A nonprofit organization dedicated to chronicling the history of the LGBTQ movement in the Deep South said it was “appalling” that two Republican state lawmakers criticized the group’s presentation Thursday hosted by the Alabama Department of Archives and History as a promoter of the “liberal LGBTQ political agenda”.
“I don’t think they know what ‘politicize’ means,” said Maigen Sullivan, co-founder of the Birmingham-based company. Invisible Histories Projectwho gave the lecture organized by ADAH entitled “Invisible No More: Alabama’s LGBTQ+ Story” Thursday in Montgomery.
1819 News, a website that It was owned by the Alabama Policy Institutepublished in event preview Wednesday.
Preview followed for a story citing Alabama House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen, R-Hartselle, and state Rep. Jamie Kiel, R-Russellville.
“The fact that state money, buildings and resources are being used to promote a liberal LGBTQ political agenda flies in the face of our state’s values. If this is what they are doing with the tax payer money being sent to them, maybe we should re-evaluate [the ADAH’s] allocation in the next budget,” Statdthagen said, according to 1819 News.
Kiel said the event was an example of the “woke liberal agenda … invading our culture.”
“I can’t stand to spend Alabamians’ tax dollars on something that the vast majority of the state can’t stand,” he said, according to 1819 News. “This also highlights the need to expose state spending on other DEI programs there may be. It’s sad that state resources are being used to politicize the out-of-touch views of the left” .
An ADAH spokeswoman could not immediately be reached for comment on the lawmakers’ response.
But Sullivan said the presentation, which touched on Alabama’s first Pride march, the struggles of LGBTQ student organizations at Auburn University and the University of Alabama and the state’s first LGBTQ center, It wasn’t politics.
“I really just went over things that are pretty black and white,” he said. “It’s just a record of history and so I find it mind-boggling that someone would interpret the facts as a political agenda.”
The Alabama office of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ rights group, said the Republican lawmakers’ comments were “not surprising, but troubling all the same.”
“Alabama has a long history of trying to erase the stories of marginalized individuals, so the latest statements from certain lawmakers are not surprising but equally troubling. As the nation’s oldest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization, we stand strongly with the ‘ADAH in its commitment to preserve the history of ALL Alabamians,” the organization said in a statement sent to AL.com Thursday night. “We’ve already lost countless historical accounts and stories through past attempts to erase history. Events like these are what really seem to preserve history.”
Sullivan said he finds it “horrifying as an individual taxpayer that our legislature is trying to deny a full and honest look at our own histories, to eradicate history in this way seems counterintuitive to who we say we are as a country.” .
The comments by Stadthagen and Kiehl, Sullivan said, sound “like rhetoric they are making up to politicize their own agenda.
“I think this is the last gasp of bigotry because they wanted a culture war and they’re losing,” he said.
The event also wasn’t paid for with state money, Sullivan said.
“This was not tax-funded, it came from a grant program from the Alabama Humanities Alliance,” he said, referring to ADAH’s food for thought cycle of conferences and presentations.
Sullivan noted that in the early 1990s, when there were attempts to shut down the Auburn Gay Lesbian Alliance, the university’s president at the time said the constitutional right to assemble was granted to all organizations and not only those with which the majority agreed.
“As Americans, we have a right to assemble, we have a right to free speech,” he said. “And to come and attack this [event] … it’s a violation of free speech and people’s ability to gather and learn things.
“Honestly, it’s an eradication of open knowledge and conversation, and these things lead to fascism,” he continued.
He said the organization thanked ADAH for being open to their conversation.
“It’s important right now that these institutions are advocates for honest and accurate truth telling,” Sullivan said.
