Nex Benedict Was Killed By a Republican Culture War. We Cannot Stand for It.

Nex Benedict will never see their seventeenth birthday. The beautiful, healthy, vibrant nonbinary teenager died at the hands of peers who bullied them incessantly and who violently beat them in their school bathroom, simply because they existed. Their murder is heartbreaking and infuriating—and unsurprising.This is the rotten, putrid fruit of MAGA America and all it stands for and aspires to.Deadly violence targeting the LGBTQ community and those who support them is not a random aberration, it is the logical progression. When you continually label queer people as predators,when you repeatedly accuse teachers of being groomers,when you declare drag shows and gay clubs as societal threats,when you intentionally target transgender children and their parents,when you perpetually traffic in irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric designed to generate irrational fear of LGBTQ people—hate crimes are guaranteed.The hollow culture wars that Christian Conservatives have spent the past few decades going all-in on have actual human costs. They are not ideological expressions untethered from life on the ground. They are not just tweets and slogans and disconnected pulpit diatribes devoid of consequences. They are not merely reckless words and irresponsible assassinations of character against people for their gender identity and sexual orientation.They may begin as those things, but eventually they become teenagers terrorizing and assaulting non-heteronormative young people because they have so dehumanized them as to see them as expendable and necessary collateral damage of a righteous holy war they have been drafted into by their parents and pastors and politicians.The tweets and slogans and diatribes eventually become verbal assaults and underserved acts of hatred. They become gaping wounds too severe and numerous to withstand.There is no mystery here to be solved, no complex code to uncover, no hidden motive we need to follow down endless rabbit trails to discern.This is simple cause-and-affect.It is the grotesque monster Republicans have made because they have lacked creative ideas or noble impulses or any desire to lead responsibly for the common good.By continually chasing the sensational, by relentlessly ratcheting up their rhetoric, by dragging their base to an ever-deepening bottom, and by using LGBTQ people as faceless, nameless political chips—they are nurturing the kind of wasteful violence that visited Nex Benedict in what should have been the safest of spaces.The Republican Party and their voting base, and the conservative Christian movement that leverages its pulpits for them will continue to pretend they are oblivious to or even outraged by this violence when it appears. But until the Right reckons with the flesh-and-blood cost of their continual verbal assault on a group of already marginalized people, and until they repent and begin to fight for the rights and humanity of the LGBTQ community, these physical assaults will continue—and they will have that blood on their hands.Meanwhile, the rest of us cannot allow fear to cause us to pull back or shut up.We need to become more bold and more visible allies than we have been before, or we risk devolving into a nation that accepts this unspeakable violence as normal. It is not normal.This is a moment for people of faith, morality, and conscience to decide with clarity who we are individually and who we want to be collectively. It is a day when individuals and families and neighborhoods and businesses and churches need to stand and be counted.The dangerous words of the Conservative movement are getting people killed.It's time for allies of the LGBTQ community to explicitly speak words that love and bring life and declare what we will not abide here.We often like to say hate has no home here.We need to move this from aspiration to incarnation.Nex Benedict and young people like them deserve to walk into this world as the fullest, most authentic version of themselves and not have to be harassed, threatened, beaten, or killed for that right. To hell with this hatred. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe