Like a pack of roaming dogs, Republican state governments are racing to smoke out people who do not live their lives according to right-wing evangelical dogma. State after state has passed laws restricting the teaching of LGBTQ-affirmative content and targeting the families of students who identify as gay or transgender. The state of Texas, as usual the moral anti-exemplar of the nation, has sicced government enforcers upon the parents of transitioning trans children, and the state of Arizona is planning to ban the delivery of gender-affirming healthcare to trans youth. Republicans have taken perhaps the most vulnerable, powerless people in the entire country and made them the targets of another backlash.

The right-wing panic-thuggery aimed at transgender youth is a new manifestation of a pattern long present in conservative American politics. When a marginalized group demands, and wins, recognition after a long history of oppression, the first impulse of American reactionaries is to punch back. While marginalized Americans strain at the shackles of oppression, it is the right wing that typically possesses residual power in society and politics. After all, the definition of conservatism requires that right-wingers possess the influence to repel social change.

So when the marginalized make gains, the conservatives impose punishment. Our country’s right-wing power structures use the capacity for domination that they still possess to restrict the freedoms of rising Americans. That’s all rather abstract. But we have repeated examples throughout our history. The most devastating reactions, of course, have been inflicted upon Black Americans. In the wake of the African American Civil Rights movement, and supplied by mysterious social currents with the excuse of a crime wave, right-wing leaders like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan punished Black people with decades of prison expansion, culminating in a mass incarceration system that imposes immense suffering and is the clear successor to slavery and Jim Crow.

By far the most visible cultural change in 21st century America has been the emergence of LGBTQ people into relative acceptance by the country’s cis/straight majority. Most Americans, knowing and loving LGBTQ people who came out or simply drawn to acceptance by bonds of human sympathy, have accepted this change more or less without a grudge. But to the evangelical base of the Republican Party, LGBTQ visibility has been a terrifying and enraging thing to see. Evangelicals are motivated not primarily by personal morality or piety, but by anxieties about sexuality and the loss of patriarchal authority for cis-men. Homosexuality and transgender identity are by far the greatest sources of fear facing this fearful demographic.

So, with their base agitated and the power structure of which they are guardians under strain from human rights advocacy, conservative Republicans have sought to crack down once again. The wave of vile laws targeting LGBTQ young people seek to force these kids back into a position of marginalization and non-acceptance. The bills carry the unforgiving edge of the American State. This is an effort by the bigotry that encrusts most American systems to silence, shame, and punish a group of people who are just now tasting the promise of American life. It’s repugnant and despicable.