Conservatives sure do like their catchy phrases. I’m old
enough to remember when Newt Gingrich, in his role as Speaker of the House,
broke the norm by hiring marketers to shape public opinion rather than
pollsters to measure public opinion. This is the kind of thinking that
led to renaming the Estate Tax as the “Death Tax” because marketers understood
that people instinctively have a negative reaction to the word “death”, so by
applying that name to a tax Republicans wanted to repeal they manufactured
broad support for abolishing a law that most people didn’t even know existed, let
alone understood.
But catchy phrases have a tendency to spread. Years later,
Republicans would rename the Affordable Care Act as “Obamacare” in their zeal
to get rid of it (it didn’t work). They also relabeled a Reagan-era low-income
telephone program “Obama phones” in the hope that the idea of free cell phones
for poor people would outrage average voters (it didn’t).
Now we have this utter nonsense that conservatives like to
throw out anytime a company markets anything to an LGBTQ audience. Despite
many, many examples of successful products that have been marketed this way,
they insist that it’s a failing strategy.
What they don’t seem to understand is that society is
evolving whether they like it or not. These are the same voices that once cried
out in protest over Star Trek depicting a kiss between a white man and a
black woman. Star Trek is still with us, alive and well, in 2026. I
remember hearing that Queer as Folk was going to be the end of civilization
as we know it. (In a way, maybe it was.) And I seem to recall an incident at
the MTV Music Awards when people lost their minds over Madonna and Britney
Spears sharing a kiss.
Change is inevitable. While there remains a lot of work to
be done our society is more open and inclusive than it was in the 1960s, and it’s
going to continue no matter how much certain groups of people threaten to hold
their collective breath until they turn blue. “Go woke, go broke” is nothing
more than a temper tantrum writ large, a hissy fit thrown by people who insist
on a culture without diversity or compassion, a world where everyone has to
conform or face the consequences.
The thing about that is that they’re going to lose. In many
ways, they already have. And they know it. That’s why they’re so desperate to
put the genie back in the bottle. But it doesn’t work that way. Better days are
coming. We just have to wait them out, because I promise you they can only hold
their breath for so long.