Texas A&M University, earlier this month, banned a philosophy professor from teaching about Plato’s Symposium because it’s too gay (well, in their words, for discussing “gender ideology”), and, while obviously philosophy classes should be allowed to teach about Plato and state lawmakers and administrators shouldn’t be interfering in curricula… they are right that the specific texts that they banned are pretty gay.

If the legislators’ and administrators’ goal is to make LGBTQ+ people feel more isolated and alone as a way of getting them to conform and pretend to be cisgender and heterosexual, this won’t be enough to accomplish that goal — however, it’s a necessary step towards that goal.

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I grew up in the ’90s in a conservative part of central Indiana, and I went to college on the other side of the country, determined to get away from everyone I knew and to live my life as I wanted. One of the classes I had to take in my first semester at college as an 18-year-old freshman was a survey of Western civilization-type class that included Symposium as one of its readings.

I still remember the professor warning us in the class prior to reading Symposium that the text was about “love” and that, for Plato, that very much included love between two men. This was 2001, pre-September 11, just a couple of years after Ellen DeGeneres came out, and at a time when homosexuality was illegal in many states, so, yes, we got a “trigger warning,” and the potential trigger was a discussion of homosexuality.

It’s hard to say what impact that book had on me. Pretty much the only mentions of homosexuality in grade school that I remember from Indiana were the slurs kids would throw around every other sentence, the jokes and insults that were never any deeper than calling someone gay, the Christians randomly arguing (against no one!) that homosexuality was sinful, the casual discussions of violence against gay people (I grew up in the days when fantasizing putting all gay men on an island and dropping a bombshell on them was just a normal thing for people to talk about, like the weather)… and here I was — a freshly minted adult among other adults — talking about Plato, the famous philosopher who (pretty much every adult my whole life had said) was an important historical figure. And Plato was gay. Maybe not “gay” in the modern sense, but he was writing books about loving men, and that was close enough for me.

One of the passages that Texas A&M University had an issue with was Aristophanes’ speech about the origin of love. The short version is that, in the distant past, humans rolled around like balls with four arms and four legs and two faces. Some people were all male, some all female, and some a mix. They were powerful and a threat to the gods, so Zeus cut them all in half. Now they (we) spend our lives looking for our other half and holding on when we find them.

While the point of the story isn’t an explanation of why some people are gay and others are straight, it’s baked in, and modern readers are going to notice that Aristophanes is saying that same-sex love has the same origin as opposite-sex love. They’re all just normal variants of human sexuality, and it’s not something that anyone else in the book even comments on. That is, same-sex love is just another legitimate expression of love that comes from the same place, at least for Aristophanes. Others in the book have different opinions about male same-sex love, but none are disapproving.

I wasn’t the only one to take that message from that story. I have heard it mentioned by other queer people throughout my adult life. It featured prominently in the late-90s musical (and later film) Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It’s a part of the queer lexicon.

“The ‘gender ideology’ of this tale comes to us from the fourth century BC,” writes Guardian columnist Osita Nwanevu. “And philosophers in the many centuries since have examined it not only for what it tells us about the Greeks in Plato’s day but for what it might tell us, as far removed as we might be from ancient Athens, about sex, love, and longing. It is a tale about universal aspects of the human experience philosophers have examined in the service of understanding what it means to be a human being.”

Nwanevu’s larger point is that the underlying ideology of the presidential administration — as shown in Stephen Miller’s claim that the world is “governed by strength” and Vice President J.D. Vance’s statement that America is nothing more than a “homeland” for “people with a shared history and a common future” — is really selling people short. What it means to be human is much more than mere strength and domination, and America is supposed to be an idea and an ideal, not just a piece of land where we live.

That is, America is supposed to be about all people’s inherent value and right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” not Miller’s “iron laws of the world” — those of “might makes right” — that Nwanevu rightly calls “the laws of animals.”

This is fundamental to how the global neo-fascist movement sees the world: For them, everything is about domination and resource-hoarding. All other considerations are secondary.

It can be seen in the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights that are often justified by pointing to a decline in the birthrate, or in the attacks on humanities and social sciences at universities, degrees that many claim (often incorrectly) don’t pay well. This can be seen in the complaints that schools shouldn’t teach kids to be more tolerant of diverse people — a necessary skill in a multicultural world where we all get along — and should instead teach them the bare minimum of reading, writing, and arithmetic (and, since it’s the 21st century, how to code). It can be felt in the right-wing mockery of art and arts funding when they never have complaints about spending money on military equipment that will never (and should never) see combat.

And it’s in this horrifying Greenland business, which is what Miller was talking about when he was discussing “the iron laws of the world.”

On the one hand, invading Greenland would end NATO, end all sorts of ties between the U.S. and Europe, and end the peaceful world created in the latter half of the 20th century that led to prosperity in the West and an end to the wars for territorial expansion that defined Europe for millennia.

On the other hand, Greenland looks kinda big on Mercator-projection maps, and adding a big splotch to the part of the world labeled “United States” would make the president feel like he actually accomplished something of value in his life.

It shouldn’t be surprising that LGBTQ+ rights flourished in the post-war world, as did other human rights protections; ending the constant spats over pieces of land inspired people to understand that there’s a lot more to being human, to be concerned with their own and other people’s happiness, and to try to live up to the ideals laid out in previous centuries.

Which is why MAGA wants to end liberalism itself. To them, people are workers, soldiers, baby-producing machines, not human. Our worth is measured in terms of how much stuff we can produce, how much we can contribute to our nation’s domination over other nations. Individuals’ fulfillment and happiness are secondary. It’s a cold and sad way of looking at the world.

So Plato, of all people, is taking a beating in Texas. Learning about philosophy opened my mind when I was young and taught me to ask questions about what life could offer. (The part of Symposium about how homosexuality results in intellectual reproduction instead of biological reproduction like heterosexuality wasn’t even on the syllabus at Texas A&M, but I still haven’t forgotten about it.)

In the war on human-ness itself, LGBTQ+ identities will always be one of the first victims. That’s why they don’t want us learning about ourselves.

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