The Whole Community Is the Target

This is the second post in the Pride 2026 Series.

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The first time I visited my aunt and uncle—one of my mother’s sisters and her husband, people I had been told about my whole young life and whom I already understood to be family in the fullest sense—I noticed a coffee machine on their kitchen counter. I must have been very young. I remember being confused in a way I couldn’t articulate: not troubled, exactly, but puzzled. I had been taught, with the quiet certainty that characterizes the way children absorb the rules of the world they’re born into, that good people didn’t drink coffee. And these were good people. I knew that. The coffee machine didn’t fit.

I didn’t resolve the confusion that day. I filed it away, the way children do with things that don’t yet have a category. But I think about that kitchen often, because it was probably the first time I understood—without knowing I understood it—that the lines I had been taught to see weren’t describing the world. They were trying to organize it. And the world wasn’t cooperating.

I am writing this second post in this series because watching what is happening in 2026, I keep returning to a version of the same question that coffee machine first raised: who, exactly, is the line around? And why?

The short answer, in the current political climate, is: all of them. Not some of them. Not the most visibly nonconforming. Every queer person.

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The first post in this series documented the erasure of transgender and queer history from the Stonewall National Monument website and the painting over of the Pulse nightclub crosswalk—a memorial to the 49 predominantly gay and bisexual Latinx people murdered there in 2016. The Stonewall erasure targeted transgender and queer history most explicitly. The Pulse crosswalk removal targeted queer community memory more broadly. But the logic underneath both does not stop at any single letter.

Consider the sequence of events at Stonewall alone. The National Park Service removed transgender and queer references from the monument’s website in February 2025. When that drew protest, the erasure continued: in July 2025, bisexual people were removed as well, the monument’s history rewritten to describe Stonewall as a milestone solely for “gay and lesbian civil rights.” When the bisexual removal drew its own outcry, those references were quietly restored—but the transgender and queer references were not. Read that sequence carefully. It is not a story about protecting gay and lesbian people while targeting trans and bisexual people. It is a story about testing how far the erasure can go before enough people notice, and then recalibrating until the next attempt. The letters are not being removed from the acronym because the administration has a principled distinction in mind. They are being removed one at a time because that is how you eat an elephant.

Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that established marriage equality nationwide, is not safe either. In 2025, at least nine states introduced legislation aimed at blocking new same-sex marriage licenses or passed resolutions urging the Supreme Court to reverse the decision. The Southern Baptist Convention—the nation’s largest Protestant denomination—voted to make overturning Obergefell a top priority. In July 2025, Kim Davis—the former Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2015—filed a formal petition asking the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling. The Court declined the petition in November 2025, with Justices Thomas and Alito signaling they remain eager for a cleaner case. Lambda Legal, which argued Obergefell before the Court, is not taking its eye off the issue: other cases are working their way up through the lower courts, and the current majority is not the one that decided Obergefell in 2015.

Then there is the conversion therapy question—which concerns not just transgender youth but gay and lesbian youth as well. In March 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors, as applied to talk therapy, constitutes viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment. The decision does not overturn Colorado’s law outright—it sends the case back to the lower courts under a more stringent standard of review that the law is unlikely to survive. More than 20 states have similar laws. The Trevor Project, which provides crisis intervention services to LGBTQ+ young people, called the ruling “a tragic step backward for our country that will put young lives at risk.” The American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and virtually every major clinical body have established that conversion therapy is not only ineffective but harmful. The Court’s majority was unmoved.

The same week Chiles v. Salazar was decided, a report from theologians assembled for the late Pope Francis’ Synod of Bishops described conversion therapy as a source of “profound suffering, personal lacerations, and experiences of marginalisation” for LGBTQ+ Catholics—drawing on firsthand testimony from two gay men in same-sex marriages who had been subjected to it. The report did not change Catholic doctrine. It did not endorse same-sex marriage. What it did was listen to people whose lives had been shaped by the practice the Court had just ruled States cannot ban—and say plainly what it had done to them. Some institutions, it turns out, are moving in the opposite direction from the Court.

The lines, it turns out, are around all of them.

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There is a clinical framework that helps explain what this kind of sustained, systematic targeting does to people. Minority stress theory, first formally articulated by Ilan Meyer , holds that sexual and gender minority individuals experience health disparities not primarily because of who they are but because of what they are subjected to. The distal stressors—discrimination, violence, legislative targeting, the daily ambient awareness that your government is debating whether you exist—accumulate alongside the proximal stressors: internalized stigma, the effort of concealment, the vigilance required to navigate a world that does not always believe you belong in it. Together, they produce measurable, documented harm: elevated rates of depression, anxiety, suicidality, substance use, cardiovascular disease. These are not hypothetical risks. They show up in emergency rooms and primary care waiting rooms. They are, in the most precise clinical sense, a public health crisis.

What the current political environment is doing is not adding a few new stressors to an already difficult landscape. It is operating at the structural level—legislating the stressors into permanence, removing the data infrastructure that would allow us to measure and respond to them, and systematically dismantling the legal protections that had begun to reduce them. Research is unambiguous that structural stigma—discriminatory legislation, heteronormative policy, inadequate healthcare access—worsens LGBTQ+ health outcomes independent of interpersonal discrimination. The states with the most permissive legal environments for LGBTQ+ people consistently show better health outcomes for LGBTQ+ residents than states with the most restrictive ones . This is not a political observation. It is an epidemiological one.

When I worked through this material with psychology interns, we spent time on a study examining the well-being of both religiously active and former LGBQ Mormons through the lens of minority stress and cognitive dissonance . The finding that stayed with me was this: people who had clearly resolved the tension—whether by fully integrating their religious and queer identities or by leaving the Church—reported better wellbeing than those caught in between, unable to commit to either position. The identity ambiguity itself was the wound. What the current political environment is manufacturing, at scale, is exactly that ambiguity: telling queer people that they may be tolerated in some contexts and erased in others, that their marriages may stand today and be relitigated tomorrow, that their history exists in the archive and nowhere in the official record. That is not a sustainable position for any person to inhabit. The research says so clearly.

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The tradition I was raised in taught me to ask, when I encounter a person in need: who is my neighbor? The question comes from Luke 10, where a lawyer asks Jesus to define the limits of his ethical obligation. Jesus responds not with a definition but with a story—a man beaten and left on the road, passed by a priest and a Levite, then helped by a Samaritan. The Samaritan is the key figure. He was not simply a foreigner. He was theologically incorrect, ritually unclean, despised by the very tradition the lawyer was trying to defend. Jesus did not use him as an example of a tolerated outsider. He used him as the moral exemplar—the one who understood what neighbor meant and acted on it, while the religiously credentialed men found reasons to cross the road.

The lawyer who asked the question could not bring himself to say “the Samaritan” when Jesus asked which of the three men had acted as a neighbor. He said instead “the one who showed mercy”—technically correct, emotionally evasive, unwilling to name the person his tradition had taught him to regard as less than. I recognize that impulse. I grew up with it. I understand the comfort of a definition of neighbor that does not require too much of you.

But the parable does not allow for that comfort. Jesus does not ask “who is your neighbor?” He asks “which of these three do you think was a neighbor?” The question is not about who deserves your mercy. It is about whether you are capable of giving it. And the commandment that follows is not a suggestion: Go, and do likewise (Luke 10:37 KJV).

The queer community—in all its letters, in all its internal disagreements, in all the ways it does not sort neatly into categories that make anyone comfortable—is on the road. The priest and the Levite have their reasons. They always do.

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This is not, I want to be clear, a simple argument. The community I grew up in has genuine theological convictions about sexuality and gender, convictions held by people of sincere faith and good intention. I have not forgotten that, and I am not dismissing it. But sincerity of belief does not determine the outcome on the road. The priest was presumably sincere. The Levite may have had excellent theological reasons for not touching someone who appeared to be dead—ritual purity laws are not nothing. And the man lay there regardless.

What I am asking—what I believe the tradition I was shaped by actually requires—is not that anyone abandon their convictions about sexuality or gender. It is that they not use those convictions as a reason to cross the road. It is that they acknowledge the person lying there. It is that they extend to queer people the same presumption of dignity and worth that same tradition insists every human soul possesses.

Because here is what I know, from my clinical work and from the research and from years of watching what happens when people are denied that dignity: the harm is real. It shows up in numbers—in the elevated rates of depression and suicidality and substance use and cardiovascular disease documented in population after population of LGBTQ+ people. And it shows up in the people who avoided healthcare for years because they were afraid of how they would be treated, in the people who cannot say out loud who they are in the places where they live.

Bisexual people face health disparities distinct from and often worse than those facing gay and lesbian people—higher rates of depression, anxiety, and poverty, compounded by erasure from both straight and gay communities . Gay and lesbian people face renewed threats to the legal infrastructure—marriage, adoption, employment—that their movement spent decades building. Transgender people face the most acute and immediate targeting, from healthcare bans to bathroom laws to the administrative erasure of their identities from federal data. Queer and nonbinary people have been literally deleted from the founding monument of their own liberation movement.

These are not separate problems. They are the same problem, applied with varying intensity to different parts of the same community.

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I am aware that some of the people reading this will disagree with parts of what I have written—perhaps many parts. I am aware that invoking the Good Samaritan in a Pride post will strike some readers as presumptuous, as though I am claiming to know what Jesus would have thought about trans rights. I am not making that claim. I am making a narrower one: that the tradition I was formed by, at its ethical core, does not permit me to look away from people in pain because I find their lives theologically complicated. That tradition gave me a question to ask, and the question does not have an exemption clause.

The whole community is the target. That is not a political assertion. It is a documented pattern of events, visible to anyone paying attention. The data are being erased so it will be harder to see. The history is being rewritten so it will be easier to forget. The legal protections are being litigated away so there will be less recourse when the next act of the pattern unfolds.

These are my neighbors. Not a figure of speech. The people whose history is being erased, whose marriages are being relitigated, whose children are being told by their government that specialized crisis support is not for them—they are my neighbors, my patients, my colleagues, my family. They are being harmed. I have a moral obligation to say so, to show up, and to do what I can to help.

I was shaped by a tradition that taught me God keeps track of these things. What I cannot believe—and remain the person I am—is that the God who created every human soul will hold it against me for stopping on the road. I am aware that some in my tradition would call what they offer “love” too. But the Levite probably loved the injured man. His love didn’t stop. The Samaritan didn’t offer the man a theology. He offered him a bandage, a bed, and money left with the innkeeper for whatever else was needed. The parable doesn’t record a single word spoken between them. There was no condition, no conversion, no requirement that the man account for how he came to be lying in the road. There was only: here is what you need.

That is the love the parable commends. Not love that requires the beloved to change before receiving care. Love that shows up and pays the bill.

If the God who governs the afterlife holds that against me, I want no part of it. I will take my chances with the neighbor who stopped on the road.

Jesus ends the parable with a question: Which of these three was a neighbor? The answer has not changed. Go, and do likewise.

That is what I am trying to do here. And it is what I am asking of anyone reading this who has not yet decided which person on the road they are going to be.

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If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or contact the Trevor Project directly by texting START to 678-678 or calling 1-866-488-7386.

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If you are looking for ways to act, or for support for yourself or someone you love, these organizations are doing essential work: PFLAG supports families and loved ones of LGBTQ+ people with resources, community, and advocacy; the ACLU is tracking anti-LGBTQ legislation state by state; the Trevor Project provides free, confidential crisis support to LGBTQ+ young people twenty-four hours a day; GLAAD monitors and responds to anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in media and government; and the Human Rights Campaign works toward full legal equality for LGBTQ+ Americans.

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This post was written by the author. Claude (Anthropic) assisted with verifying current‑event details, refining the structure of the series, supporting revision and editing, and generating ZotPress and WordPress shortcode syntax for citations and formatting. All positions, interpretations, and personal statements are the author’s own.

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