The Human Rights Campaign Invents an Emergency

The fomenting of hysteria has become such a predictable feature of American public life that it’s hard to retain the capacity for shock. Seemingly not a day goes by without political outrage entrepreneurs warning us that some nefarious group or concept—drag queens, “white supremacy,” antifa, “disinformation,” immigrant rapists, Russian bots—constitutes an existential threat to the nation. And yet even by the already debased standards of our discourse, the declaration earlier this month of a “national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans” by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest LGBTQ political lobbying organization in the United States, constitutes a new low.