Dangerous Bazaars

When I was talking with friends over coffee, and heard that multiple video game and digital media outlets had been pressured into removing games with erotic or taboo themes or delisting media with erotic elements, I can’t say I was taken by surprise; platforms have been targeted for allowing all kinds of speech over the years, and now someone was outraged once again by media they were never going to engage with anyways. Predictably, people from marginalized & politically disfavored communities have been pushed off of mainstream platforms, forced towards ever more niche & seedy outlets.

In the past few years, we’ve seen a number of similar actions against platforms preferred by often independent artists and models—OnlyFans & Patreon come to mind, and we’ll talk about them later—and this new line of attack has many of the same characteristics as we’ve seen in the past. What’s new, however, is the outrage from the broader public towards payment processors’ censoriousness—and the international scope of this incident.

“Obscenity” in print & other media

It’s pretty uncontroversial to say that people have been producing erotic media since we started assembling iconography to communicate ideas. Humans like to put our emotions and feelings into media, and we’ve done so on all topics of our lives for millenia; more recently, however, we’ve become more and more censorious about what topics are allowed.

Consider that even examples from Roman times persist, and while they were found somewhere between titillating and outrageous in that cultural context, later translators were shocked at their contents; Catullus wrote a poem (Catullus 16, Pēdīcābo ego vōs et irrumābō) that later editors found so obscene that it wasn’t even translated in print until the 20^th century! All of that, while out of view of “polite” society, people continued to circulate and most definitely enjoy media considered lewd or obscene, which we’d today consider quite tame.

What we’re also not unfamiliar with, at least in queer communities, is oppression on the basis of our choices in expression & media—mostly by people who will never interact with our media, or have any sort of interaction with the community. The new trend is to claim that books or other media is pornographic for featuring… uh, discussion of safe sex aimed at teenagers? A person exploring their sexuality when they were a teenager? Other aspects of just … discovering oneself, too. Thinking about books I read as a teen, I read plenty of adult fiction that depicted sex between adults. Some even talked about using condoms. The shock! The horror!

To claim that a text is pornography is to assert that it serves no purpose other than to excite lewd emotions and responses in the reader—and generally we reserve the name “erotica” for that in print. A discussion of safe sex is hardly erotica; by any account, a book written to be informative about how to prevent diseases and hopefully build healthy relationships is exactly what I’d want teenagers to be reading. Or, at even greater remove, a book about accepting that the gender binary just isn’t quite right for you. Apparently this is a controversial opinion to hold, though; in 2023, a teacher was fired by the Cobb County school board for reading a book to her class, My Shadow is Purple. At the hearing where this was announced, the board’s lawyer said:

“The Cobb County School District is very serious about the classroom being a neutral place for students to learn. One-sided instruction on political, religious or social beliefs does not belong in our classrooms.”

I can only but assume that the lawyer was joking, because one side’s opinions are very, very obviously being held above another’s here. I have to assume that the sides here are “Children can’t be allowed to hear that filthy queers exist,” and “kids should know the world around them” stands in opposition to it―and it feels awful to hear someone describe the simple expression that people like me or my partner exist in the world as “pornographic”. As though it’s something to be ashamed of, or hidden.

Growing up queer

This may come as a shock to the more conservative types out there, but I understood even as a smooth-chinned boy that the other boys were way more interesting to me than girls. Even if I didn’t really get why until puberty slammed into me, I was pretty much in denial until I was standing in the kitchen one day and just said it to my folks. The 90s were not exactly peak for embracing one’s own man-love, what with the ongoing AIDS crisis; DADT; DOMA; the slow whimpering end of the lavender scare; Matthew Shepard & the subsequent smear effort against him to justify his murder; the rampant & extreme cultural homophobia that continued into the early 2000s; I could continue, but at some point it all just gets a little overwhelming. Gay men couldn’t even safely get together to have sex in private without risking prosecution in many states until 2003 with the resolution of Lawrence v. Texas, and even still a decade later, the police in some jurisdictions in Louisiana were caught attempting to entrap gay men for “soliciting” sex. With that backdrop, who’d want to be queer? Much easier to be straight―but, unfortunately, nature is as nature will.

As the fight over gay marriage erupted across the US and Proposition 8 in California showed us all the ugliest truths about what people really thought of each other, the stigma seemed to be truly fading away. We’d made immense inroads socially, and as state after state corrected their historic wrongs, it really felt like we were getting somewhere good. I got used to a lot more representation in media, and it really seemed like things were getting to a new, more stable state. The community could turn its attention to shoring up our legal standing & other pressing matters (like better public transit, the true Gay Agenda.)

Well, ten years have passed since Obergefell became the law of the land, and what’s old is new again. We’ve seen a return of the most common slur against the community: that we somehow are “recruiting” children by sneaking in LGBTQ+ representation into television shows, books, and movies. This showed up in the 70s, at least until Anita Bryant had a pie smashed into her face, and other voices continued to pick it up in every decade after, in some form or fashion. It became a common slur against us in the 90s and 00s as we started to win marriage equality, before fading out as it became clear that the line of attack had been defeated.

Since we’re playing the greatest hits, or worst in this case, this time it’s not about sexuality (okay it is about sexuality but they only started saying that as they started winning)—it’s about how everybody’s trans now. Or something to that effect. Consider again My Shadow is Purple and how absolutely innocuous that messge is, because it’s really, really straightforward. People have bodies that don’t always match our initial perceptions of them! Sometimes people figure it out later, sometimes they’re just not sure… and that’s okay. What’s not okay is going out of your way to claim that just expressing that fact of life is a plot. Imagine living your life in fear of other people living in truth.

Even hosting events where people dress up to read stories to kids is seen as suspect—look at drag storybook hours and the protests they engender. So to hear that once again, a group is demanding that media be declared “obscene” and unfit for sale, is unsurprising. They’ve picked a new tack this time, though―the state is no longer in the business of censoring that speech, as we’ll discuss. The new angle now is, they’re putting pressure on payment processors—who, as private entities, are not subject to the same restrictions as the government is—to block those transactions these agitators view as morally questionable or impure. What’s new is, people who’re being impacted are actually stepping up… so we’re not entirely hosed yet.

A brief discussion of censorship in print

Matters of censorship are fundamental to the history of this country; arguably, one of the principal actions leading to the American Revolution was the censorship imposed by the Stamp Act, and the general suppression of wider communication in the Colonies by King George. While the colonies sought their own freedoms, they imposed a fair number of restrictions

Of course, the population pushed to the colonies didn’t exactly do a good job of avoiding then screwing things up in their own ways. Taking the short view, religious liberty was still a common point of contention, and publications were routinely censored for taste, for some time.

I’m going to be honest, I’m going to elide over a lot here because the history of obscenity in the US is huge, and mostly really rough. We’ll pick up close to the turn of the century, though.

Just over a hundred years after the Stamp Act, the Comstock Act reworked some existing law to codify the criminality of sending obscene matter through the postal service, amongst other things. The definition of “obscenity”, of course, took something of a winding road to reach the modern sense of its application, but at the time it would have banned anything more explicit than, well, a particularly sigh-heavy Edwardian tale; everything else had to be moved more covertly. This isn’t even uniquely a gay matter: in the 1920s, James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned when Margaret Caroline Anderson & Jane Heap were found guilty of obscenity, and it wasn’t until 1933 that this now-classic was able to be legally published in the US.

There were a number of other fights about obscenity over the 20^th century; the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover and its subsequent film adaptation were both the subject of landmark cases on obscenity—I’m informed there are better novels, but it had the more interesting path to publication. Over time, the standard moved from “all ‘erotic’ materials” to just those of some special immoral nature (generally queer) that remained ill-described. Even this, eventually, we ground down. While the Comstock Act still exists in law, its scope has been limited to actual harmful material such as CSAM¹.

However, if the only concern was the regulation of speech by the government, we’d be in a much better position. Instead, we need to talk about how debts have been settled across the US for quite some time; in fact, the current state of the payment world is more or less why we’re in this mess, so maybe it needs a review too.

Private action evades constitutional protections

One of the upsides of using a private service is that it’s free of governmental restraints… but the downside is that unless the conduct of whoever’s providing the service is regulated in some way, you’ve got limited recourse if it does something to harm you. The banking system is no different; different communities, populations, careers, and businesses all currently get somewhat differential access to our banking system. Without diverting this essay to also discuss how we got to the current banking system, we can at least touch on a few key points.

Access to any sort of banking mechanism being common for most of society is actually fairly recent, as societal timelines go. In that time, we’ve had several acts passed to restrict how banks offer services, specifically in cases where they were deliberately denying access to resources. These fights have taken on a few forms, including the Fair Housing Act to address redlining, where lenders and realtors would collude to limit minorities from buying in some neighborhoods. Later, there was the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which required lenders to equally apply standards for women—and in fact most prohibits most discrimination for issuing credit.

However, that only deals with the availability of banking, not the actual transferring of funds. For that, we need to look at transaction clearing methods and payment processors, both of which have been traditionally privately operated. On top of that, banks generally were given significant lenience in who they’d bank with, especially as applies to businesses. Broadly speaking, I’m not going to really talk about before the existence of the FDIC, because honestly we can see most of the pattern play out since the 1950s. In that time, we’ve seen laws put in place to ensure equal access for women and minorities—yes, places would open accounts, but there were significant restrictions & limitations they’d erect.

Here’s the Smithsonian Magazine’s article on the ECOA, talking about how minority access to banking—womens’ banking as well as for people of color & others—was heavily restricted, until passing the ECOA & its amendments started to force open the… oh, I stumbled into a metaphor.

One of the segments of the business world that has struggled for a very long time to maintain access to banking & credit is erotica, and “adult” industries in general (strippers, sex toy shops, porn models, sex workers, to name a few categories); with the arrival of the internet, it’s gotten even worse as payment processing has almost exclusively entered the realm of the Visa & MasterCard Networks—the era of online shopping & credit cards. This has led to customers needing to use an array of ever seedier means of payment for media that’s perfectly legal, just “undesirable” in some way. Unknown payment networks with opaque names and difficult to use websites, all of which doesn’t lend to a feeling of ease and trust while shopping.

In the cases related to media & literature, my particular domain of interest, we’ve seen significant content restrictions placed on erotic media for sale through the payment processors―from some topics being declared unfit for sale, to American Express’ complete ban on adult content―and often banks have claimed some form of “reputational risk” coming from holding the funds of a legal business some vice president might find gross. This has played out with porn actresses being discovered by banks and then having their accounts terminated, with increased difficulty securing business capital for queer businesses, and… I could keep going, but really, you get the picture.

As it happens in the video market, platforms have been changing; the traditional studio model started to get stale, and then came Patreon & OnlyFans. With these new creator²-forward platforms came… more visibility into transactions from payment processors. Where previously there had been a few smaller players, now most of that contact with the payment processor was through the company actually hosting the actors, and receiving payment directly from customers―and suddenly Visa & Mastercard had visibility. We’ve seen a straight line from the original fight with OnlyFans over actor identification to now game platforms banning entire swaths of queer games on the basis that these will risk the reputation of the platform, but really it’s because a group of Australian campaigners found a way to push at the soft spots from afar.

So, sure, this is a new outrage, but it’s the ongoing outrage, just… more visible now. We, the queers who’ve been shut out of bank & payment network alike, have been stuck navigating a marketplace that is antagonistic to us―the dangerous bazaars of the financial services providers.

How can we protect ourselves from these dangerous bazaars?

We’re then left to ask what we’re going to do in the light of this performative outrage. We operate in an environment with three major players in the US and only a few others outside—on the consumer credit side. On the commercial side, it’s even weirder. Effectively, competition is between The Clearing House (formerly the “New York Clearing House Association”—the origination of the modern interbanking system, effectively) and the Federal Reserve Banks, the Fed; unbeknownst to me until I was researching this article, the Fed runs its own parallel ACH: FedACH, in addition to other, faster mechanisms.

The issue with ACH that FedACH resolves really comes down to the same issue as Visa & Mastercard present; there’s leniency for a private firm to deny a client on “reputational” grounds, as that doesn’t define a protected class. The refrain from banks, credit card processors, and online payment services (hi PayPal) is that customers in some market sectors are high risk clients and they don’t want to deal with that; the more recent twist is that the banks are now reaching into other platforms and telling them what content is allowed on those platforms.

So we’re left in a bit of a bind. The credit card processors have made it clear in the past, repeatedly, that they have no regard for queer expression—often broadly categorized as explicit in some way—and would rather not “allow” us to engage in commerce. There’s options outside that system, but they’re either speculative or not broadly available.

However, in spite of that there’s a novel option available to us. H.R.987/S.401, the Fair Access to Banking Act is currently in committee in both houses of Congress. It’s a seemingly wholly Republican-led bill that they seem to have built to benefit the oil & gas industry, and probably mining; firearms & fireworks also get called out in a bunch of their literature. It’s an interestingly written act, to say the least. Let’s walk through it.

(Disclaimer: I’m not a constitutional scholar, so… I’m some uninformed guy on the internet who’s read a lot of legal opinions. I’ll try to avoid wandering into wild speculation & just stick to a plain reading here, which is usually how bills are best read anyways.)

Sec. 2. FINDINGS.

Congress finds that—
(1) article I of the Constitution of the United States guarantees the people of the United States the right to enact public policy through the free and fair election of representatives and through the actions of State legislatures and Congress;
(2) banks rightly objected to the Operation Choke Point initiative through which certain government agencies pressured banks to cut off access to financial services to lawful sectors of the economy;
(3) banks are now, however, increasingly employing subjective, category-based evaluations to deny certain persons access to financial services in response to pressure from advocates from across the political spectrum whose policy objectives are served when banks deny certain customers access to financial services;
(4) the privatization of the discriminatory practices underlying Operation Choke Point by banks represents as great a threat to the national economy, national security, and the soundness of banking and financial markets in the United States as Operation Choke Point itself;
(5) banks are supported by the United States taxpayers and enjoy significant privileges in the financial system of the United States and should not be permitted to act as de facto regulators or unelected legislators by withholding financial services to otherwise credit worthy businesses based on subjective political reasons, bias, or prejudices;
(6) banks are not well-equipped to balance risks unrelated to financial exposures and the operations required to deliver financial services;
(7) the United States taxpayers came to the aid for large banks during the Great Recession of 2008 because they were deemed too important to the national economy to be permitted to fail;
(8) when a bank predicates the access to financial services of a person on factors or information (such as the lawful products a customer manufactures or sells or the services the customer provides) other than quantitative, impartial risk-based standards, the bank has failed to act consistent with basic principles of sound risk management and failed to provide fair access to financial services;
(9) banks have a responsibility to make decisions about whether to provide a person with financial services on the basis of impartial criteria free from prejudice or favoritism;
​(10) while fair access to financial services does not obligate a bank to offer any particular financial service to the public, to operate in any particular geographic area, or to provide a service the bank offers to any particular person, it is necessary that—
(A) the financial services a bank chooses to offer in the geographic areas in which the bank operates be made available to all customers based on the quantitative, impartial risk-based standards of the bank, and not based on whether the customer is in a particular category of customers;
(B) banks assess the risks posed by individual customers on a case-by-case basis, rather than category-based assessment; and
(C) banks implement controls to manage relationships commensurate with these risks associated with each customer, not a strategy of total avoidance of particular industries or categories of customers;
(11) banks are free to provide or deny financial services to any individual customer, but first, the banks must rely on empirical data that are evaluated consistent with the established, impartial risk-management standards of the bank; and
​(12) anything less is not prudent risk management and may result in unsafe or unsound practices, denial of fair access to financial services, cancelling, or eliminating certain businesses in society, and have a deleterious effect on national security and the national economy.

The highly amusing thing to me about this section is, like, this is being written to talk about oil barons and mining tycoons. They’re mad that the big banks wouldn’t fund Arctic oil development. I have to admit, I’m not sure that the oil companies need those banks to do that, and while I agree that the banks should not fund that development because I don’t think it should be done at all, I have to admit that I just don’t feel like the oil firms were being debanked that seriously. Someone will always take your money. Meanwhile, Operation Choke Point had a terrible impact on lots of queer artists and performers; pornography & escord services were two of the focus areas, and there are plenty of queer businesses that can be classified under those categories. This next section is also useful:

Sec. 3. PURPOSES.

The purposes of this Act are to—
(1) ensure fair access to financial services and fair treatment of customers by financial service providers, including national and State banks, Federal savings associations, and State and Federal credit unions;
(2) ensure banks conduct themselves in a safe and sound manner, comply with laws and regulations, treat their customers fairly, and provide fair access to financial services;
(3) protect against banks being able to impede otherwise lawful commerce and thereby achieving certain public policy goals;
(4) ensure that persons involved in politically unpopular businesses but that are lawful under Federal law receive fair access to financial services under the law; and
(5) ensure banks operate in a safe and sound manner by making judgments and decisions about whether to provide a customer with financial services on an impartial, individualized risk-based analysis using empirical data evaluated under quantifiable standards.

Like, okay, this means that banks have to give firearms companies loans if they’re reliably going to pay them off, but like… this is actually good? This applies to everyone equally, and clearly states that the goal is to remove barriers to financial access for legal businesses. All legal businesses, and they can’t just make carve-outs for their preferred industries by design.

Interestingly, by including Findings & Purposes sections in this bill, later legal arguments can actually establish specific intent on the part of the authors—something we sorely miss with some other texts.

SEC. 4. Advances to individual member banks.

​(a) Member banks.—Section 10B of the Federal Reserve Act (12 U.S.C. 347b) is amended by adding at the end the following:
​“(c) Prohibition on use of discount window lending programs.—No member bank with more than $10,000,000,000 in total consolidated assets, or subsidiary of the member bank, may use a discount window lending program if the member bank or subsidiary refuses to do business with any person who is in compliance with the law, including section 8 of the Fair Access to Banking Act.”.
​(b) Insured depository institutions.—Section 8(a)(2)(A) of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act (12 U.S.C. 1818(a)(2)(A)) is amended—
(1) in clause (ii), by striking “or” at the end;
​(2) in clause (iii), by striking the comma at the end and inserting “; or”; and
​(3) by adding at the end the following:
“(iv) an insured depository institution with more than $10,000,000,000 in total consolidated assets, or subsidiary of the insured depository institution, that refuses to do business with any person who is in compliance with the law, including section 8 of the Fair Access to Banking Act,”.
(c) Nonmember banks, trust companies, and other depository institutions.—Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act (12 U.S.C. 342) is amended by inserting “Provided further, That no such nonmember bank or trust company or other depository institution with more than $10,000,000,000 in total consolidated assets, or subsidiary of such nonmember bank or trust company or other depository institution, may refuse to do business with any person who is in compliance with the law, including , including section 8 of the Fair Access to Banking Act:” after “appropriate:”.

Okay, so they’re adding a clause to the end of the definition of terms under which member banks can access the Federal Reserve system that asserts it needs to be in compliance with the bill’s text (below). This means that most to almost all banks that deal with the Fed have to be compliant, so… if you bank, basically, you’ll encounter this. The Credit Union section covers the same, but for Credit Unions. I’ll skip that.

SEC. 5. Payment card network.

(a) Definition.—In this section, the term “payment card network” has the meaning given the term in section 921(c) of the Electronic Fund Transfer Act (15 U.S.C. 1693o–2(c)).
(b) Prohibition.—No payment card network, including a subsidiary of a payment card network, may, directly or through any agent, processor, or licensed member of the network, by contract, requirement, condition, penalty, or otherwise, prohibit or inhibit the ability of any person who is in compliance with the law, including section 8 of this Act, to obtain access to services or products of the payment card network because of political or reputational risk considerations.
(c) Civil penalty.—Any payment card network that violates subsection (b) shall be assessed a civil penalty by the Comptroller of the Currency of not more than 10 percent of the value of the services or products described in that subsection, not to exceed $10,000 per violation.

This is good! This requires that Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, probably Zelle and maybe Paypal?³ all would be required to abide by this law as well. Mastercard gets told to stuff it. Similarly, it then goes on to proscribe access to the ACH Network if a bank violates this law, which is one hell of an axe to swing.

All of that brings us to the actual text of the Fair Access to Banking Act:

SEC. 8. Fair access to financial services.

​(a) Definitions.—In this section:
(1) BANK.—The term “bank”—
(A) means an entity for which the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is the appropriate Federal banking agency, as defined in section 3 of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act (12 U.S.C. 1813); and
(B) includes—
(i) member banks;
(ii) non-member banks;
(iii) covered credit unions;
(iv) State-chartered non-member banks; and
(v) trust companies.
(2) COVERED BANK.—
(A) IN GENERAL.—The term “covered bank” means a bank that has the ability to—
(i) raise the price a person has to pay to obtain an offered financial service from the bank or from a competitor; or
(ii) significantly impede a person, or the business activities of a person, in favor of or to the advantage of another person.
(B) PRESUMPTION.—
(i) IN GENERAL.—A bank shall not be presumed to be a covered bank if the bank has less than $10,000,000,000 in total assets.
(ii) REBUTTABLE PRESUMPTION.—
(I) IN GENERAL.—A bank is presumed to be a covered bank if the bank has $10,000,000,000 or more in total assets.
(II) REBUTTAL.—A bank that meets the criteria under subclause (I) can seek to rebut this presumption by submitting to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency written materials that, in the judgement of the agency, demonstrate the bank does not meet the definition of covered bank.
(3) COVERED CREDIT UNION.—The term “covered credit union” means—
(A) any insured credit union, as defined in section 101 of the Federal Credit Union Act (12 U.S.C. 1752); or
(B) any credit union that is eligible to make application to become an insured credit union under section 201 of the Federal Credit Union Act (12 U.S.C. 1781).
(4) DENY.—The term “deny” means to deny or refuse to enter into or terminate an existing financial services relationship with a person.
(5) FAIR ACCESS TO FINANCIAL SERVICES.—The term “fair access to financial services” means persons engaged in activities lawful under Federal law are able to obtain financial services at banks without impediments caused by a prejudice against or dislike for a person or the business of the customer, products or services sold by the person, or favoritism for market alternatives to the business of the person.
(6) FINANCIAL SERVICE.—The term “financial service” means a financial product or service, including—
(A) commercial and merchant banking;
(B) lending;
(C) financing;
(D) leasing;
(E) cash, asset, and investment management and advisory services;
(F) credit card services;
(G) payment processing;
(H) security and foreign exchange trading and brokerage services; and
(I) insurance products.
(7) MEMBER BANK.—The term “member bank” has the meaning given the term in the third undesignated paragraph of the first section of the Federal Reserve Act (12 U.S.C. 221).
(8) PERSON.—The term “person”—
(A) means—
(i) any natural person; or
(ii) any partnership, corporation, or other business or legal entity; and
(B) includes a customer.
​(b) Requirements.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—To provide fair access to financial services, a covered bank, including a subsidiary of a covered bank, shall, except as necessary to comply with another provision of law—
(A) make each financial service the covered bank offers available to all persons in the geographic market served by the covered bank on proportionally equal terms;
(B) not deny any person a financial service the covered bank offers unless the denial is justified by such quantified and documented failure of the person to meet quantitative, impartial risk-based standards established in advance by the covered bank;
(C) not deny, in coordination with or at the request of others, any person a financial service the covered bank offers; and
(D) when denying any person financial services the covered bank offers, provide written justification to the person explaining the basis for the denial, including any specific laws or regulations the covered bank believes are being violated by the person or customer.
(2) JUSTIFICATION REQUIREMENT.—A justification described in paragraph (1)(D) may not be based solely on the reputational risk to the covered bank.
(c) Cause of action for violations of this section.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a person may commence a civil action in the appropriate district court of the United States against any covered bank or covered credit union that violates or fails to comply with the requirements under this section, for harm that person suffered as a result of such violation.
(2) NO EXHAUSTION.—It shall not be necessary for a person to exhaust its administrative remedies before commencing a civil action under this section.
(3) DAMAGES.—If a person prevails in a civil action under this section, a court shall award the person—
(A) reasonable attorney’s fees and costs; and
(B) treble damages.

There’s been some concern apparently that this may be a bad thing for queer artists & others on the fringes of banking, but I’m pretty sure this is a beneficial bill that’s accidentally awesome? This essentially states that banks must get out of the business of moralizing about expression of their customers; this has been used for environmental good, yes (maybe⁴), but the idea of “reputational risk” has always had that connotation of disrespectability, at least when discussing queer and “alt” expression. Quite often, perfectly legal businesses that aren’t “respectable” were considered “high risk”; strip clubs, even individual strippers & performers would get shut out by local banks, making banking more complicated and dangerous for those very people instead.

While I expect we’re going to see some amount of chicanery with this in place, it’s plain from §2 & §3 that the goal of this legislation is to stop banks from categorically banning any category of business from access to banking services. The “quantitative, impartial risk-based standards” statement in §8(b)(1)(B) is certainly what some banks will use to try and claim that queer creators are “too risky”―but this law also creates an avenue for redress, which we currently don’t have. As it stands now, queer creators are exclusively at the whim of banks and the card processors; this law would present us with a means for redress and put the onus on the banks instead, to prove that they are not denying those services based on “a prejudice against or dislike for a person or the business of the customer”, §8(a)(5).

To be clear, the fact that the largest banks wouldn’t fund oil drilling in the Arctic is not a critical crisis of truly staggering proportions; the fact that entire segments of the economy, operating legally & above board, routinely get shut out of banking resources for being “high risk” or “immoral”, now that’s a staggering issue.

One of these will get votes, though. Maybe we can encourage some support from the Left?

I do actually think this is worth promoting, and worth supporting. If you’re an American, you should contact your House Representative about H.R.987 (click the “Contact Your Member” link), and contact your Senator about S.401 (same instruction.) Tell them that this is a good-sense policy in an era where access to banking and commerce—a critical aspect of national communication & conversation—is so privatized, we need improved protections from censorious gatekeepers, keeping us in a dangerous bazaar that will seek to undermine us at every opportunity.

In particular, if one of your Senators are on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, or your House Representative is on the Committee on Financial Services, please reach out to them. These members are:

Senate: Scott (R-SC), Warren (D-MA), Crapo (R-ID), Reed (D-RI), Rounds (R-SD), Warner (D-VA), Tillis (R-NC), Van Hollen (D-MD), Kennedy (R-LA), Cortez Masto (D-NV), Hagerty (R-TN), Smith (D-MN), Lummis (R-WY), Warnock (D-GA), Britt (R-AL), Kim (D-NJ), Ricketts (R-NE), Gallego (D-AZ), Banks (R-IN), Blunt Rochester (D-DE), Cramer (R-ND), Alsobrooks (D-MD), Moreno (R-OH), McCormick (R-PA).

House: Hill (R-AR), Waters (D-CA), Lucas (R-OK), Velázquez (D-NY), Sessions (R-TX), Sherman (D-CA), Huizenga (R-MI), Meeks (D-NY), Wagner (R-MO), Scott (D-GA), Barr (R-KY), Lynch (D-MA), Williams (R-TX), Green (D-TX), Emmer (R-MN), Cleaver (D-MO), Loudermilk (R-GA), Himes (D-CT), Davidson (R-OH), Foster (D-IL), Rose (R-TN), Beatty (D-OH), Steil (R-WI), Vargas (D-CA), Timmons (R-SC), Gottheimer (D-NJ), Stutzman (R-IN), Gonzalez (D-TX), Norman (R-SC), Casten (D-IL), Meuser (R-PA), Pressley (D-MA), Kim (R-CA), Tlaib (D-MI), Donalds (R-FL), Torres (D-NY), Garbarino (R-NY), Garcia (D-TX), Fitzgerald (R-WI), Williams (D-GA), Flood (R-NE), Pettersen (D-CO), Lawler (R-NY), Fields (D-LA), De La Cruz (R-TX), Bynum (D-OR), Ogles (R-TN), Liccardo (D-CA), Nunn (R-IA), McClain (R-MI), Salazar (R-FL), Downing (R-MT), Haridopolos (R-FL), Moore (R-NC).

I’ll also suggest some tailored messaging. With Republicans, we should talk about the importance of reducing the ability for the government or for banks to interfere with legal businesses. With Democrats, we should talk about the importance of extending protections of free expression to commercial dealings; the Framers of the Constitution quite frankly never considered the prospect that so much commerce would be mediated by private parties, so the idea that private parties might successfully quell speech that the government could not just didn’t occur to them. We should fix that oversight now; there is a significantly more grave and ongoing moral injury to the population done by excessive moralizing than the claimed stand of banks against oil exploration―which we know because those banks are still funding oil exploration and drilling elsewhere, and still profiting hugely off of it.