Defending LGBTQ+ dignity in the South means defending Black voting power

It was one hard-won victory inside a much larger struggle over who gets to belong fully in American civic life and live unburdened by systemic injustice.

That is why the recent weakening by the U.S. Supreme Court of federal voting rights protections should alarm every LGBTQ+ person in the Deep South, especially those of us living in states like Alabama and Georgia.

Black and LGBTQ+ communities share interests

Credit: Barry M. Cole

Credit: Barry M. Cole

In the South, Black political participation has often served as one of the strongest democratic checks against the majoritarian power of white evangelical conservatism and its increasingly organized extremism against LGBTQ+ rights.

This is not an attack on faith itself. Many people of deep faith have stood courageously beside LGBTQ+ communities. The danger comes when a strain of white evangelical political power seeks to transform personal belief into state enforcement.

We see this clearly in efforts to erase LGBTQ visibility from schools, restrict transgender healthcare, remove books from libraries, and expand religious exemptions that allow discrimination under the language of conscience.

These are not merely policy disagreements. They are attempts to define full citizenship through a narrow moral framework in which queer people are tolerated only if they remain invisible.

Even where Black churches may hold complex theological views on sexuality, African American voters as a political bloc have consistently supported broader civil rights protections, democratic access, public education, healthcare equity and anti-discrimination measures. Those policies create the civic infrastructure that protects all vulnerable communities, including LGBTQ+ citizens.

When Black voting access is weakened through gerrymandering, voter suppression or court decisions that make discrimination harder to challenge, the practical result is often stronger legislative control by politicians advancing anti-LGBTQ+ policies.

This is not theoretical. We are already watching it unfold.

Across Southern states, lawmakers are expanding “Don’t Say Gay” style laws, restricting classroom discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity, attacking transgender youth, and broadening legal protections for refusal of service based on religious objections.

Although the attack is not primarily on marriage, we cannot afford to understate the danger. Rights ranging from access to restaurants to hospital visitation and inheritance are conceivably in the crosshairs of these extremists. Marriage equality may remain legally intact while LGBTQ+ people become less safe at school, less protected at work, less visible in public life and more vulnerable to discrimination disguised as conscience.

Closeted LGBTQ+ individuals will retreat further into silence. As my own research into shunned spaces has shown, forced invisibility carries devastating emotional consequences, and suicidal ideation will tragically increase as well.

Why the work to secure civil rights is far from over

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal

This is why the rollback of voting protections matters so deeply.

The same political machinery used historically to weaken Black citizenship — district dilution, moral panic, educational censorship, and the rhetoric of “protecting traditional values” — is often repurposed against LGBTQ+ communities.

Many LGBTQ+ Americans, especially white gay men who have benefited from recent legal victories, are tempted to believe the hardest battles are behind us. Marriage equality created a sense of crossing a threshold, of finally accessing the blessings of full citizenship. But history, especially Southern history, teaches otherwise. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

If we march only when marriage equality itself is directly threatened, we are already too late.

We cannot afford selective outrage. Our only hope to preserve our rights is sustained unity through protest, coalition-building, voting and civic resistance.

To defend LGBTQ+ dignity in the South means defending Black voting power. It means recognizing how white evangelical political extremism has learned to use democratic erosion as a pathway to moral control. Its reach extends all the way to the Supreme Court.

The battle for voting rights and the struggle for LGBTQ+ dignity are not parallel causes. They are the same fight.

Georgia knows this history well. Alabama does too. We know what happens when democratic participation is narrowed and “moral” majorities are given unchecked power.

This danger will become personal for all of us. No one in the LGBTQ+ community, including gay white men, will be excluded from a rollback of our human rights.

To put it starkly, we stand together or fall apart.

Barry M. Cole, Ph.D., is a novelist and instructor of African American literature whose research centers on marginalized communities throughout the world. He resides in Alabama.

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