weird christian publishers um he also served as the senior pastor of a, of a church in Maryland, um, called the Hope Christian Church. He, uh, and he was, he was a leader of an effort by white and black religious right preachers to work together against LGBT equality, specifically them but like the perkins really tried to like reach out on that front to get like that coalition going which was kind of unique at the time so yeah a big part of of frc's strategy is to pound home the false claim that queer people are more likely to sexually abuse children other than heterosexual people um this is uh yeah this is this is not scientifically true. You can look up like stats and you can look up, you can look up like the American Psychology Association has done a lot of research on this topic

because it was such a big point in the early 2000s that people had to like talk about it. Yeah, so like it's like one of these things that like was a myth, you know, ambiently as a scare tactic and a slippery slope fallacy. But I think there's also it has its roots in a particular misunderstanding of Romans 2 about the pedophilia that was happening in the Roman Empire and speaking out against that. Yeah. And not specifically against like consulting adults.

This is a Bible passage. consulting adults even this is even yeah even even like the old even even in the old testament a lot of new people going into like the actual translations of stuff and like even like leviticus um it is definitely pointing towards it being about specifically like fathers not abusing their like like you know like prepubescent like sons who are like more like androgynous like it is specifically targeting like this type of idea. It's not, it's not against like gay men who are like adults. Yeah. There's, there's this theological conversation on the right that was

happening that kind of was like trying to account for that historical context and was like, it's both clearly it's both. Cause they go together. Right. And obviously like we have to find a way to justify demonizing gay people in order to protect the sanctity of marriage so we have to like

save the children in multiple ways so Perkins has continued to defend the kind of gay men as pedophiles idea he had a televised debate on MSNBC in 2010 about this so like yeah that's i mean that is like 12 years ago at this point but still 2010 feels much more recent than stuff you know talking

about like the late 90s um yeah debating with the southern poverty law center like on the issue of gay rights i remember that now yeah yeah so some other anti-lgbt kind of propagandists at uh at frc includes peter sprigg who joined in 2001 um he authored the brochure called top 10 myths about homosexuality which was pretty popular around the time um such claims inside the book include that like x-gay therapy or conversion therapy works. Sexual orientation can be changed. LGBTQ people are mentally ill because being LGBTQ makes you ill. And that the sexual abuse of boys by adult men is more common than consensual sex between adult men,

which is obviously not true. That is quite... I have questions. That is quite the... So many questions. That is quite the stat. And like Spriggs' sources are a mixture of like junk science issued by groups that support

conversion therapy and also legitimate science quoted out of context or cherry-picked, which is a long-used tactic by anti-gay kind of groups to bolster their claims and their general rhetoric, right? If you mix in a hint

of truth it can make all of your outrageous stuff seem more like legible um we knew that from the screw tape letters yeah no like one of yeah sorry one of one of his better books i actually enjoy the screw tape letters i think it's clever it's pretty fucking funny it's good but also like just like an easter egg for those who know what we're talking about. He was extremely kinky. Carry on. Anyway, one of the main researchers they kind of misused research for was Judith Stacey, who has since issued lots of public statements condemning what Family Research Council advocates for

and has endlessly requested that anti-gay groups stop misrepresenting her work. Yeah, so we're going to jump forward to 2008 because this is, of course, the election of Obama has really kind of frightened a lot of people. This is when Dobson sent out that letter detailing what a post obama future could be in which he included gay marriage as a part of like the the dystopian

nightmare he was imagining this is the future that gay people weren't yeah um and interesting uh just an interesting thing on sprig here he was uh he was um he was on msmdc again which i mean maybe we should stop maybe we should stop inviting these people onto news channels but anyway um spring responding works spring responded to a question about allowing non-american same-sex partners um of american citizens to immigrate into the states by saying i would prefer that we export homosexuals from the united states rather than import them um and saying I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions on homosexual behavior. And then when asked,

should we outlaw gay behavior? Spriggs said, yes. So yeah, it's very much a clear mask-off thing. They just don't want it around at all. An idea I'm going to tie this more towards the end of the series with the trans stuff is the idea of queerness as like a contagion.

These people having to like – the brutality is justified in their own heads because it's like this idea that queerness can spread and it can infect children. So you have to contain it and any action taken against it is justified because it's like you're containing a virus. And any action taken against it is justified because it's like you're containing a virus. And it's like this is really what kind of makes them feel so justified and righteous in every action they do. So, yeah, including outlawing gay people, including exporting them from the United States, a blatantly fascist idea. idea so yeah um frc also worked unsuccessfully to continue the don't ask don't tell uh policy um this was up until like 2010 so that was that was a bit definitely another thing they tried to focus on but the slide well you know the progressive side actually was happening around that time uh it is you know since kind of stalled something interesting about that yeah earlier today yeah oh yeah so i was again looking at heritage foundation

because that was the heritage foundation was like my big kind of go-to when i was growing up in the 90s and 2000s and doing speech and debate and apologetics camp and all that shit. And I was like, well, what was their take on Don't Ask, Don't Tell? And they, in the early 90s, were very, very against it. Yeah. In 93, they had like this paper published and they were very against it because they were like, well, then you won't, then you'll still have gay people in the military. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. then you won't then you'll still have gay people in the military yeah absolutely in the military

yes they're like they will they will be like it'll be bad for the unit cohesion there will be sexual abuse as if that wasn't already happening there will be like all of these terrible things happening in the military that couldn't possibly happen couldn't possibly be happening otherwise it will like weaken combat effectiveness is the line that uh family research council used yep yep yeah so there was definitely a shift in like the 90s where a lot of these evangelical groups were against don't ask don't tell because yeah it still allowed gay people and just they didn't say anything but then as they saw progress happening they're like okay this is better like, okay, this is better than nothing? This is better than

them being openly gay? So they kind of switched gears towards 2010. They're just grasping at anything they can. I think it's time for another break, and then we will kind of finish this off with some other not fun information.

But yeah, let's do an ad.'s let's see let's see what our our lovely sponsors at has to say well his big thing is trying to get volunteers together to raid child hunting island off the coast of indonesia um like a counter raid yeah yeah you can you can volunteer to go fight in ukraine yeah you can volunteer to go fight in Ukraine or you can volunteer to help take down this child hunting island

so that can run it you know it would be fun to have all of like the food delivery services have their own like private militias

that take each other out that's the world we're moving towards Garrison I mean the post office already does so why not why not the yeah

yeah arm everybody everything should be a military. That's the whatever podcast this is. Definitely the solution here. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter.

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows., presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not.

Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head,

search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. And we're back, and we are still talking about my favorite topic, which is the Family Research Council. During the 2012 election cycle, they donated about $208,000 to 80 federal Republican candidates, saying that they're using the money to strategically be used to support pro-family candidates and pro-family issues and elections and ballot incentives across the country. Yeah, so this is just, you know, in terms of, you know, keep the pro-family angle in mind.

You know, they continuously were always donating money. 2012 was the highest one on record. And I don't think they've even matched that since then. It was pretty high because that was Obama's second term. So they were definitely trying to really, really organize. Because this was right before 2013 when the Supreme Court was going to be ruling on gay marriage as well. So, of course, it didn't get finalized until 2015, but they were starting to hear cases. I'm going to kind of briefly go back

to James Dobson here. J-Dob. Reference if people did not listen to the Behind the Bastards ones. He's an evangelical Christian author and self-proclaimed psychologist who found... If you don't know who James Dobson is, please

preserve your innocence and just quit. Just go. Enjoy it. Don't know. Log off now forever. Log off now. Just don't know who James Dobson is, please preserve your innocence and just quit. Like, just go. Enjoy it. Don't know. Log off now forever. Log off now. Just don't know. God, I do love the idea of a self-proclaimed psychologist. That's the energy I want to bring to 2022. Child psychologist. Yeah.

I know what kids need. They need to be on hunting island. And this guy doesn't even believe in like uh child development like no he doesn't he doesn't look child development but also you do know that i'm getting a phd in parapsychology right i know garrison we're paying for it yes this podcast is going to have the highest rate of doctors uh of any podcast on the internet other than the one that our friend kava does anyway um i i will be happy

to be invited back onto kava's podcast as a doctor in parapsychology i think i'll be able to offer some really unique insights okay any anyway um dobson found and focused the family in 1977 um which is unfortunate because he could have just watched star wars but instead he did he doesn't he hates fun We knew he hates fun. That is a key part of his ideology. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, he's a founding member of several

anti-LGBT hate groups. Family Research Council being one of them. Also, he is a founder of Alliance Defending Freedom. Fuck ADF. Yeah, he got two under his belt. The organization, which is now based in Arizona,

became a very powerful kind of fundraising behemoth dedicated to fighting so-called marriage equality for queer people and trans-inclusive non-discrimination protections. And a big part of the thing that they were fighting for was enshrining a, quote, right to discriminate against LGBTQ people in

state law. All the stuff around what if a baker is forced to bake a cake for all of this nonsense. That's an ADF case. That's an ADF case. That is Dobson. He started that kind of thing

yeah so I'm gonna now have a little fun though because we're gonna jump ahead a little bit just to kind of get the rhetoric kind of nailed down on what kind of house stuff we're gonna start shifting towards the trans stuff at this

point but 2015 But we're going to start shifting towards the trans stuff at this point. But 2015, after the Supreme Court ruling for nationwide marriage equality, Dobson had this beautiful, beautiful quote. I had this black cloud over me on June 26th when that decision was handed down. And I was contemplating this foreboding, this black cloud. It hit me like a ton of bricks. The decision was not really about gay marriage. It's about everything else. It's about the entire culture war. It's about control of the public schools and it's about

what's happening in universities. It's about the economy and it's about what business is and it's about the military and it's about medicine. It's about everything. We lost the entire culture war without one decision. The gay marriage thing was just a part of it, but it's going to touch every dimension so this is what we like to call foreshadowing i wish that was true um but in terms of yes in terms of kind of how this gets expanded to like businesses schools universities medicine i just love the histrionics that they start kind

of focusing on in terms of like well we lost this culture war i guess we got to move on to the next one which is you know the even more freakish thing which is oh kids wanting to kids realizing that maybe they have a different views on gender so that's the next kind of like rotating target that that that they that they move towards. So, yeah. Earlier that year, Dobson laid bare his fundamental confusion on what it means to be LGBT. He claimed on his radio show

that being bisexual meant that you have orgies, which I mean, not... I mean, how old is he? Okay, so... We wish. Yeah. Yes. This makes everything so much more complicated.

Yes. He also blamed in 2012 Sandy Hook Massacre on queer people because the nation turned their back on God. It allowed judgment

to fall on us, which is why I said it happened. That's one of the interesting splits in the right between the people who think it's fake and the people who thought it was queer people's fault. Yes, yeah, it's because of the queer decadence. Yeah, they've all come back together now, but it was a real split. And one of the other great things about Dobson is, so after

my Behind the Bastards episodes on Dobson, literally like the day after it dropped i found this extra little disturbing nugget of info about him um in an old blog post titled is my child becoming homosexual dobson recommends us dobson recommends things that a father can do to help his child fix homosexual symptoms fix Fix. Sorry. Including taking your child into the shower with you to compare penises. Wait, what? Yeah, it is.

Not good. Your child... I will quote from the blog. The boy's father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness He can play rough and tumble games with his son In ways that are decidedly different From the games he would play with a little girl

He can help his son learn how to throw and catch a ball He can teach him to pound a square Of a wooden peg into a square hole In the peg What? He can even take his son Into the shower with him where a boy cannot help notice that dad has a penis

just like his what only bigger oh my god you know what this reminds me of so that is a quote by Dr. James Dobson psychologist oh my god anyway So that is a quote by Dr. James Dobson, psychologist.

God, wow. Oh my God. Anyway, I'm sure there's nothing at all to... Hey, Jimmy Dabs, how's your son? How's he doing? How's that going? Are you talking? Nothing at all to kind of interrogate there.

Yeah. The other thing that I really love, and by love i mean don't love yeah um is that like the only gay people who exist are gay boys yeah they really lesbians and bi people don't exist at all like it's yeah this isn't a really interesting thing it's because it's about why would... It's about... If it happens to a woman, it's like, oh, well, they're a woman anyway. They're already not as good as men. I guess it kind of makes sense that they would do that. If it happens to a guy, you're like...

Well, Eve's sin, obviously. Why would you do that? You're part of the patriarchy. Why would you... You're supposed to exert power over women. What is wrong with you for not wanting that like there's a whole bunch of other like patriarchal stuff going on and like why they focus on that also because they undeniably find lesbians attractive like they can't like they can't help but find it hot so they definitely focus it more on gay men because

they find that more gross because it is like a defiance of patriarchy in like a different way you but stuff yeah and of course but yeah um yeah well and i think also this is the same reason why transmisogyny becomes such a huge sort of driver of the anti-trans movement because you know i mean you see this a lot also with we see this with non-christian like uh transphobes too but like the the the the ultimate sin you can commit if if you are if you are a person is or if if like yeah the ultimate sin you can commit against sort of the family is having someone who like being born and being seen as a man and then you know becoming a woman a woman and that's like that's you know that that's that's what trans misogyny is right it's about it's it's the specific kind of of trans sexist trans sexism that you get when you do that when you specifically like you know in in these people's eyes it's like you give

up being a man and become a woman and these they go ballistic over this because it's you know like it's it's it's it's rejection of patriarchal power and they you know and they they have to do all of this sort of like incredible pathologizing to explain why this would happen and ignore just like this person was always a woman. That's the reality of what's happening. It's a condemnation of your misogyny and your misogynistic behavior to like go join the victims of our hate. So like it has all of these these layers here yeah and it's gonna we're gonna get like right right right into trans stuff now because yeah and in 2015 supreme court ruling making same-sex marriage illegal throughout the united states

which uh sent lgbt well anti-lgbt hate groups into a furious uh reaction um family family research council was no exception and it started working in tandem with other groups to support hate groups into a furious reaction. Family Research Council was no exception, and it started working in tandem with other groups to support so-called religious liberty. Laws which allowed people who object to same-sex couples and just queerness in general

to deny goods and services to same-sex couples and just queer people in general. It is very non-specific. So, yeah. Also in 2015, Family Research Council faced its own set of scandals, referring to a friend of the pod, Josh Duggar, who was executive director of the Family Research Council

action political arm of the organization. It was obviously revealed that he had molested several... Saved the babies to your hard drive. Several children and yeah, had a lot of children on his hard drives. Sorry. So much that like,

even like the FBI was kind of surprised at how much he had. Like, when the FBI is surprised on how much child porn you have, you're like quite the bad guy. Yeah, you are quite the bad guy. When you surprise them. Have you read his

appeal case? I have not read his appeal. It's basically making it out to be like, there was this other guy who had access to that computer. Was his name Josh Duggar? No computer it was his name josh duggar no it's just like he's just like somebody else probably did it it wasn't me yeah so he uh resigned from family research council after posting a brief message on his website saying that he uh

resigned after a concerning events were made public i think he resigned from family research council because of the ashley madison account yes well yeah yeah he he resigned listing uh listed listing concerning events as the recent he's just not to ashley madison accounts got hacked and leaked and it was revealed that he had his. His email was also on there, yes. Yeah, yeah. I feel like that's what kicked it off, but that was around the time. That was, he didn't get, yeah. His sister's case got released to the press.

It is frustrating how, yeah, definitely the Ashley Madison thing was seen as more of a moral failing than molesting children and having tons of child porn that was definitely like within like the church and within within the kind of the whole like like church like network the ashley madison thing was seen as much more of a kind of like a egregious sin well because

that's infidelity and that's just like that destroys the entire you know nuclear family whereas molesting your siblings is just boys doing boy stuff see i i grew up a boy and i never i never did that i kind of i'm not sure what they never did that either so anyway uh back to any real boys write in and let us know please we all need to know this back to back to perkins um so perkins was elected uh head chair of the u.s commission on international religious freedom um in 2019 to 2020 which was a an independent bipartisan federal government entity established by u.s congress to monitor analyze and report on threats to religious freedom so who sponsored that fucking bill that's a good question uh over the course of this time he he continued to work at the family research council as well um including the annual family research council sponsored uh values voter summit

in 2019 i've been to those. the Values Voter Summit. They featured an anti-trans panel that illustrated the anti-LGBTQ rights shift to kind of storytelling as a way to further marginalize trans peoples and like the battle against affording care. Watch J.K. Rowling get invited to CPAC next year. Oh, God. The panel hosted like a multiple kind of anti-trans activists.

Lynn Mager was there. Two of Mager was there. Two of Mager's children identify as trans and they no longer speak to her. Andre Van Moll, the co-chair of an anti-LGBT hate group, the American College of Pediatricians Committee on Adolescent Sexuality

used pseudoscientific claims telling the audience that dissidence from gender dysphoria is the norm calling they use this weird problematic study that left like that left trans kids together with non-trans kids to study this idea of gender identity it's a whole bunch of like the same like you know how like they like in the early 2000s they were they were misusing like research to say like oh look how all of these gay people are all also all pedophiles also they have sex

with kids more often than adults like what no it's it's the same it's this it's the same type of thing um they also made the false claim that uh the majority of trans kids are also like diagnosed with autism um which makes it easier for them to be recruited into being transgender because they can be tricked because they're autistic. You can collect them all. This is like the, the, the then diagram of autism caused by vaccines is causing trans kids. Oh God.

Yeah. Also, also the idea that like trans affirming care causes more dysphoria, which causes more suicide, as opposed to the scientific reasoning that affirming care causes less dysphoria, which causes less suicide. You know,

a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of nonsense stuff. You can't expect a group that will not acknowledge the fact that having access to birth control as a way to prevent abortions would acknowledge any of this is real either. Yeah, no. I mean, yeah, the panel also featured uh kathy grace duncan from uh from the portland oregon-based portland fellowship which states that it offers a freedom to people from homosexuality um duncan claims that she detransitioned and is proof that transitioning is always wrong because that she detransitioned that means it's proof for everybody that everyone should yes because

trans people are a monolith yeah we're talking more about we're gonna be talking more about um the sort of how people who do transition get weaponized against trans people and again i also i also need to point out like just just immediately that like most people who do transition detransition because they are under immense social pressure too because society is enormously transphobic and then there are a small number of people who do treat who do treat detransition because it's not for them and good for them but yeah they get a very very small minority of those people basically get used as weapons by people who don't care about them other people get gender affirming surgeries and change their minds about it later you there's this whole movement of

you know women who are getting their breast implants removed what's the difference it's the same picture yeah yeah same picture another really fun another fun thing i do at least once a year is i go on to the focus on the family and family research council websites and why do you do that look at look at their entire like queer section that's really interesting because like like pre-2015 all of them are around gay people. Is my kid gay? What to do if my kid's gay? Is my kid showing gay symptoms?

All this stuff. And then post-2015, it's all like the gender issue. The cult of people trying to get your kid to become trans. Is my kid trans? Why is my kid dressing up in girls' clothes? It's such an immediate shift. How to know if your kid is sex entrenched. All of this homosexual like fear

stuff to immediately being scared about like the gender identity kind of movement and like the cult of transgenderism. Yeah, it is such a stark change. Heritage Foundation website is the same. I looked up when they added their gender page

and it was in 2017. Yeah, exactly. That was when they started going after trans things. Before that, the only thing was like, oh, well, it's actually okay that there's a pay gap between men and women. And in 2017, they were like trans. From 2015 to

2018, you see a massive explosion in all of these, in all of these, like, stuff about trans and, like, trans science, whether it be, like, the, whether it be, like, the answers in Genesis,

whether it be Focus on the Family, whether it be kind of the Heritage Foundation, all of this stuff. You can watch an immediate shift in the type of stuff that they start talking about.

I will just say I am a little glad they're doing that, not for reasons you think, but because this means that there are kids growing up like we grew up who know that this is an option now. Whereas like. That is true. We didn't know that it was an option until we got out. Yeah, it is.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but you can see the kind of the switch in stuff. There's a in the in a Family Research Council pamphlet written by Peter Sprigg called How to Respond to the LGBTQ Movement published in 2018. There's people with gender dysphoria or transgender identities are more likely than the general population to engage in high risk behaviors, which may contribute to psychological disorders or both. High risk of suicide exists among those who have already received gender reassignment surgery, which exists suicidal tendencies resulted in an underlying pathology. Wait, did the same people write the script of euphoria?

But yeah, a whole bunch of stuff around like Tom Perkins, Peter Sprigg. You, if you just look at all of this stuff, it's this is such a, such an explosion. Tony Perkins wrote a pamphlet called I Have a Girl Brain But a Boy Body for a Virginia kindergartner's transgender story thing that he was doing around 2019.

For years, LGBTQ activists wanted to keep the goal of luring children into sexual confusion under wraps. But now that they've hoodwinked a lot of the country on their agenda, these extremists no longer have to hide. In fact, they're increasingly bold and even boastful about their real intentions of recruiting kids. So in terms of like, yeah, it is an infection. It's a contagion that they're trying to like infect or recruit children um and again all of that kind of rhetoric is in a post like in a in like a in a pamphlet a call you know about about trans being about being trans saying i have a girl brain but in a boy body it's like the fact that this rhetoric is happening is going to convince kids that they fall prey to it like it's this whole this whole

thing that is such a such a marked kind of change. You can read the other titles include stuff like the regressive cult of transgenderism, all this kind of stuff talking about our country understands that Scientology is a cult, but we don't seem to understand how much the transgender movement mirrors cults like Scientology. It's all of the same stuff.

If the transgender cult is the best cult I've been in yet. Rates. I feel like we need to add that to the timeline of our podcast. Nobody will give me shit. I can stop doing my weekly injections whenever I want to. And you won't lose your friends.

Amazing. No, I will not. You can stop putting testosterone on at any point. That was kind of the bulk of the stuff I had gathered around specifically talking about kind of Family Research Council and how, you know, the change happened around 2018, 2017, 2016 from all of the stuff around, you know, protecting marriage equality, protecting, you know, the sanctity of marriage to changing. It's like it's the same save the children rhetoric, but now shifted over to gender issues. I mean, they're just moving the Overshine window because they can't win on the gay issue anymore. So they've just got to keep pushing in that direction.

But it's the same organizing forces. It's the same organizations. It's the same mailing lists. It's the same pamphlets. It's the same writers. It's all the people who wrote all the same stuff, just moving it over to trans things. So I just wanted to kind of lay this groundwork for us when we talk about kind of the ongoing just you know there was all these fears around you know gay people in the change rooms gay people in the bathrooms just gets shifted over to trans people in change rooms trans people in the bathrooms it's just this it's the just moving

it's just this like this turning of the clock that just shifts it over to the transgender o'clock time i don't i don't know where i was going with that metaphor but It's easier to pull... Parental rights stuff is on the rise in this community as a talking point, and so it's easier to pull that in with trans issues than it is with gay issues. Yes. Well, I think that we are running out of time, but

even Kieran, where can people find you online? Our podcast is The Kitchen Table Cult. You can find it at kitchen table cult.com our handle on twitter is kitchen cult pod i'm at blue pup boy on twitter and i'm at eve underscore etchinger um i would also recommend like if you want to have a like you know trans authors take on the transition the novel detransition baby is out there it exists it is again one person's take it's not a monolithic thing but it's a it's a good novel um and then if you want to learn more about the effects of the deconversion therapy universe um gary conley's

book boy erased is fucking great. Yep. Agreed. I just want to thank you both for coming on to talk about, again, one of the most fun topics. Our favorite people. Near and dear to all of our hearts. Featuring friends at the pod, James Dobson, and his urge to take his kids in the shower with him to compare penises. And our good friend, Josh Duggar. Save the babies to your heart drive. Save the children. Not like that.

Not like that. All right. That's the episode. you you you you You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.