Is the right about to backslide on gay rights?

As a consequence, Trump’s presidency witnessed a sudden flowering of high-profile openly gay conservatives in the media, people like Guy Benson, Rob Smith, Dave Rubin, Brandon Straka, The Spectator’s own Chadwick Moore and Douglas Murray, Andy Ngo, and (not least) the magnificent Tammy Bruce. If you’d told me thirty years ago that in 2022 I’d be able to turn on a conservative discussion show (I’m thinking specifically of Fox News’s Gutfeld! here) and see openly gay people debating everything except gay rights, I’d never have believed you.

So it’s been deeply dismaying to see antigay sentiment bubbling up again on the right. Last December, Kevin Roberts, the new head of the Heritage Foundation, contended that no true conservative can support gay marriage; in the Hill in July, he reiterated that view at length, citing court cases over gay wedding cakes. I suspect that most gay Americans agree with him about the cakes. So, as it happens, does the Supreme Court, which in 2018 and 2019 sided with bakers who refused to provide pastry for same-sex nuptials. It’s hard not to see Roberts’s focus on this piddling issue as an attempt to bring back the bad old pre-Trump days of inane, reflexive GOP gay-bashing.

For Heaven’s sake, there’s even a frequent guest on Tim Pool’s popular podcast — a young guy in his twenties named Seamus Coughlin — who the other day broke into a rant about “homosexual behavior.” Still, not all the current antigay grumbling is inexplicable. Radical “queer” activists — who stalled gay-rights progress for years by foregrounding flamboyant fools as representative of the “community” while smearing solid gay citizens as “straight-acting” and “assimilationist” — now test the limits of heterosexual tolerance with nonsense like “Drag Queen Story Hour,” which unapologetically attempts to sexualize small children.