Mallory McMorrow’s viral speech attacking what she called Republicans’ “hollow, hateful scheme” against L.G.T.B.Q. rights has made her an instant hero on the left.
As Mallory McMorrow awoke last Monday morning, she found herself transformed into a creature she didn’t recognize.
A colleague in the Michigan State Senate, Lana Theis, had sent a fund-raising email accusing her of wanting to “groom and sexualize” children. Theis, a Republican who has latched on to Donald Trump’s fantasy of a stolen 2020 election, had invented an outrageous smear against someone who wasn’t even a direct political opponent.
McMorrow was, in her own words, “livid.”
A relatively new legislator and the mother of a 1-year-old, McMorrow was also genuinely shocked. Even though she had been watching as Republicans across the country pushed a spate of new laws limiting how teachers can talk about gender and sexuality, she didn’t expect to be drawn into the fight personally.
“The fact that you could just kind of fling this accusation at me was so deeply hurtful,” she said in an interview, adding that Theis’s email was “vile and disgusting.”
What happened next was the kind of moment around which political careers are born.
McMorrow “just sort of sat in the feelings for the day and thought about how horrible I felt,” she recalled. On her 90-minute commute from suburban Detroit to Lansing, the Michigan capital, she wrote and rewrote possible responses in her head. She consulted L.G.B.T.Q. people she knew to...
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