[troosevelt]

I think it's possible if not probable you are correct, but a lot of this is not as coordinated as you might think. Religious conservatives just think porn is the devil, and more and more, I find non-religious people that view it as such, too, without some wider plot to take rights away from gay people. They're just prudes and they're happy to remove those rights when given the chance. This certainly is the average conservative, it's not a top-down marching order, it's just how they view things.

To back this up, you suggest that Bush's Child was part of a larger plan to get rid of education, but this is not an accurate assessment of Bush, Bush was a traditionalist in favor of traditional education, he's not of the Trump ilk, and Child was very much a Bush keystone. The push to eliminate the Dept of Education is 20 years farther down the road and pushed by very different people.

I say this because you should know your enemies, viewing everything as part of an elaborate top-down plan often gets you nowhere.

[giraffe_lady]

I think you're the one not knowing your enemies here. There is a plan to strip queer people of rights, it is already well underway. You cannot possibly have an effective plan of opposition if you don't acknowledge the incredible economic, social, and technological resources that have been spent spreading and nurturing the prejudices that you can now call "uncoordinated." A lot of the individuals furthering these measures do not identify themselves with "a plot," sure, but it doesn't mean they don't have a role in it.

[Spivak]

There was a constellation of political groups who were internally coordinated weren't coordinated with one another because they wanted slightly different outcomes or had different motivations. The absolutely massive success of the coordination behind the LGBT political movement and refusal to be broken up and picked off piecemeal is what made various oppositions more bark than bite. But that isn't true anymore, as you and others have recognized. I mean the plan is outlined in Project 2025, we're well beyond small organizations screaming into the void and skulking around the political periphery. It's just out in the open which makes it a lot easier to rally around.

And now, to my view, it's basically a race. The very well coordinated political opposition laser targeting transgender people as the weak link has to push them back into the closet before too many people know someone trans personally and realize they aren't scary monsters with pointed teeth. They failed with the gays but they were about an order of magnitude larger and so got more exposure.

[blackcatsec]

It's certainly amped up in coordination over the last decade with the mixing of the tech oligarchs and the traditional religious oligarchs.

What it reminds me of is the situation in Saudi Arabia. The religious elite allows the Saud family to rule all of the politics and economics of the government so as long as the religious elite have the ability to enforce religious law on the population. It's an unholy union of church and state and this marrying of those two in the United States should absolutely fucking terrify everyone.

[blackcatsec]

Let me reframe a bit on this one.

You are correct that it's not a distinctly organized group, but very loosely organized with people continually carrying the baton forward in the relay race to remove our rights. Each runner is going to be slower or faster than the previous one, but they're still running in the same direction.

A cornerstone of NCLB was to expand the funding for Charter Schools across the United States (rather than fund public education). And while these schools are supposed to be non-religious, a small provision of NCLB allowed parents to choose private, religious options if their schools fell behind (which, given the draconian testing expectations, made it pretty easy).

So maybe the NCLB Act took the long way around to get where we're at today, but it was still always headed in this direction as soon as it offered private schools as a funded alternative to public school, rather than investing in our public schools with our public funds.

On the larger issue of what you're saying, it can be difficult to distill the information down in a way that makes sense when all of it is a very complex web of people and power and ideaologies.

At the end of the day, it took 50 years, but they did succeed in getting rid of Roe vs. Wade eventually. The relentless pursuit of this effort which took 50 years of adaptation and pushing as hard as possible in every area without relenting, even when they hadn't succeeded in every direction, is what made this happen.

I expect no less from these further pushes now that we're over that hump. Maybe these efforts fail today, but they will continue to push where they can until they figure out ways in which they can succeed.

It's quite relentless and those of us whom are on the other side of this definitely need to recognize the threat for what it is. Which, to your statement, makes this so much more dangerous than if it were just a single headed hydra.

[mrguyorama]

Giving the overprudish religious fanatics what they want to earn their support has actually been an open plan of the right wing in the US since at least Reagan.

Reagan chose not to do anything about the AIDS crisis partially because it was a "gay" disease, and the religious right was openly happy and proud that the gays were dying.