Guest Post: The Supreme Court: Responding with Movement

5/31/23
By Glenda Russell, LGBTQ+ Historian and member of OBC's Advocacy & Public Policy Committee

Are you perhaps expecting a US Supreme Court decision about LGBTQ rights sometime soon?  Here's a perspective to consider the next time you don't like the outcome of a political situation or event.

It's easy to get caught up in the specific events that affect our political realities. Such events might include proposed bills, executive orders, judicial decisions, elections—all sorts of events that don't go our way.

We may well react to these events with surprise, shock, disappointment, sadness, anger, and other feelings. Mostly, those feelings make sense.

It's tempting to see such events as some sort of final outcome in the struggle for LGBTQ rights. But, they are not final.

Actually, they are steps in an ongoing process of wins and losses, steps forward and steps backward, victories and backlashes.

One of the biggest dangers is treating them like a final loss, or even like a final gain. Win or lose, in a given situation, the work is still there before us. When political events go our way, there's a danger we'll take that as a final decision and then neglect doing the work to continue moving forward—and that includes consolidating our gains, making sure no one is left behind,  and preparing for whatever backlash is to come. 

When political events don't go our way, there's the danger we'll get overly discouraged and stop our efforts to move forward.

Good or bad, these are moments—specific events, whether they are on our side or not. They are moments, they are not our movement.

Our movement is ongoing, with inevitable ups and downs, wins and losses. When we lose in one sphere—Congress, a state legislature, an election, a court, public opinion—we can press our case in another sphere. That includes in our own heads as we deal with political outcomes. That's how change happens.

Whatever the event, it's momentary. The movement is all of us. It stretches back through history and it stretches farther into the future than our eyes can see. 

It's a movement. So let's keep moving.