A column in today’s NYT indicated that an extraordinary percentage of the members of Gen Z identify themselves as LGBTQ. You don’t have to be part of the hard right to find that alarming. Common sense tells us that a substantial portion of the increase is due to favorable portrayals of LGBTQ people on TV, in movies, and on the internet; calling yourself LGBTQ has become fashionable as a result. If you’re, say, Ron DeSantis, what can you do about this?
You would start, of course, by excluding LGBTQ people and ideas from the public sphere to the maximum extent possible. The right is already starting to do that. Regulating public activity, however, would not be enough. You could only put the genie back in the bottle with Chinese levels of censorship of TV, the movies, and the internet for many years, if not decades. Nothing less than that has any hope of success.
Leaving aside the obvious First Amendment issues with this approach, would you really want to live in a country with that kind of censorship? Didn’t think so.