McCarthyite Laws Targeting Leftists Are Still on the Books Across the Country
Communists were excluded from an Oklahoma Pride festival recently based on an old McCarthyite state law. The incident is a reminder of how easily the Red Scare’s mechanisms for state repression can be revived in 21st-century America.
Senator Joseph McCarthy (left) during the Army-McCarthy hearings, with Pvt. G. David Schine (center) and Roy Cohn (right), June 7, 1954, in Washington, DC. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
It’s LGBTQ Pride parade season all over America, but not for communists in Oklahoma City. This year, the Communist Party of Oklahoma was denied a booth at the Oklahoma City Pride festival because of a 1955 McCarthyite law declaring Communist Party membership illegal in the state.
The incident was troubling for obvious reasons: Pride celebrations put inclusivity of marginalized people at their heart. Even more alarming, with anti-communism on the rise, and with Donald Trump and other far-right politicians constantly calling for repression and violence against socialists and communists, many other states also have such laws on the books. The Right is ready and willing to use them. This coercive legal infrastructure stems from the McCarthy era as well as earlier Red Scares, but today’s political climate makes it newly relevant.
Oklahoma’s law makes membership in the Communist Party illegal, as well as membership in any group that might “advocate, abet, advise, or teach . . . any activities intended to overthrow, destroy or alter . . . the government of the United States, or of the state of Oklahoma . . . by force or violence.” It declares that members of such groups don’t have any rights.
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