When Gov. Mike Parson wants to downplay the ignominious history he’s about to make, he heads to the closet. It’s like a tell in a poker player who gives away his hand with a blink of an eye or a nervous tic. Parson is letting us know he has shame, but he doesn’t have the courage to own up to it.
Such was the case two summers ago. That was when a Republican state representative — Ann Kelley of Lamar — complained that there were “gay-rights†banners in the Missouri Capitol. They were there as part of a history display, one created by college students in Missouri, called, “Making History: Kansas City and the Rise of Gay Rights.â€
Keep in mind, the display was literally in a museum, the one that exists on the first floor of the people’s building, but for today’s spate of Missouri Republicans, the ones who seem to oppose LGBTQ rights every chance they get, the reminder of their bigotry was too much to take.
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Parson, or his minions, had the display about an important piece of Missouri history relegated to the closet. OK, it wasn’t a closet, but another building in Jefferson City, one that is away from the Capitol, one that doesn’t get much foot traffic.
The moment was a metaphor for what was to come.
Fast forward to last week. Parson headed to the closet again.
Behind closed doors, with none of the hubbub that normally surrounds the signing of legislation that Republicans have declared as a top priority, Parson signed two of the most hateful, anti-LGBTQ, pieces of legislation in the country. OK, check that. The bills — one that bans transgender children from participating in sports, and one that bans gender-affirming care for transgender children — are not much different than the ones passed in other Republican-led states, mostly in the South. That’s not because those states have a unique proliferation of transgender athletes or transgender children seeking care. It’s because their legislatures are willing to do the bidding of right-wing bill-writing factories that spread hate in order to appease some fervent part of their political base.
Here’s how Sen. Greg Razer, a Democrat from Kansas City who is one of the few openly gay legislators in Missouri, described Parson’s signing of the bills:
“Missouri Republicans in the legislature have now given the government new power to control people they’ve never met, over an issue they don’t understand,†Razer said in a written statement.
Indeed, Parson and his anti-LGBTQ colleagues, pretended to care about protecting children, but they never met with the children they wanted to protect. They never met with the parents who came to the Capitol week after week from all over Missouri to ask them to simply leave their children alone and allow them the opportunity to meet with their doctors and make health-care decisions as parents.
Parson and his fellow Republicans chose a different path: They used the long-arm of a tyrannical government to take away parents’ rights; to get between parents and their doctors; to fight mythical bogeymen as they rewrite LGBTQ history in Missouri.
That history, when it is someday written, and when it someday appears in a traveling display in the Capitol, will not be kind to those who trampled upon the U.S. Constitution in the name of stopping perhaps eight children from participating in high school sports and banned surgeries that have never taken place by using hyperbolic language intended to drive fear in those who simply don’t understand, or don’t want to care enough to try.
was born in Kansas City in 1966, the year I was born, to help promote gay rights in Missouri, and nationally. Parson could have read about it in the display he banned from the Capitol. Back then, and, well, frankly, for much of my life, plenty of us didn’t know that we had gay aunts or uncles, or grandparents or children, or colleagues, because we buried our heads in the sand, or listened to the fear spread by our political leaders.
The fight for transgender rights — that’s the T in LGBTQ for those who are wondering — isn’t much different. The transgender children around us, and their parents, are writing a new history, and like most elements of history for all marginalized communities, there is often a fall before an eventual, and inevitable rise, based on the simple love for humanity and acceptance of our many differences.
It’s going to be a bumpy road as that history is written. Just witness in Glendale, California, as a school board simply tried to pass the same Pride Month resolution it had passed for years, but right-wing fanatics fueled by fear shut down the meeting by resorting to violence. Or, closer to home, the same Christian nationalists who are seeking to control school boards created a stir outside a library in St. Peters because a librarian there didn’t fit their narrow definition of gender norms.
As long as men like Parson are signing such bills into law, and judges, like the one in Florida last week, are overturning them, the history will write itself in a competing narrative of victories and losses.
But make no mistake: Freedom will win. Love will win. In the end, Parson’s version of history will be relegated to the closet.