Deconstructing Memes: The complexities of voting and harm reduction

A meme that has been around for several years now, which usually is shared by people during an upcoming election cycle, has been showing up in my social media feed quite a bit lately.

The meme uses the colors of an LGBTQ+ flag, with the following text:

Don’t tell someone you love them, and then vote for someone who will hurt them.

I get the intent and the sentiment that comes with this meme, although I think it is problematic.

Clearly, the meme was created to specifically center those who identify as LGBTQ+. Additionally, if you have a relationship with someone who identifies as part of the LGBTQ+ community, you say that you love them or that you care about them, then it would follow that you would not vote for someone who would do harm to them. The harm in this case would be to support public policy that would do harm to the LGBTQ+ community. 

Seems simple enough. You should not vote for someone who will promote public policy that is inherently homophobic or anti-trans. However, there is also something that is implied in this meme, which often means that you should never vote for a Republican, but voting for a Democrat means you won’t do harm to the LGBTQ+ community. 

The problem I have with this sentiment and this logic is two fold. First, just voting for Democrats doesn’t mean that they won’t do harm to the LGBTQ+ community. Second, memes such as these are too narrowly focused on “gay politics”, when we know that the LGBTQ+ community is extremely diverse. There are those in the LGBTQ+ community that are also Black, Latinx, immigrants, Palestinian, Jewish, working class, unhoused, etc. 

This is the problem with narrow identify politics, since it doesn’t consider the totality of individuals and communities. 

For example, according to the site Liberation:

Just three weeks into 2024, the Trans Legislation Tracker website is already tracking 308 active bills — including 38 bills at the national level — that attempt to deprive transgender Americans of the few legal protections they have and to introduce a slew of new restrictions targeting their most basic rights, including the right to access necessary and life-saving health care, to have their identities legally recognized, to practice their culture, to engage in sport, and even to access public spaces like bathrooms.

The article goes on to note: 

At the national level, Democrats have been scarcely better champions of LGBTQ rights. Biden pledged to pass the Equality Act in his first 100 days in office, which would ban discrimination against LGBTQ people across wide swaths of U.S. public life. Three years later, it has yet to come to a vote in the Senate. Meanwhile, last year Biden’s own Education Department made anti-trans changes to Title IX, which mandates gender equality in sports programs. LGBTQ people denounced these changes as a “roadmap” for bigots to discriminate against them.

The Democrats, which cast themselves as the champions for many minorities, including LGBTQ people, are continuing to prove that they will not even be fair-weather friends to queer people as the far-right attacks get worse, and increasingly see us as a political liability. 

When we look at a who range of other identities of those who are part of the LGBTQ+ community, we can also see that you shouldn’t vote for people who will do them hard. Here are several examples of who you shouldn’t vote for because it will harm people who are part of the LGBTQ+ community.

• You shouldn’t vote for candidates who want to maintain or increase the level of funding for cops, since police departments across the US disproportionately target and kill BIPOC people.
• You shouldn’t vote for candidates who want to further criminalize immigrants, many of whom come to the US in the first place because of the economic and military policies the US imposes on their countries of origin.
• You shouldn’t vote for candidates that adopt support policies that criminalize the unhoused, perpetuate housing insecurity or don’t support rent control. 
• You shouldn’t vote for candidates that unconditionally support Israel, Israel’s current genocidal campaign against the Palestinians and the longstanding Israeli occupation of Palestine.
• You shouldn’t vote for candidates that support Corporate welfare, that support tax policies that benefit the rich and punish working class people, that support using public to dollars to underwrite development projects that will primarily benefit those in the Capitalist Class, and those that support the growing wealth gap between the 1% and the rest of us.
• You shouldn’t vote for candidates that support subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, that support the expansion of oil pipelines, mining, corporate agriculture, those who don’t support a growing shift to mass transit or community control of renewable energy sources, since all of these things perpetuate Climate Change.
• You shouldn’t vote for candidates that continue to support a massive US military budget ($886 Billion for 2025), since we could significantly reduce that budget and redirect it for housing, renewal energy, education and health care.
• You shouldn’t vote for candidates that support continue colonial and settler colonial policies that impact Indigenous people currently living in the US or Indigenous people living in other countries that the US has relationships with and particularly countries where the US has military bases.

These are just a few examples of how voting for candidates will do harm to BIPOC, immigrant, working class, non-Christian faith, and those with disabilities who are also LGBTQ+ people. Don’t tell someone you love them and then vote for people who will sure as hell do them harm!