Indiana General Assembly Legislating Hate and Censorship?

Sorry to see the following headline:

 Indiana lawmakers revive bill at center of book-banning dispute for 2023 legislative session

 A revived proposal from Indiana lawmakers that would allow librarians to be held criminally liable for distributing material deemed harmful to minors is among the first education bills filed for this year’s legislative session.

I suppose we could not be saved from the same kind of thinking that has infected other states, we are almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. See my posts here and here. The article states the proposed law only attaches liability to material already obscene under state law. Whoever heard of a school library having books legally obscene? More right-wing nutcase nonsense hiding a fear of education.

More importantly, I am not sure how - other than creating a hysteria among Indiana's judiciary - this law survives this bit of the Indiana Constitution:

Section 9. No law shall be passed, restraining the free interchange of thought and opinion, or restricting the right to speak, write, or print, freely, on any subject whatever; but for the abuse of that right, every person shall be responsible.

Hoosiers have the right to a free interchange of thought and opinion, regardless if the subject be race or LGBTQ rights. Free people means a mind free of governmental dictates.

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And even sorrier to see this one: Indiana lawmakers launch all-out campaign against LGBTQ Hoosiers.

The Indiana General Assembly has put forward a slate of hate — an onslaught of bills targeting LGBTQ Hoosiers and singling out trans kids. There is no other way to describe what we are seeing at the Statehouse. This is not one or two bad bills, this is a well-orchestrated, hate-driven campaign to push trans kids out of public life. 

This is unprecedented:

• Several bills would ban nearly all forms of science-based care available to trans youth, with potentially dangerous physical and mental health consequences. 
• Indiana lawmakers are trying to force teachers to out students, and censor in-school discussions of LGBTQ people and issues.
• Despite the First Amendment’s right to free expression, Indiana lawmakers are fighting to restrict how and when LGBTQ people can be themselves by limiting access to books about them in public libraries.
• In another effort to out transgender Hoosiers, several bills attempt to limit the ability to update gender information on IDs.

The language that we are seeing in these bills is the same language included in legislation recently passed in Texas and Florida, including Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

I do not understand the fear engendered by the transsexual. It is not as if they want to change us. For a party that used to tout individualism, the Republicans want a very homogenized America.

Consider Trans Panic and the Trans Literary Imagination by Angela Flores and published by Ploughshares. I learned something new about the law, something that I might be happy about, but which the all anti-trans legislation noted above I think only reinforces:

I couldn’t ever ground the story enough in Hila’s emotional interiority, though, even though I had a premise and a source of tension that gave my protagonist a reason for moving through her world. Why couldn’t I write close enough to Hila in order to tell the story in her voice? The reason, I realized, was because I was writing the story while in a deep state of what I call “trans panic.”

Trans panic, according to the American Bar Association, is a legal defense that allows a murder-defendant to claim that the discovery of a woman’s transgender identity “provoked him into a heat of passion,” causing him to lose his self-control and kill her. Since trans panic, however, isn’t a standalone defense but rather a defense strategy associated with the provocation and heat of passion defenses, the jury is responsible for determining whether a murder-defendant was provoked into a heat of passion by “reasonable provocation.” This means when trans panic is employed, the jury members are being asked one question: can you, as a reasonable person sitting in the courtroom, imagine yourself also losing your self-control and murdering a woman after learning she is transgender?

In that small space between reasonable and death is where it’s like to live as a trans woman in the United States, where “the jury” is a constant presence with doctors, politicians, teachers, lovers, family members, and neighbors all being empowered to judge the worth of my life. This is what I was reckoning with in 2019 while writing “Rush Hour.” I was in graduate school and still early in my own transition, navigating how to be a student and a teacher as myself. Trump was president and there were countless bills aiming toward criminalizing trans people being filed all across the country, and every month was proving to be deadlier for trans women of color than the one before. Myself and my imagination were consumed by trans panic, and I had inadvertently introduced “the jury” into my short story.

While I shopped in Dollar General the other day, a young Black woman was saying she had developed a sense about racism, she thought all Blacks had this, having had so much of it in their lives. This made sense to me. In the dark ages, when I was a Senior at Anderson High School, my psychology teacher had a poster saying: Being paranoid does not mean they are not coming for you. Blacks in this country know they may be coming for them. Jews have lived with this kind of thinking, too. Now, it seems trans people also know their lives are in jeopardy. Not a very Christian way to treat any of those groups. I would like to say it is not a very American way, except there is all that history of lynchings and shootings of Black and Jews that undermines our American commitment to all people being created equal. Why we fear people who intend us no harm escapes me.

I urge you to read the Ploughshares essay in full, then email that link around to everyone you can.

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