Since it’s Pride Month, I suggest you find an LGBTQ+ person and ask them about Republicans and “freedom.”

Visit Texas, where the attorney general talked about reinstating the state’s anti-sodomy laws. The gay-rights Log Cabin Republicans were barred from the state convention, which defined homosexuality as an “unnatural choice.”

Ask about laws like the one in Florida. Or in Utah, where the legislature passed an anti-trans bill that will affect four children in the entire state.

If you follow the news, you know this is where the Republican base is now. In a recent survey, almost half of Republicans in our still nominal democracy believe the Bible should override the will of the people.

So you can say “I don’t have one friend who espouses any of what you share here. Not one.” But that only means you don’t know the Republican base. And it doesn’t matter what “moderates” think — if their party gets the majority, it won’t be the moderates making the rules.

Look, I’m a middle-aged “straight white guy.” I’m going to be okay. But after decades of teaching, performing, and conducting music and musical theater, let’s just say I’ve known a lot of different kinds of people. And that last word is the key: people. We’re all a bunch of beautiful, flawed, inspirational, shitheaded human beings struggling to figure out who we are and our place in the world.

Do you wonder why the left seems shrill? Because the disparity in the stakes is staggering. Republicans are worried about a threat to their Twitter accounts or being fired for saying something homophobic. For LGBTQ+, “cancelation” is hate crimes, losing the right to marry, fired for no reason other than sexual preference, or finding the act of sex illegalized.

So I can’t accept that anyone who claims to support freedom is willing to vote in a way that would single out LGBTQ+ people. Rather than tolerate some limitations on yourself, you’d condemn an entire class of people to second-class citizenship and less than full humanity? Because those are the stakes.

You can vote for Democrats and stumbling progress toward something that looks like equality. Or you can vote some other way and support rolling back the equality we have managed to gain.

There are only two choices. Vote how you please, but don’t kid yourself as to who and what you’re supporting. There’s no universal pro-freedom vote, only a decision on who gets it and who loses.