Why Republicans Deserve a Taste of Their Own Medicine

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR)

I turn 34 this week, which means that I am neither particularly old nor particularly young.  Most of my life, though not quite all of it, could qualify as recent history, particularly if you counted my time as an adult.  So it's worth noting, in Pride month, that when I turned 18, I could not legally be gay and join the military; that right wouldn't be afforded to me until I was 27.  While I could legally have consensual sex with another adult man in my home state of Minnesota, if I crossed Lake Superior over to Michigan, that would have been a crime (as it would have in 13 states at the time).  I couldn't legally get married in Minnesota until I was nearly 29-years-old, and would have to wait another two years before I could get married in every state.  And it was another year after that before I could legally adopt in all fifty states...or just over two years ago, if you're keeping track at home.  I still can be fired for being gay in South Dakota.  Or Texas, Louisiana, and Arizona.  I can get turned down for an apartment in Alaska or Florida for being gay.  And thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, pretty much anyone who wanted to could turn me down for a wedding cake if they so chose.

I say these things not just to show the importance of Pride, but more to show that up until very recently (and in some cases, still currently), people thought it was 100% fine that I was legally discriminated against, certainly most elected officials did and many members of the Republican Party.  Mike Huckabee, for example, spent almost his entire public career trying to take rights away from me, and has referred to me as "aberrant, unnatural, and sinful" and decried when gay people he served for decades in Arkansas finally got the right to marry.  John McCain has spent most of his adult life trying to tear down the rights of LGBT people, claiming to be an ally but almost always siding with hate; a longtime public servant who has rightfully championed his military service, he didn't see the need to protect his gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in uniform when given the chance before the floor of the Senate.  These men took different tacts, claiming "their religion" or "states rights" excused their behavior, but they watched as gay citizens, people they swore oaths to serve, were denied basic rights in this country, and didn't think anything of it.

I say this because the Republican Party is losing its mind over the treatment of several key figures in the party, specifically Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kirstjen Nielsen, and Pam Bondi, all being forced to leave restaurants either by angry protesters or by, in Sanders case, by the management of the restaurant.  All of these things were done in response to the Republican Party's heinous, disgusting treatment of immigrant children, putting them in cages and ripping them from their mothers.  But I think the shocking thing for the GOP might just be that they realized that their actions have consequences, and perhaps they had the briefest of tastes of what their laws have done to disenfranchised peoples their entire careers.

I don't really support the right of refusing service to pretty much anyone, but I do think that if the law is going to be used to discriminate against gay people, it should very much be used to discriminate against those who hold down LGBT people.  Religious liberty laws are frequently touted as "necessary" to preserve the first amendment, but if that's the case, someone should be allowed to state that Sanders' lying and her administration's caging of children go against their religion, and therefore she doesn't have the universal right to eat in their restaurants.  Sanders, in fact, has less of a leg to stand on in this argument than someone who is black or Muslim or transgender; they didn't have a choice in being part of a minority group, while Sanders chose to behave repugnantly and strip others of their rights and humanity.

The thing that I find so shocking in all of this is that Sanders doesn't, and likely never will, understand that what she experienced for two seconds is the thing she regularly inflicts on people across the country on a daily basis without so much as a whisper of consideration.  The same can be said for her father or someone like Meghan McCain, who both decry the treatment of these Republicans without acknowledging that their families have done this to minority groups like the LGBT community for decades.  When I am asked to have sympathy for these people by "the tolerant left" who want to still find a middle ground, to understand where they're coming from, this illustrates perhaps why that may just be impossible-Sanders or McCain or Huckabee are too privileged and unaffected by discrimination to understand that the policies and party they support have made infringement on others so normal that we think of it as "public policy" not shocking or abnormal or unacceptable.  If they can't understand it when they are treated just once the way that LGBT, persons of color, immigrants, and religious minorities are treated in this country every day, there is no hope for empathy from these individuals.  We won't connect with them, we simply need to outnumber them.  And eventually we'll have a Congress that will ban Sarah Sanders from being denied service at a restaurant while also protecting an aspiring gay couple shopping for a wedding cake and a Muslim gun enthusiast who wants to go to a gun range.  Until then, if they want to discriminate against people they clearly hate under the guise of "religious liberties," then they deserve to also feel the brunt of such hateful laws.  This isn't abandoning the moral high ground-it's just claiming fairness.  Until we have equal rights for all peoples, truly all peoples, then Sarah Sanders doesn't deserve to have equal rights either.  If she's standing in the way of her own equality just to spite gay people and immigrants, then I think it's more than fine that she gets denied a night out.