A Washington think tank has developed an invention that sounds like something out of an H.G. Wells science fiction novel: a time machine. They’re calling it the “Transition Plan for the Next Conservative President.” In reality, the plan is an invention designed to transport LGBTQ Americans back 60 years into a landscape of unfamiliar isolation and invisibility.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a policy and personnel database for MAGA warriors ready to take over every federal department and agency. LGBTQ Americans are riveted on “Promise #1.” Of the 992 pages, “sexual orientation” is introduced on the fourth page, ahead of global threats, national sovereignty, U.S. border and immigration issues, the economy, and “individual God-given rights.”
“The next conservative president must make America’s civil society institutions a hard target for woke culture warriors,” Plan The Time Machine begins. “This starts with removing terms such as sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender awareness, gender-sensitive… from all federal rules, agency regulations, contracts, grant regulations, and laws.”
According to the time machine, the “purpose of big government is to substitute unnatural for the natural affections and loyalties of the people,” and the time machine enforces “natural law” in politics and religious morality. The time machine is ready to transport us back in time to federal policy and personnel issues that predate sexual orientation, gender identity, and our very identity.
The fight for civil equality for gays and lesbians began on the battlefield of the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Decades of investigations and ruined lives were rooted in the language of federal personnel policies. Words like “nasty,” “notorious,” and “nasty” were transformed into paralyzing regulatory terms like “appropriate metonymy,” “eligibility,” and “overt conduct.” Before Stonewall, the fight for equality began in Washington, with individual plaintiffs’ challenges to federal personnel policies and bitter litigation that are preserved today in reports, opinion letters, activist letters, and declassified memos in the National Archives. For gays and lesbians of that time, it was an uphill battle to build a new world of equality and shared legal status.
Lyndon Johnson’s “personnel man,” Civil Service Commission Chairman John W. Macy (1917-1986), got to the heart of the federal government’s ban on hiring homosexuals in a three-page letter he wrote to the Washington, D.C., Mattischine Association in 1966. Macy’s letter can be summarized as follows: “You do not exist.”
“We do not subscribe to Mattatcheen’s underlying view that ‘gay’ is an appropriate metonym for an individual. Rather, we believe that the word ‘gay’ is properly used as an adjective to describe the nature of overt sexual relations and conduct…. We look only at individuals, not third genders, oppressed minorities, or secret societies, and we determine eligibility for Federal employment in light of overt conduct.”
John Macy’s world is where the Heritage Time Machine lands. Gay is not the right “metonym” for his metaphor for humans (please). You are not a noun. You are an adjective! You are an act, not an “oppressed minority”. There is no such thing as “sexual orientation”. The meaning of the official apology of the US government delivered in 2009 by the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to the President of the Mattachine Association, Frank Kameny, will be deleted. “I write today to inform you that this (discriminatory) policy, which runs counter to the bedrock principles of a meritocratic civil service system, has been rejected by the US government, thanks in large part to your determination, your life’s work, and the advocacy of thousands of Americans inspired by your words.” OPM Director John Berry continued: “I want to inform you that the memorandum signed by President Obama directs OPM to issue guidance to all executive departments and agencies regarding their obligation to comply with these rules and regulations.”
For LGBTQ Americans, our greatest achievement has been the creation of our identity. We are a community, sharing legal status while facing discrimination and hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills being introduced in state legislatures across the country. In Wells’ story “The Time Machine,” a time traveler is horrified to discover he has been stranded in another time: “Suddenly, like a whiplash in my face, the possibility of losing my time, of being helpless and stranded in this strange new world loomed before me.” In the Project 2025 Time Machine, we confront that very real possibility.
“History is written by the winners,” Donald Trump’s Attorney General William Barr said after the Justice Department’s decision to drop charges against Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. It was actually George Orwell who wrote “History is written by the winners.” Barr knows Orwell well. “So it depends a lot on who writes history,” Barr concluded. Is it the Heritage Foundation or us?
Charles Francis He is president of the Mattachine Society in Washington, DC, and author of Archive Activism: A Memoir of a “Unique and Messy” Journey.
This article, “Project 2025: A time machine that would make us invisible again,” first appeared in the Washington Blade: LGBTQ News, Politics, LGBTQ Rights, Gay News.
Source: Washington Blade: LGBTQ News, Politics, LGBTQ Rights, Gay News – www.washingtonblade.com
