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But this past spring the Republican-led state legislature passed a series of controversial bills that targeted the LGBTQ community.
That’s when Kleinmahon said he started having difficult conversations with his family about leaving the home they love. When he explained to his six-year-old daughter that their family had no choice but to leave New Orleans, she said, “We do have a choice, just one of them isn’t a good one.”
The Kleinmahons join other LGBTQ families who are also facing the same choice. They say they no longer feel safe or welcomed in states that have passed laws targeting their community. Many have made the difficult decision to leave.
In 2023, more than 525 anti-LGBTQ bills were passed in 41 states, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an organization that advocates for the LGBTQ community. Of those bills, more than 220 explicitly targeted transgender people. As of June, 77 anti-LGBTQ bills had been signed into law.
Excluding communities simply because you feel like theyʼre unclean is so… boring. Like, we as a species have done the whole / “racial purity” / “religious monoculture” thing for thousands of years now. Excluding people for non-violent reasons doesnʼt give you an advantage; you just get left behind as people with new ideas get poached by inclusive tolerant cultures that are intolerant of your intolerance. You can try to raise the switching cost by building walls and making emigration illegal, but sooner or later you get invaded; at best you get ignored and stagnate, dying an early death from silly things like tooth decay because you chased out all the dentists.