Leave our children alone. Defend families. Save the kids.

Parents have been chanting slogans like this in recent days in Glendale, North Hollywood, Temecula and even on the steps of the Capitol, ardent with hatred that many in California thought was a thing of the past.

But as Sister Roma, she of the much-maligned Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, told me when we sat down for a few minutes on Monday, it’s not really the parents who fuel the hatred and everything old is new again anyway. Leg warmers, for example, are completely back.

“They cling to the last bit of power they have in terror,” Roma said

of the far-right agitators, just as ultra-cons did the last time California tried to purge its schools of anything indicative of gender diversity.

More than 75 laws banning a range of gender-related issues from talking about sexuality in classrooms to holding drag performances in public were passed this year by state houses across the country. Republican standard bearers, including Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marjorie Taylor Green, have caused anti-LGBTQ+ to hate their brand, and there is real concern that our current Supreme Court Justice Obergefell vs. Hodges, the landmark 2015 case that legalized the same, will destroy sex marriage across the country.

Hard to believe it’s 2023, especially since California has been here, done this, around 1978 with the Briggs Initiative, otherwise known as Proposition 6. Then voters considered giving school boards the power to fire gay and lesbian teachers and anyone who openly supported homosexuals. right.

The Briggs Initiative, named after then-Senator John Briggs, an Orange County conservative, also pitted LBGTQ+ rights against parental rights. The initiative taken

that allowing gay and lesbian teachers into classrooms posed a danger to children because such teachers would ‘recruit’ students into their ‘lifestyles’.

“I don’t understand why we have to make our kids sit in front of a gay teacher for eight hours,” Briggs reported in July 1977. “We can’t risk our kids.”

Sounds familiar?

“Save the kids” is nothing new, but a repeated attack, dusted and refreshed for a next generation and propelled through the QAnon social media channels to serve the goals of a far-right intent to undermine democracy and the shaky status- quo of current. Remember when we had to save the kids from the adrenochrome-drinking Democrats who ritually abused them?

under a pizzeria in DC?

If those who oppose diversity can’t outright try to ban people this time, they will ban the ideas, deliberately inciting adherents by confusing inclusion with indoctrination, and grooming with existence. Because really, who wouldn’t want to save the kids when the threat feels real?

Just like now, where the whole Briggs mess sprang from then

Florida, particularly in Dade County, where Anita Bryant, a pop singer better known for her role as a spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission, spearheaded a “Save the Children” campaign in 1977 to pass a law traits that protected gays and lesbians from employment and housing discrimination. She successfully argued that she had a right to control “the moral atmosphere in which my children grow up.”

Her campaign was a throwback to a decade of growing recognition of gay rights after the 1969 Stonewall riots. It sparked a national movement that picked up Briggs, with Bryant’s help.

Although Bryant’s campaign was successful, it drew strong backlash from California’s LGBTQ+ community. The night Bryant’s ordinance was passed in Florida, politician Harvey Milk, then a junior member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, led a protest of thousands on Castro Street.

After the Briggs Initiative made it to the ballot in California and collected hundreds of thousands of signatures, Milk was one of the most outspoken critics. In a memorable speech on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, he spoke of the need to keep California a place of hope and acceptance.

“The young gays in the Altoona, Pennsylvania and the Richmond, Minnesota, who come out and hear Anita Bryant on television and hear her story. The only thing they can look forward to is hope,” Milk said. “And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better future, hope for a better place to come when the pressure at home is too much. Hope everything goes well.’

That’s the Harvey Milk whose legacy was recently humiliated by board members in the Temecula Valley Unified School District, where a conservative majority refused to pass a new social studies curriculum because Milk was mentioned in a few pages of history material. That’s what erasure means: not letting future generations believe in hope for the oppressed, leaving them feeling alone and unequal.

Wednesday, Governor Gavin Newsom and State Atty. Gene.

eral

Rob Bonta announced

That

they are investigating Temecula’s action as a possible violation of state law.

The Briggs Initiative was ultimately defeated by more than a million votes, despite initial polls predicting easy passage. The tipping point was when former Gov. Ronald Reagan ran into it along with the then government. Jerry Brown and then president

Jimmy

Carter.

Which brings me to Monday and Sister Roma at the Capitol.

I met Roma in a room full of queer leaders at a Pride Month reception at the Capitol, where 16 LGBTQ+ activists were honored by the Senate and Assembly. Also in the chamber were the legislature’s LGBTQ+ powerhouses, where more than 10% of elected officials now identify as anything other than heterosexual.

It was a room you wouldn’t find in Kansas, Florida, Nebraska or anywhere else in 1978. In addition to Sister Roma, resplendent in a royal blue feather headdress, honored tennis legends included Billie Jean King and Rosemary Casals; Phil Collum, the first openly gay assistant police chief in Chula Vista; Janessa Goldbeck, a former Navy captain running for office in San Diego, and others you may not have heard of but who are living lives of service to make this state a better place.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have donated more than $887,000 to charities since 2000, including St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church Fund to an Immigrant Program, AIDS Housing Alliance/SF, and the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony. That is it

slightly more than the $1,500 they raised in 1980 at their first fundraiser for Cuban gay refugees. The sisters have come a long way, but have never strayed from their mission: to proclaim universal joy and atone for stigmatic guilt.

“I never came from a place of hatred,” said Sister Roma, whose blue eyes are kind and fearless.

“It really hurts” that people think she’s making fun of something, she told me. But “visibility without fear encourages others,” and so she and her sisters will continue to do what they do.

Each of the honorees walked the center aisles of the Senate and Assembly to receive valid resolutions honoring their work. Republicans walked out of the room

both times Sister Roma received her comments. And a few hundred protesters gathered outside, reportedly upset by the “mockery” that Sister Roma and her order represent to the Catholic Church, which, let’s not forget,

faces bankruptcies across California as the financial toll of sexual assault lawsuits mounts

S

.

But as Senate Pro Tem Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), the first gay woman to hold her post, told me at the front desk, there has been a “sea change” in who has power in California and there will be no turning back. are until 1978.

“This amounts to freedom,” Atkins said. Not just protecting, but promoting.

Earlier in the day, on the same steps where the Sister Roma protest took place, LGBTQ+ lawmakers announced they were pursuing a state constitutional amendment before the 2024 vote that would repeal Proposition 8, the 2008 initiative that banned same-sex marriage in California . Yes, it’s still in the California Constitution, despite being overturned by courts. It says, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns federal law on same-sex marriage, California could have a problem having that overturned proposal on its books. So as Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), one of the authors of the amendment, put it, “we must go on the offensive.”

That reminds me of another quote from Milk.

“Like any other group, we must be judged by our leaders,” he said, “and by those who are gay themselves, those who are visible.”

With activists like Sister Roma and elected officials like Atkins and Wiener in office across the state, we’re on the offensive. For all the hatred out there, born of the basest of motives and used to exploit parents, this isn’t Florida and it isn’t 1978.

In California, visibility and equality may not be perfect. But unlike leg warmers, closets are never coming back.