The red-state drive to roll back civil rights is entering a new phase, perhaps best symbolized by Florida’s passage this week of the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill censoring how schools discuss sexual orientation. President Joe Biden’s administration is leaning more heavily into the fight, even as business leaders are retreating from the battlefield. In multiple states, prominent companies that regularly tout their commitment to diversity and inclusion have largely stood aside as GOP-controlled legislatures and governors have approved laws that restrict voting access, curtail abortion rights and LGBTQ freedoms, and limit how teachers can discuss race, gender, and sexual orientation in public schools. The refusal of the Walt Disney Company, one of Florida’s most powerful employers, to publicly criticize Florida’s “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill as it moved through the legislature has quickly come to symbolize a retreat from the loud public opposition that many companies expressed to earlier state initiatives restricting civil liberties, such as the “bathroom bill” North Carolina Republicans approved in 2016. Across the broad range of socially conservative initiatives that Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and the GOP state legislature have advanced since 2021, business has been “silent, silent as fuck, they are so silent,” says Florida Democratic State Representative Anna Eskamani, echoing a complaint I heard across several states from Democrats and civil-rights advocates this week. “[Businesses] have other priorities, which impact their bottom line and their profits, and they view that as more important.” The Biden administration is pointedly moving in the other direction. During 2021, many activists complained that the president was largely ignoring the red-state offensive while focusing on passing his Build Back Better economic plan and stressing his willingness to work with governors from both parties on the pandemic. But in the past few months, the administration has notably sharpened its tone on many of these red-state efforts. The Justice Department is challenging a steadily growing list of state actions that it views as violating federal constitutional or statutory rights. In his State of the Union address last week, Biden singled out for criticism the new state laws on voting, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. “The president is the first to say we want to work together and we want to work in bipartisanship for the American people but … we are also going to call out some of these really hateful bills that have gone after some of our most vulnerable communities,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, told me. Since 2021, Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Idaho, and Montana have advanced a torrent of socially conservative legislation. This includes laws limiting access to abortion, restricting voting rights, banning transgender girls from participating in high-school or college sports, barring transition medical treatment for transgender minors, censoring how teachers can talk about current or historical racial and gender inequities, removing licensing requirements to publicly carry firearms, increasing penalties for public protesters, and immunizing drivers who hit and injure protesters. Florida alone has passed almost every item on that list, and this week added the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill restricting classroom discussion of sexual orientation. This week the legislature is also expected to pass DeSantis’s “Stop Woke” act, which restricts how not only schools but also private companies holding diversity training can discuss racial-equity issues. “The last two or three years has definitely been not even a wave; it’s an onslaught,” Eskamani told me. “It’s so intense, and every direction you turn, you have another culture war to fight back against.” In many ways, the 23 states where Republicans now control both the governorship and state legislature are attempting to unravel “the rights revolution” of the past 60 years, in which both the Supreme Court and Congress have generally expanded the range of basic rights and liberties available nationwide. As I’ve written, the cumulative aim of these proposals is to return the U.S. to a pre-1960s world in which those basic rights and liberties vary much more from state to state. In the process, the red states are enshrining the social priorities of a GOP coalition centered mostly on the experiences and preferences of older white Christian and nonurban voters over those of more demographically and culturally diverse younger generations. The contrast is sharpest with Generation Z, young Americans born after 1996: Almost half of the generation is nonwhite, about one-fifth of its members identify as LGBTQ, and more than one-third describe themselves as secular, unaffiliated with any religious tradition. Among the Millennial generation, born from 1980 to 1996, the numbers on each front are not quite as high, but still far above older generations. In the first stages of the current struggle, business leaders appeared acutely conscious of staying on the sympathetic side of those rising generations, who represent most of their future employers and customers. Arguably the opening bell for the current round of socially conservative legislation was the 2016 passage of North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which required people to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth. [...] Why have so many companies backed away from these fights? Some corporate lobbyists I spoke with said one reason is they believe public opposition is counterproductive because more Republican elected officials in the Donald Trump era find it politically valuable to be seen fighting big companies. Businesses also frequently complain that the widening gulf between the parties leaves them in a lose-lose position of alienating an important block of potential customers wherever they come down in policy debates. (Activists, though, point out that businesses often try to have it both ways by rhetorically identifying with causes such as inclusion and diversity without taking tangible steps to defend them.) But another factor probably looms larger than any of those considerations: However much they want to publicly align with the values of younger consumers and workers, big companies want to go only so far in fighting these proposals, because they still mostly prefer Republicans to control state governments and deliver the low-tax, light-regulation policies they favor. State Republicans in turn have grown more overt about threatening those benefits when business leaders raise objections to the culture-war components of their agenda. When American Airlines criticized the restrictive voting bill Texas passed last year, Lieutenant Governor Patrick openly threatened to kill other legislation the company cared about.
Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic on how red states are leading the charge to roll back the advances of the Civil Rights Movement (03.10.2022).
Ronald Brownstein writes for The Atlantic on how red states are rolling back the advances of the Civil Rights Movement, such as full-scale assaults on abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, and voting rights.
