At the Vote Pray Stand Summit, Christian Parents and Their "Rights" Take Center Stage

[Nevilledog]

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/vote-pray-stand-summit/

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https://archive.ph/MyCsv

Under the glittering chandeliers and blue stage lights of the Pray Vote Stand summit in Washington, D.C., inside the cavernous ballroom where three Jumbotron screens faced row after row of Christian conservatives, evangelical leader Tony Perkins placed his hand on Amy Atterbery’s shoulder and began to pray. It one of the last sessions on the main stage at the annual political gathering of the Christian right, hosted by Perkins’s Family Research Council. And Perkins was giving his blessing to the movement’s most promising public face: the Christian parent.

Holding back tears, Atterbery read from a printout the tragic story of how she had refused to accept her teenager’s gender transition, prompting her child to run away at the age of 16 and become homeless. The emotional crescendo of Atterbery’s story was her attempt to stop “butchers” from performing the phalloplasty her 19-year-old had chosen to undergo. Her child is now 23 and, Atterbery confirmed in an interview with me, unaware that his mother is sharing his story on a national stage to serve a fast-moving political project whose ultimate goal is to ban transition-related care for adults like him.

The audience prayed for Atterbery, prayed for an end to what Perkins called “one of the most demonic agendas that we see in our nation today.”

In this narrative of good versus evil, of Christians versus demons, of the gender binary versus “gender ideology,” it is not the transgender child suffering from homelessness who is the victim but the parent who rejects that child. The Christian right believes that parents like Atterbery are its greatest hope for political redemption in the post-Roe era. This movement that helped bring about the end of Roe is throwing its energy behind a political strategy centered on wrapping the (literal) demonization of trans people in the innocuous-sounding catchphrase “parental rights.”

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