Please stop doing this.
Queen Mab may be bound by clever wordplay, but conservatives are not the fey. The devil may be forced to keep his promises, but Christian Nationalists are not restrained by the same integrity as Old Scratch.
“Oh-ho! They didn’t think through their own rules, hmm? What fools! Don’t they even know how [literature/biology/history] works?”
Friend, their rule is, “Fuck you” and “Thank your betters.” Beloved, their way of making things work is, “Eradicate the vermin.”
This is a central feature of right-wing ideology and absolutely critical to understand.
Conservativism consists of exactly one principle, to whit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Frank Wilhoit (2018)
Conservatives believe hierarchy is fundamental to humanity (and sometimes fundamental to the universe). While you may think they imagine themselves at the top of this hierarchy, that’s not so. They just always imagine someone else guaranteed to be below them. They can accept that someone will be above them but the bargain of self-injuring collaboration is to be granted absolute power over some other even more despised group (“psychological wages”).
This is why equality is anathema to conservatives. They cannot imagine it, only an inverted system of oppression where they lose power.
If they accept slavery, it’s because someone must inevitably be fettered and tortured, but in a good system, it’s someone who deserves it. So if a slaver can’t hold the whip or put someone in chains, they assume they’ll be enslaved — which is unnatural and unfair because they don’t deserve it. Literally, slavers responded to abolitionism in history this way but also right now (just ask people about ending prison slavery).
So think about that in terms of queer life.
At present, cis-heteronormativity and patriarchy are intensely indoctrinated into children and violently enforced to maintain the current hierarchy. A huge amount of energy shapes children from birth and keeps them in line. If society rejects that hierarchical oppression, the right wing does not believe that no one will be indoctrinated or coerced. They believe indoctrination and violence will be queer instead, and that’s unnatural and unfair (unlike the status quo they call natural and fair).
Therefore, conservatives will try to stop this “grooming” where children think of themselves as people with agency, bodily autonomy, and a full sense of self — because they say that’s perverse.
There’s no “gotcha” here. The logic is consistent. Conservatives just think we’re subhuman.
Conservatives used to openly claim nobles and royals had better blood, and to openly claim certain people were subhuman by race, gender, disability, etc. That has never gone away, it only got quieter for a while. The return is not an aberration but central to the whole project and way of ordering their existence.
If you think it’s an oversight by conservatives that black letter law makes it so cisheterosexual as well as queer relationships can’t be acknowledged, you fundamentally misunderstand the point of power and believe law exists like magic spells rather than expression of that power.
TST sued us from April 2020 to September 2024, and we are still here.