Keith Townsend – “Our NC Lieutenant Governor, Mark Robinson, has launched his own moral crusade of fear by attacking the lifestyles and beliefs of many of his fellow North Carolinians. He claims that public schools in our state are teaching students to hate America and that young children in primary grades are being urged to question their gender. Both of these statements are nonsense. He also dismisses homosexuality as filth and the transgender movement as demonic.”
In 2012, two years before the invasion of Crimea, Vladimir Putin launched a campaign to protect Russia against what he perceived to be the existential threat of “western decadence”. His initial and primary target was the homosexual community inside Russia. What has become known as the “gay propaganda” law (June 2013) does not allow the media, teachers, mental health providers and others to speak positively on LGBT topics. Violators can be fined and are often incarcerated. It even stipulates that foreign offenders are to be jailed for 15 days before being deported.
In March of 2015 the first International Russian Conservative Forum was held in St. Petersburg. Far-right delegates from across the globe, including the United States, were invited to attend. Putin’s message to those gathered was: “We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual.”
The American representative, a white supremacist named Jared Taylor, apologized for America’s embrace of diversity, which he described as a form of “national suicide”.
If some of this political rhetoric from Russia seems eerily familiar, it should. This is especially true if you are a follower of North Carolina politics.
Our NC Lieutenant Governor, Mark Robinson, has launched his own moral crusade of fear by attacking the lifestyles and beliefs of many of his fellow North Carolinians. He claims that public schools in our state are teaching students to hate America and that young children in primary grades are being urged to question their gender. Both of these statements are nonsense. He also dismisses homosexuality as filth and the transgender movement as demonic.
Robinson boasts that he owns an AR-15 in case the government “gets too big”. At the recent Republican state convention, he claimed that once a woman is pregnant, her body is no longer her own.
Like Putin, Robinson justifies his abuse of others by masquerading as a champion of religious and family values. History shows that whenever a particular group of people are targeted by those in positions of power, terrible things are bound to happen.
As Paul Krugman recently wrote in the N.Y. Times (3/28/22): “America’s vulnerability comes not from the decline of traditional family values, but from the decline of traditional democratic values, such as a belief in the rule of law and a willingness to accept the results of elections that don’t go your way.”
Keith Townsend