The Nation: The Roots of Today’s Racism and Police Violence, in an ‘Inconceivably Brutal’ Riot 150 Years Ago

One hundred and fifty years ago this month, the white population of Memphis, Tennessee, set about raping, murdering, and plundering the city’s African Americans, most of whom were recently liberated slaves. The riot left dozens dead and entire African-American neighborhoods completely destroyed. It was a harbinger of things to come. Soon the Ku Klux Klan, which had been founded only a few months earlier, in addition to other white-supremacist vigilante groups, would embark on a more general campaign of violence and terror, ultimately succeeding in bringing Reconstruction to an end and ensuring that African-Americans would not enjoy full equality and freedom for many, many more years.

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The New Yorker‎: Transgender Rights and the End of the New South

Earlier that day, McCrory’s office had filed its own federal lawsuit, which attempted to protect the state from federal anti-discrimination action against H.B. 2. “North Carolina does not treat transgender employees differently,” according to the lawsuit. “All state employees are required to use the bathroom and changing facilities assigned to persons of their same biological sex, regardless of gender identity, or transgendered status.” Such bland assertions of neutrality have an infamous place in the law. Before the Supreme Court established a right to same-sex marriage, in 2015, North Carolina forbade gay and straight alike to wed members of the same sex. Before the Court invalidated laws against racial intermarriage, in 1967’s Loving v. Virginia, the state forbade both black and white people to marry someone of the other race. All these laws were defended on the grounds that they treated everyone alike. So, for that matter, were the original Jim Crow segregation laws. In 1896, upholding separate-but-equal accommodations, the Supreme Court held that, if “the enforced separation of the races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” this was “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it.” [...]

Trump’s version of the Republican Party, at least as he has expressed it in the primaries, liquidates both sides of McCrory’s strategy. On the cultural front, it turns away from personal and religious morality to stir up an us-versus-them energy with nationalist xenophobia. Economically, it replaces a blandly relentless laissez-faire program with aggrieved attacks on incompetent élites—sometimes in the name of tax cuts, sometimes in support of trade protectionism, universal health care, and rebuilding crumbling infrastructure. Trump’s primary campaign and Barack Obama’s Administration, in very different ways, have left Pat McCrory’s Republicanism with hardly any place to stand.

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CNN: Why my parents tried to cure me of being gay

Reparative therapy's most alluring fiction is right there in its name: the idea of an Edenic reparation, a return to a Golden Age when life was much less complicated. It is a lie I've seen repeated in the latest string of anti-LGBT legislation passed in Tennessee, Mississippi, and most notably North Carolina. In order to protect us from complicated identities and shifting realities, politicians hide under the guise of safety, cleansing public spaces of all ambiguity. Bathrooms become either/or, and businesses operate under the personal beliefs of their owners. "Safe spaces" are reserved for those least in need of them. Instead of making room for all people, these states offer the same two options my parents once offered me: conform or move on.

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