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Over the past week, a campaign with the hashtag #TrueColorsDay, created by True Colors United, and driven by celebrities such as Cyndi Lauper, Joan Jett, Rufus Wainright, Annie Lennox, Panic! at the Disco, Chrissie Hynde, Melissa Etheridge, Peter Frampton, The Temptations and other old pop music glories, has gone viral.
True Colors United’s #TrueColorsDay campaign advocates that “housing is a human right” and they promise nothing less than to “create a world where everyone has a safe place to call home.”
The hashtag #TrueColorsDay refers to the last Wednesday in April, which has been designated by True Colors United as a “national day for raising awareness about homelessness for LGBTQ youth.”
True Colors United is a non-profit — formerly known as True Colors Fund — founded in 2008 by singer Cyndi Lauper, which claims to “implement innovative solutions for homeless youth that focus on the unique experiences of LGBTQ youth.”
According to their studies, “LGBTQ youth are 120% more likely to be homeless than other youth.” And so they work by lobbying “at the federal, state and local levels to ensure vital funding, policies, systems and protections are in place to meet the needs of homeless LGBTQ youth.”
In other words, this nonprofit’s main innovative solution is to pressure governments to spend more taxpayer money on nonprofits like True Colors United. This maneuver will be many things, but innovative, it is not.
True Colors United not only demands that the government spend more on grants, but also supports writing all kinds of laws that positively discriminate against LGBTQ youth.
While they claim to believe that “everyone deserves a safe place to call home, regardless of class, race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation,” the reality is that they would be excluding people from their grants on the basis of their gender and sexual orientation. All of their programs and assistance are aimed exclusively at homosexuals, bisexuals, transgender people or people who are questioning their sexuality.
There is such a variety of genders available to identify with in order to receive assistance, that it would be easier to define it through who would be excluded and discriminated against: the heterosexual homeless.
What would happen if a charity organization said that its grants were only for heterosexual homeless people? Wouldn’t organizations like True Colors United cry foul? And not only accusing them of discrimination, but also calling them homophobes, and demanding that the government either outlaw them or force them to be inclusive by law.
For them, anyone who opposes their concept of social justice will be labeled a homophobe, a heteropatriarchal supremacist, and a dangerous fascist to be canceled. It is as if their intentions and proposals could not be subject to analysis, scrutiny or criticism.
True Colors United’s concept of “social justice” is not very just, nor is it very social
It is not very fair, because it does not start from a principle of equality before the law — we should all be treated equally before the law, regardless of our gender or sexual orientation — but rather they start from the idea that we should all be equalized through the law. It is the government, and only the government, that can solve the housing problems of LGBTQ youth, through grants, subsidies and regulations.
And it is not very social either because these types of welfare policies end up generating more problems than they solve.
Interventionist public policies that affect the housing market such as aid, subsidies, public housing, rent price controls, anti-discrimination laws, among other issues, are precisely those that generate greater problems of access to housing.
For example, setting maximum rental prices and giving special protection to tenants against landlords reduces the supply of housing, raises prices and increases rental requirements.
If there is someone who is going to rent a house and is afraid of a defaulter or a bad tenant, and knows beforehand that his tenant would be specially protected because he is homosexual under the law, he will think twice when choosing. This law that supposedly favors homosexuals, in reality, would be harming them and limiting their access to housing.
By confusing equality under the law with equality through the law, we move from a system in which the homosexuality of the tenant would be irrelevant as long as he fulfills his obligations, to a system in which the homosexuality of one of the parties would take on enormous relevance in the event of litigation.
If True Colors United believes that LGBTQ youth suffer from a particular housing access problem, it has a thousand ways to try to solve it with innovative funding formulas from the private sphere. Turning to the government to inject public money or discriminate positively, ends up multiplying the number of poor people and putting up artificial barriers that make it difficult for the very groups they claim to defend to get out of this marginalized situation.
It seems as if behind the True Colors United marketing campaign, the true colors of a left-wing political agenda are hidden.
Ignacio Manuel García Medina, Business Management teacher. Artist and lecturer specialized in Popular Culture for various platforms. Presenter of the program "Pop Libertario" for the Juan de Mariana Institute. Lives in the Canary Islands, Spain // Ignacio M. García Medina es profesor de Gestión de Empresas. Es miembro del Instituto Juan de Mariana y conferenciante especializado en Cultura Popular e ideas de la Libertad.
Social Networks: @ignaciomgm