A reporter from ITK Entertainment asked Cyndi Lauper, “What do you make of all the anti-LGBTQ legislation that’s making its way in bills across the country?”
As The Hill reported, Lauper responded, in her distinctive Queens, New York accent:
Um, you know, I believe you don’t stop the fight. Equality for everybody – or nobody’s really equal. This is how Hitler started, you know, just weeding everybody out and then finally he, you know.
I don’t think it’s a good idea what they’re doing, but, you know. You just have to keep fighting for civil rights, I guess. That’s the way it is in this country. Started out like that, didn’t it?”
“Anti-LGBTQ legislation” is a negative label that activists and their allies in media and politics apply to bills that protect sexually-confused children from experimental, body-damaging medical interventions like puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones and surgeries.
“Anti-LGBTQ legislation” includes laws that protect parental rights in education, preserve girls sports for biological females, and safeguard children from books and curriculum that sexualize and confuse them.
“Anti-LGBTQ legislation” refers to sensible policies such as keeping girls and women’s showers, locker rooms, restrooms, dorms and dressing rooms for girls and women – rather than inviting men who claim to be women into those private spaces.
You bet, Cyndi. Protecting parental rights, girls sports and children is exactly like “how Hitler started.”
Lauper, who turns 70 in June of this year, is a singer, songwriter and actress, known for her eccentric, “free-spirited” clothing, colorful hairstyles, and 80s songs such as “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “True Colors.”
She’s also a staunch, left-leaning activist for abortion and LGBT issues.
The reporter asked the question at an event where the Library of Congress honored singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell as the 2023 recipient of its Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Lauper was one of the performers at the event, singing Mitchell’s song, “Big Yellow Taxi.”
The reporter did not explain why she asked Lauper the policy question nor what expertise the singer has in public policy issues.
Lauper may not know, but when you stoop to using analogies about Hitler and the Nazis, you’re often making a ridiculous, odious comparison – and you’ve already lost the argument
Godwin’s law, conceived by attorney and author Michael Godwin in 1990, initially related to internet discussions. He stated:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
That is to say, the longer the argument goes on, the more likely it will be that someone brings up Hitler and the Nazis, which invariably stops any further discussion.
Godwin believed that “the comparisons trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis.”
As Godwin’s law was popularized, the idea grew prevalent that whoever makes the comparison to Hitler loses the argument.
Not only did Ms. Lauper use a horrible comparison, but she has it exactly backwards: It’s radical activists in education, politics and the medical industry who are working to take children from their parents, indoctrinate them into a demonstrably false ideology, and hurt them with experimental, grossly disfiguring medical interventions.
We don’t need to use a comparison to the Holocaust to make those arguments.
Related articles and resources:
Christian College Sues Federal Government to Protect Women’s Privacy in Campus Housing
School District Refuses to Rescind Controversial Sex Ed Curriculum for Kindergartners
Sex Educators Say ‘Early Grades May Be the Best Time’ to Introduce Children to LGBT Issues
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