OAN’s anti-LGBTQ hatred reaches new lows in the right-wing war against teachers
OAN recklessly accuses people of pedophilia and flirts with eliminationist rhetoric about “punishing” the LGBTQ community: “We can no longer be afraid of getting canceled and called a domestic terrorist”
Published
Right-wing media have spent the last several weeks engaging in a modern smear campaign of homophobia and transphobia, targeting both elementary school teachers and The Walt Disney Co. with baseless accusations of “grooming” – and far-right cable outlet One America News Network has been particularly toxic.
Driven in part by “Don’t Say Gay” laws in states like Florida, and the opposition those laws have inspired, voices on OAN have called teachers and LGBTQ people “child predators” with a perverted desire to “groom” children using support from schools, businesses, and the federal government. OAN has even attacked individual teachers for “grooming” kids, suggesting that even mentioning LGBTQ identities in the classroom is pedophilic behavior.
Some guests claim that this imagined “grooming” epidemic is proof society should not just resist transgender identity, but also homosexuality – otherwise the United States could fall to the leftist agenda of a Marxist “gender revolution.”
Right-wing media has poisoned the American electorate with lies and bigotry for decades, sometimes with fatal results. The recent intensification of OAN’s hatred is part of a wider, years-long push throughout right-wing media to falsely accuse LGBTQ people and their supporters of “grooming” children. The very lives of LGBTQ people, including children who may need to learn the terms for the complex emotions they feel, are at best pawns in a game of attention-seeking from conservative outlets like OAN. At worst, the network’s extreme bigotry features calls to violence, putting people’s lives in danger and suggesting the far-right figures behind this latest anti-LGBTQ campaign actually want us eliminated from society.