Should the government prioritize the LGBTQI community after natural disasters?

Are homosexuals and transgendered people more at risk from natural disasters than the rest of the population? I dare say there is a robust tranche of right-of-center opinion which holds that they are indeed more at risk and that by and large this is a very good thing. Natural disasters are sometimes called “acts of God” and those of a deeply conservative disposition may be inclined to see them as a punishment from the Almighty for grave transgressions of a sexual or gender nature. It is God doing what God does best — a spot of appropriate smiting.

When organizations talk about equity, they mean privileging one group over another group

The rest of us might enquire why, if this is so, God allows perfectly decent straight people to be killed alongside the supposed transgressors in natural disasters — and the only answer forthcoming seems to be that His righteous vengeance is not always pinpoint in its accuracy and nor should we expect it to be so. Either that or He is intent on exacting retribution upon both the deviants and those who tolerate deviants within their midst. I have to say I find this argument unconvincing and, as it is advanced by only a small percentage of people, some of whom may have large stocks of weedkiller in their basements, I shall let it lie.

The question has arisen as a consequence of the behavior of the Federal Emergency Management Agency following a number of problematic hurricanes. Like almost all federal agencies in the US, FEMA is greatly distrusted by those who are further to the right than a fish knife, as James Thurber once put it. It seems that the agency — which was set up by Jimmy Carter, by the way — has spent an awful lot of its funding providing homes for illegal migrants. It was also accused of being singularly ineffective when Hurricane Helene struck towards the end of last month, leaving more than 200 people dead across the southern quarter of the country.

However, more stuff has come to light which may well get the goat of a good many Americans — the notion that FEMA operatives may have considered prioritizing their relief efforts upon members of the LGBTQI et al community. The evidence that was presented for this was a resurfaced video clip from last year of a senior FEMA employee, Tyler Atkins (in case you meet him, his pronouns are he/they), which went viral very quickly. In a FEMA meeting, Atkins aired the idea that “LGBTQIA people and people who have been disadvantaged already are struggling. They already have their own things to deal with. So, you add a disaster on top of that, it’s just compounding on itself.” This was interpreted as him suggesting that the LGBTQI community should be prioritized when disaster struck.

I did wonder for a while how FEMA’s rescue teams would effect this prioritization as the flood water lapped around the homes of North Carolina. How would they identify the gay people? Just assume that if they were well-turned-out with admirable physiques and were perhaps humming some of the tunes from Mamma Mia! as they stood on their roofs, then they might well be gay? Or maybe as the rescuer was winched down from the helicopter he could shout at the victims, above the howling wind: “Do you bat for the other side?” “Sorry, I can’t hear you!” “I said, are you a member of Sodom’s army?”

And so on. The left moved quickly to deny the whole thing. Atkins’s comments had been taken out of context and at no point did he suggest that FEMA should concentrate its efforts upon the gay and transgender community, they argued, deploying a whole raft of fact-checkers like those used by the BBC to prove that Hamas are not terrorists, but playful little squirrels. Given that I can find no record of Atkins explicitly saying that the LGBTQI community should be prioritized, on this issue the fact-checkers may have had a point. What the fact-checkers didn’t report, however, is the broader context of the whole meeting. Whatever Atkins’s own views, whether certain communities should be prioritized was in effect a given during the meeting. It hardly needed to be articulated at all. At one point Atkins handed over to a strange-looking lady called Maggie Jarry, from the US Department of Health and Human Services, who said: “There are a couple of things intersecting in my mind here. One is the culture of emergency management as an organization, as an industry in the United States specifically, not abroad. The shift that we’re seeing right now is a shift in emergency management from utilitarian principles — where everything is designed for the greatest good, for the greatest amount of people — to disaster equity. Further, as the Daily Mail pointed out, the first page of FEMA’s website insists that the organization’s first goal is to “Instill [sic] Equity as a Foundation of Emergency Management.”

You will be long aware by now what “equity” means in such a context. It means entirely ignoring — pace Ms. Jarry — the greatest good for the greatest amount of people and concentrating solely on what Sigmund Freud called the narcissism of small differences. Equity does not mean equality — this latter has become a discredited, regressive, concept which serves only to entrench racism etc, etc. When organizations talk about equity, they mean privileging one group of people over another group of people: blacks over whites, blacks over Asians, gays over straights, transgender over cisgender.

In other words, they are employing inequity in order to demonstrate their commitment to equity. Don’t worry — while you may have trouble comprehending such a patently idiotic ideology, those who subscribe to the post-rational imperatives of identity politics have no trouble at all taking it on board. Because gays and lesbians suffer at the hands of a heteronormative society, it is vital that we consider grabbing them off the roof first because, after all they have endured, it is unfair to expect them to cope with flood–waters. Narcissistic and self-flagellating it may be, but that’s what these people appear to think.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.