Hey, white gay cisgender guys, can we chat? We are one of those too! And we have been yelling and yelling for years that the fight for LGBTQ equality (yes INCLUDING THE “T,” for those who still would like to argue it shouldn’t be there) is the same fight as the fight for abortion rights is the same fight for contraception and anything else fascist white Christians want to get their hands on.
Why? Simple. Because those fascist Christians don’t give a flying fuck about unborn babies. They care about controlling the bodily autonomy of anybody who isn’t white, heterosexual, cisgender and conservative Christian. These are not people with “sincerely held beliefs.” They are Christian nationalist white supremacists.
And yes, we could stay up on this very tall high horse and spend more paragraphs shaming gay white cisgender guys for very often letting the “white cisgender guy” part of who they are govern how they ultimately vote and act. And maybe we will write more about that sometime. Or maybe it’s not useful right now.
In this blog post, though, we’re here to tell you that they’re coming for PrEP next. You know PrEP! It’s that game changer drug so many of us take that reduces the chances of HIV transmission to virtually nada.
The Advocate (the gay magazine, not the New Orleans newspaper) reports on some of the lawsuits filed by fascist lawyer and former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, who was the braingenius behind Texas SB 8, AKA the bounty hunter abortion ban.
Mitchell now has set his sights on Descovy and Truvada, two medications that help prevent HIV transmission when taken as PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, because those medications enable homosexual behavior, the suit states.
In the case Kelley v. the United States of America, filed in federal court in 2020, Mitchell represents several clients who object to the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that insurance providers cover, among other things, preventive medications specifically for PrEP.
You know, because religious Right assholes think if they don’t personally need a medication, or if they need to impose their stupid bullshit religious beliefs on employees who don’t share those beliefs, then Loving God Jesus is probably on board with denying folks healthcare coverage they need.
“The PrEP mandate forces religious employers to provide coverage for drugs that facilitate and encourage homosexual behavior, prostitution, sexual promiscuity, and intravenous drug use,” the lawsuit states.
Fuck you.
“It also compels religious employers and religious individuals who purchase health insurance to subsidize these behaviors as a condition of purchasing health insurance.”
Like Hobby Lobby, but more open with the God Hates Fags signs this time around.
Regarding the plaintiffs, the suit claims “neither they nor any of their family members are engaged in behavior that transmits HIV.”
That they know of and/or are willing to admit.
Mitchell ain’t just some rando on the internet, though we wouldn’t be surprised if we found out he’s got a profile or two on incel message boards. Again, he was integral in coming up with that Texas bounty hunter abortion ban, where regular private citizens can sue anybody they believe aided or abetted in an abortion. He has some weird, bizarre, demented beliefs about sex, like so many fundamentalist Christian types do.
In an amicus brief in the Dobbs case wherein Samuel Alito used an extended Breitbart comment to overturn Roe v. Wade, Mitchell wrote, in essence, that sluts can control their own reproductive health by just not having sex. He also strongly suggested in that amicus brief that the (illegitimate partisan hack) Supreme Court should overturn the decisions that created marriage equality and decriminalized the private behavior of gay couples in their bedrooms. Specifically, he said the Court should write a decision in Dobbs that “leaves those decisions hanging by a thread.”
Did those words send a thrill up Clarence Thomas’s leg? We don’t know, but that sure is the pube Thomas hurled in his concurring opinion, which all but said they’re coming for the gays next.
As a doctor quoted in the piece in The Advocate notes, gay men are by far not the only people who get PrEP prescriptions. But that’s not the point. They’re going after the fags, and if they catch some more people doing things they don’t approve of in the process, well then bully for them.
And let us underline this: Just like they want to ban abortion in order to punish people for having sex they think is gross or bad or slutty or that they’re secretly jealous of, they want to ban PrEP in order to punish people for having sex think is … gross or bad or slutty or that they’re secretly jealous of.
And what would be the punishment there? What are they saying they think gays deserve?
You get it?
This is everywhere. It’s open season on fuckin’ pretty much everything. Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, recently did not say “fuck no, that’s crazy” when asked if he’d be willing to defend some old-timey sodomy laws. That is just an example. There are more in the Advocate story.
This is happening.
So, white cis gays, if you’re not on the train yet — and many of you are! — please chase it and hop on. The fight needs you and it needs your MUNNAY.
And in case we were not clear, “the fight” is the abortion fight and the gay fight and the trans fight and the everyfuckingfight you can think of that isn’t “white” or “straight” or “cisgender” or “fascist fundamentalist Christian.”
Because it’s all the same fucking fight.
You get it?
Good.
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