By Joshua Arnold

First Lady Jill Biden introduced her husband, President Joe Biden, as he spoke Saturday at the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) annual National Dinner, billed as “a national gathering for champions of LGBTQ equality.” Like a well-planned multi-course meal, Jill prepared the favorable audience for her husband’s truth-lite entrée — which will be analyzed elsewhere — with a complementary appetizer so fanciful it deserves scrutiny all on its own.

Said First Lady Jill Biden:

“But despite the freedom and acceptance we have fought for in places like D.C., we know that in too many other parts of our country, these rights and freedoms are under attack. Across the country, in places like Texas and Florida and Alabama, LGBTQ individuals don’t have the freedom to be honest with their family or embrace their gender identity at work. They don’t have the freedom to walk down the halls of their school as their authentic self. They don’t have the freedom to hold hands with their partner on the sidewalk.”

Were these comments AI-generated? The point is clearly: blue jurisdictions good, red jurisdictions bad. But surely a Democrat could make that point to HRC without such obvious fabrications. Here are five false claims Jill Biden made in that paragraph.

False Statement 1: “In places like Texas and Florida and Alabama, LGBTQ individuals don’t have the freedom to be honest with their family … ”

To be clear, the people generically labeled as “individuals” are children who live under their parents’ roofs; there are neither proposals nor benefits to enacting such a ban for adults — not to mention the obvious free speech violation. Thus, Biden implied that Republican-controlled states have passed laws forbidding children who identify as LGBTQ from informing members of their family.

But exactly the opposite is true; LGBT activists and teachers unions are the ones fighting to keep children who identify as LGBTQ from informing their parents. Democrat-controlled states like California are fighting to conceal students’ LGBTQ identities from parents, while Republican-controlled states have passed laws requiring to schools to inform parents, such as Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, expanded this year.

False Statement 2: “In places like Texas and Florida and Alabama, LGBTQ individuals don’t have the freedom to … embrace their gender identity at work.”

Whereas the previous statement merely reassigned the players in a live controversy, this statement resuscitates a dead one. In 2020, in Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court — the one Biden loves to call “extremist” — ruled 7-2 that a man who identified as a woman could wear women’s clothes to work, rewriting civil rights employment law to find LGBTQ protections where none previously existed. While conservatives denounced the decision and have warned about its problematic impacts on religious freedom and other areas of civil rights law, for now the decision remains a controlling court precedent that no one has directly challenged.

False Statement 3: “In places like Texas and Florida and Alabama, LGBTQ individuals … don’t have the freedom to walk down the halls of their school as their authentic self.”

Despite the vast disparities in freedoms enjoyed by adults and children, when it comes “LGBTQ individuals,” this Doctor of Education expected her hearers to consider them interchangeably.

Even still, one must squint to see even the slightest connection between this claim and reality. Biden assumed a feelings-first understanding of the phrase, “authentic self,” which implied someone could walk down the school hallway “inauthentically.” Cracking the coded language of trans ideologues, she seemed to be pointing an accusing finger at school districts that protect students’ private spaces from members of the opposite sex, and which do not constrain the free speech of staff or students by requiring them to use false names or pronouns when referring to a gender-confused student. If policies restricting a student’s name, clothing, or restroom usage at school prevented the student from being his or her “authentic self,” then that “self” would be rather susceptible to external pressures, and not very inward to begin with.

Keep in mind that school, like the military, is an inherently controlled environment, where many constraints are placed on students’ behavior. The military does not forgive a private who goes AWOL because he was fulfilling his self-identity as a traveler, nor one who sells military secrets because he was fulfilling his self-identity as a spy. In the same way, a school does not permit all student expressions of self-identity; students may not dress as a character from Call of Duty, use the restroom in a dog park, or insist that their teachers and classmates call them “Batman.” This is true of all schools, not just those in Texas, Florida, and Alabama.

False Statement 4: “In places like Texas and Florida and Alabama, LGBTQ individuals … don’t have the freedom to hold hands with their partner on the sidewalk.”

Insert a record-scratch — what was that now? Was this intended as a joke? Did anyone at the sold-out national dinner for LGBTQ activists have any personal experience that could support such an outlandish claim? Does anyone believe, for one moment, that a state legislature or governor would seriously entertain such an idea — much less that they could enact legislation to that effect?

I’ve only heard of one alleged instance of (opposite-sex) romantic partners not being allowed to hold hands on the sidewalk, and that was in the context of an ultra-conservative religious university. The many alumni of that school whom I know offer mixed reviews about whether such a rule ever existed, but all assure me that it is certainly not in effect now. I mention this because it seems that the First Lady attempted to smear entire states as right-wing theocracies — with policies that not even ultra-conservative religious schools implement.

As for the merits of the case, not only may same-sex partners hold hands on the sidewalk in all three states, but LGBT organizations freely advertise Pride Parades in Austin, Tampa, and Birmingham — and those were just the first three cities I checked. Doubtless hand-holding is among the least offensive LGBT activities in a Pride Parade. Nor do people in these states who self-identify as LGBT hide their identity out of fear of state reprisals. Earlier this year, LGBT activists entered the state capitols in Florida and Texas, among other states, endeavoring to pressure legislators to vote against pro-parent, pro-biology legislation. These protestors chanted loudly, blocked hallways, and generally made themselves a nuisance. Does anyone really believe they lacked the freedom to hold hands?

False Statement 5: “But despite the freedom and acceptance we have fought for in places like D.C., we know that in too many other parts of our country, these rights and freedoms are under attack. Across the country, in places like Texas and Florida and Alabama …”

Biden then proceeded to talk about “freedoms,” which are more or less — usually less — connected to reality. But she never discusses which “rights” of people who identify as LGBTQ are under attack.

The reason is, as far as long-established rights are concerned, people who identify as LGBTQ enjoy all the same rights as other Americans. They have the same inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” recognized in the Declaration of Independence, notwithstanding their rebellion against their own biology which makes their pursuit of happiness a steep one. They have the same rights to worship, speak, print, assemble, and petition that other Americans enjoy under the First Amendment. They have the same rights to bear arms under the Second Amendment, and the same legal protections under the Third through Eighth Amendments. They have the same extensions of rights provided under the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. None of these rights are in question.

The problem is that LGBTQ activists, particularly pro-trans activists, are aggressively demanding special rights that would infringe upon the guaranteed rights of other people. They demand state sanction for their preferred pronouns, which would involve state infringement on the free speech rights of others. They demand universal acceptance for, approval of, and cooperation with their lifestyle choices, even from people with profound religious objections. They demand unrestricted access to other people’s children, undermining parental rights. The examples could go on. The point is, if Jill Biden got into any specifics about what “LGBTQ rights” were under attack, it would become clear that LGBTQ activists are attacking other people’s rights, not the other way around.

Of course, a sympathetic crowd as at HRC’s national dinner wasn’t going to call out the First Lady for telling them what they want to hear. Despite the organization’s universal-sounding name, “Human Rights Campaign,” the promotional description for its annual dinner admits that the organization really stands for and cares about one goal: advancing the LGBTQ agenda. Is it possible to do that without spewing lies and slander? Apparently not.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.