The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
Maybe the story of the Sammamish planning commissioner was a one-off. Perhaps it was just an aberrant eruption of homophobia, made more bizarre because it came right after a dry discussion on stormwater codes.
But that planning commissioner sure sounded comfortable, during a public meeting no less, spewing his beliefs that “LGBT people” are “promoting diseases,” and that Pride month is an “infestation into the minds of our kids in schools.”
I wonder where this planning commissioner got all that?
Wassim Fayed was a commissioner on the Sammamish planning board, serving a four-year term that was to end in 2027. He resigned Monday after spending six minutes during a meeting last week expounding his retrograde views on homosexuality.
“I was just so shocked,” says Todd Langton, a Sammamish resident who had watched the meeting on Zoom. “It’s like we’ve gone back to step one on the whole gay civil rights movement.”
It did feel that way. When Langton alerted me to the comments and I watched a video of them, I was instantly teleported back 30 years.
For those who weren’t around, the state Legislature spent the 1990s and 2000s debating whether to give basic anti-discrimination protections to LGBTQ+ people (so they couldn’t be kicked out of rental housing just for being gay, for example). This routinely prompted religious activists and some public officials to show up quoting Leviticus about how being gay was an “abomination,” often in graphic terms.
It was dehumanizing, a dark chapter in local politics. Critics also often suggested the gay rights movement was about corrupting society, especially children.
Echoed Fayed during his impromptu dissertation: “To promote this in every movie, in every TV show, everywhere teaching our kids and poisoning our kids with this — I don’t believe it’s the right thing to do.”
Again, why is this backlash coming now?
It’s not like gay-bashing ever went away, of course. But it did seem that society had made some strides. Open expressions of anti-gay animus, at least by public officials, was supposed to be out of bounds.
Now it’s everywhere. We’ve got multiple states banning discussions of gayness and gender identity in schools. We’ve got riled-up customers trashing Pride displays at Target.
It wasn’t long ago the biggest complaint about Pride was that it was no longer countercultural — that it had been co-opted by mainstream corporate marketing. Now it’s apparently radical again.
I think what’s happening nationally is mostly just another chapter in conservative political marketing. Fomenting fear about insidious forces undermining our “real” culture has been their get-out-the-vote strategy forever.
Fayed cited his Muslim faith to defend his anti-gay views. I would remind him that it was his group at the tip of the right-wing spear just a few years ago.
But I would still question — where is this LGBTQ+ backlash really coming from? What happened in Sammamish is more of a symptom than the disease. Feels to me as if an enormous permission structure is being built, nationally, one anti-LGBTQ+ brick at a time, that has made it seem OK to publicly gay bash again.
It’s true there’s a movement that continues to press for acceptance — hard. It should, as a recent Gallup poll found that 7 percent of the adults in the country now self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender — with that rising to nearly 20 percent of Generation Z.
What the planning commissioner was objecting to is literally true — they are “everywhere.” Yes, they’re in your movies and your TV shows. But that’s because they’re also in your real-life classrooms and your Target stores.
They always have been. What’s progress is that the younger generations finally aren’t as stigmatized by it all.
I thought the rest of us might be getting there, too. But take it from the sorry saga of the Sammamish planning commissioner: We’ve obviously got a ton of work yet to do.
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