5/23/19 discussion about Colorado events and sex policy

Here is the link to my May 23, 2019, Twitter thread discussion about "a recent Colorado political event," and why I thought it pointed to the need to reassess things like the mission creep of the MeToo movement and a lot of America's sex laws and sex policy.

I didn't say this then. But the political event was the recall of Rochelle Galindo, following a big scandal related to some sexual allegations about the Colorado State Representative.

I actually need to sort out the history of my experience with this situation. I can't say what my experience actually was at this time. But I think things went like this.

At the 2019 Colorado Democrats re-org meeting, the Colorado Dems chair, Morgan Carroll, told everybody that some folks in Galindo's district were aiming to recall her, basically because, following the Blue Wave of 2018, the Democrats were working hard to push through progressive legislation. The conservatives were aiming to recall a lot of people. But they started with Galindo.

I think -- I can't say for sure, and I need to look through my notes and see what I wrote down -- that at the re-org, Carroll said that we were not to talk about the Galindo recall effort, nor about the scandal surrounding Galindo, because we weren't to give the conservatives any publicity.

I think Carroll said that the Galindo recall effort would probably just be the tip of the iceberg. The Colorado Dems wanted to see how that effort went. And if it looked like it would be successful, the Colorado Dems would then go full-force in an effort to stop that and other recall efforts.

I think that by April, it became clear that the effort to recall Galindo would work. The Colorado Dems put some effort into trying to stop the recall campaign. But it was too late. Galindo was recalled.

However, that inspired the Colorado Dems to fight against all the other efforts by conservatives to recall Democratic State Representatives who were pushing progressive policy.

But these remaining Dems were all white, and, unless Brianna Titone faced recall efforts, which I don't think she did, they were all cishet.

So it seemed to me, from the moment Morgan Carroll said, Don't protect Rochelle Galindo (and, again, I might have misinterpreted what she said), the real message here was, Don't protect an Hispanic queer woman. Instead -- the Hispanic queer woman got to be the guinea pig for the Colorado Dems' experiment about whether the conservatives would be able to get the Blue Wave representatives recalled.

This really seemed to highlight for me, not just the fact that the conservatives would use sex scandal -- even fake sex scandal -- to get progressives kicked out of office; but also that the Colorado Democrats really didn't feel much of a need to protect LGBTQ folks, but especially brown LGBTQ folks, from getting recalled.

This, again, was right in line with a lot of my feelings about sex scandals in America, anyway, as I'd watched over the years as the MeToo had severe mission creep, always digging up sex scandals about queer folks and Black, brown, Jewish, and Asian folks, while the cishet white males dominating the economy and perpetuating the same old bad system were allowed to keep on doing their thing.

Watching everything happen to Rochelle Galindo, it seemed to me that all the sex scandal infrastructure that gained power from the MeToo movement stood to benefit cishet white people a lot, and, often, hurt queer folks and folks outside of that white normative power structure more than ever.

However -- it's worth noting, because it shows what a weak character I have -- that, even as I saw this stuff happening to Galindo, I didn't stand up and say, This is baloney! We have to help her!

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