Joe Biden face-planted on camera recently while attempting to discuss the LGBT community. As is his habit, the president managed to completely botch his public statement, uttering an iteration of the LGBT acronym that no one has heard before. That he’s this bad even reading a teleprompter is hardly comforting.
But while it’s weird that we have a president who speaks as if he should be in a nursing home, that’s not really why I’m writing this article. Stick with me for a moment, but here’s the clip to start things off.
Do you know what? I don’t even blame Biden here. The absurdity of the LGBT acronym is most at fault for his fumbling about, not his otherwise clear and present senility. The thing just keeps growing and growing, and at what point do we ask why it’s even necessary?
What does a transgender person have to do with a gay person? In fact, the two ideas are at odds with one another — given it is considered offensive to not believe gender is fluid while at the same time it’s also considered offensive to believe sexual preference is malleable. Are you confused yet? Further, what does an intersex person, which is a birth defect, have to do with a lesbian person? What purpose does it serve to add terms like “two-spirit” to the acronym? How are almost any of these different groups of people even related?
The entire thing is dumb. There is no actual “LGBTQ2SIA+” community (I had to copy and past that because it’s impossible to keep up with at this point). Rather, there are lots of different individuals with lots of different ideas about society and life. It’s not like there’s a yearly meeting of LGBTQ2SIA+ Americans where they decide what to think in lockstep. To be a community, you actually have to be a community. That means living in proximity to one another, sharing ideas, and helping your neighbor. A gay person in California is not in a community with a transgender person in Florida. Why pretend otherwise?
Yet, our politics demand we lump people in together like this, and there’s no end in sight to how far this will go. What other letters and symbols are they going to add? Where does it stop and at what point can we just consider people to be people? I don’t think it’s bigoted to ask that question.
Democrats see political power in dividing and grouping people this way, though. That’s why it continues to happen, no matter how absolutely silly things get. So in the end, perhaps Biden had a point when he stumbled over the LGBT acronym. His politics just won’t allow him to realize it.