This Pride, have your cake and eat it, too

Back in 2018, the cake debate was inescapable. Not a day went by when someone wouldn’t ask my opinion on whether or not our civil rights laws compelled a baker to make a cake for a gay couple. Through a combination of insufficient clarity in reporting, deliberate misinformation, and wild hypotheticals, this question metastasized into so many different permutations that it became difficult to actually nail down the core question at hand: whether or not a business owner had the right to deny service to someone simply because they were gay. That question seemed to be avoided. Opponents insisted this was about the design of the cake, about compelled speech, or about participation in ceremonies. They would never address that core question, because they knew their answer would be deeply unpopular.

In 2022 we’re seeing a similar phenomenon centered around transgender children. Whether it’s their ability to participate in extracurricular activities, their ability to access medically necessary care, or their ability to simply use a restroom at school, the debate has again permutated into all manner of outrageous hypotheticals ranging from fabricated stories about litter boxes in schools to outright accusations of child abuse.

These distractions seem to be a deliberate strategy by opponents of equality to obfuscate the core questions in the debate. They know that equal rights poll well, in fact an overwhelming 76 percent of Americans support affirmative protections for LGBTQ individuals in the areas of housing, jobs, and public life, including 68 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of independents. This leaves them grasping at straws for culture war issues that will win them votes, which is why they center the conversation on cake and athletics rather than real structural issues like housing discrimination and access to equal educational opportunities.

This Pride month, let’s re-center the conversation on what these debates are really about. Just like it was never actually about wedding cakes, it’s also not about sports. It’s not about bathrooms. It’s not about books. It's about the ability of LGBTQ people to live their lives in public without being legally discriminated against. It's about the ability to do the things we love, and love the people we love, without unreasonable barriers forcing us to quit or conform.

Keenan Crow is director of policy and advocacy for One Iowa.