A right-wing author has a plan for people who aren’t happy about shifting attitudes about LGBT rights: secession.
Douglas MacKinnon, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan, said on Tuesday that Southern states should break with the U.S. and form their own nation based on values like opposition to homosexuality, and that his former boss would be the perfect namesake.
“For whatever reason the leaders that we’re picking are deciding not to stand firmly for traditional values,” MacKinnon told radio host Janet Mefferd. MacKinnon is currently promoting a book, “The Secessionist States of America: The Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values Country … Now.”
Marriage equality, MacKinnon said, is such a threat to personal liberty that states should risk a second civil war to preserve the right to discriminate against people.
“If you happen to make a donation in favor of traditional marriage, you can lose your job. If you happen to refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple because it goes against your religious beliefs, you can be driven out of business,” he said.
In MacKinnon’s fantasy, South Carolina would once again play a central role in forming the new Reagan nation, joined by Georgia and Florida, but not Texas, which MacKinnon dismissed as too corrupted by “a number of incursions into Texas and other places from some of the folks in Mexico.”
MacKinnon also wrote an op-ed earlier this year that accused the Walt Disney Company of promoting a “pro-gay agenda.”
Meredith Clark
Meredith Clark is a freelance writer and editor. She was previously a senior news producer for "Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj," a reporter with MSNBC.com, the digital politics and culture editor at Glamour and a senior news and politics editor at Refinery29. She has written for Vulture, Rolling Stone, Self, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, The Daily Beast and Bustle.