Author Archives: Stephen H. Miller

More Myths

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Kwame Anthony Appiah writes:

>>Today, a new generation of political and social activists are inclined to speak of “allyship,” by which they typically mean an arrangement where prospective allies submit to the direction of the marginalized group, like deferential guests in someone else’s home. The vision here is remote from true coalition building, from a partnership of mutual respect, from a politics grounded in overlapping moral perceptions.<<
And again:

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Beyond Victimhood

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Andrew Sullivan writes: >>Those whose livelihoods are built on defending victims have an interest in sustaining a victim paradigm for gay America, in which they are the saviors. And victim narratives are comfortable. They allow us to avoid responsibility for our own problems, while transferring it to others. They evoke cheap but satisfying empathy. They seem to cast us as somehow noble for being “oppressed.” They actually provide status among today’s elites — and can help you advance your own career solely on the basis of your orientation if you want to go to college or get a job at a major corporation. I think it’s time to shuck off this narrative, because it is a crude simplification of the gay experience, because it is profoundly out of date, and because it focuses us on other people we cannot always change while ignoring things closer to home that we can. What we need now, I think, is a narrative more productive and constructive, less about the harm the world can do to us, and more about the good we can give back to the world.<<

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Everyone’s Rights

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As Angelo wrote recently:

There is potential for federal legislation that guarantees protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans while yet shielding people of faith and good will from heavy-handed punishment by the government. But the “Equality Act” isn’t it.

Worth repeating:

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Progressive Anti-Semitism

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Unappeased Forever

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Last year, LGBTQ activists complained that President Trump did not issue a pride month proclamation, although many high-ranking officials and executive departments did so, This year the president issued a statement, and LGBTQ activists complained about it. But of course.

More. Obama was a more self-evidendently pro-LGBTQ rights president, as progressive activists view LGBTQ rigthts. But activists give Trump no credit for anything – from his convention acceptance speech pledging “to our protect LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression” (following the shooting deaths at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub) to openly gay appointments, to his administration’s raising the issue of the safety and security of gay people around the globe. Instead, efforts to find a workable balance between the rights of religious traditionalists not to face state coercion to provide creative services to same-sex weddings get denounced as “bigotry” and “hate” by progressives who have nothing but contempt for the rights of those whom they detest.

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Does the Trump Admin Really Want to Deny Transpeople Healthcare?

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The Affordable Care Act prohibits healthcare providers—doctors and hospitals—from discriminating on the basis of sex. An Obama-era policy interpreted “sex” to include gender identity. Now, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services has proposed rolling back that interpretation.

LGBTQ advocates say that doing so will open the door to discrimination against transgender men and women by healthcare providers. So why would the Trump administration do this, unless they just hate LBGTQ people? That, in effect, is the narrative in most mainstream liberal media.

The two sides see each other’s views through their own lenses, of course. “It’s clear his administration wants to return to a time when discrimination against women and anyone who faces gender discrimination in healthcare went unchecked,” said the National Women’s Law Center. Likewise, Pride at Work issued an alert that read:

“Like every bully, this president attacks those he perceives as weak and least able to defend themselves. What this bully misunderstands is that transpeople aren’t facing this administration alone. Pride at Work and countless other organizations and institutions are here to stand with, for, and beside our transgender siblings in the face of these unrelenting attacks from this administration.”

But as advocates for religiously affiliated, generally Catholic hospitals have pointed out, they have come under pressure to proscribe puberty blockers to pre-adolescent children, and to perform gender realignment procedures that conflict with their religious beliefs, just as being required to perform abortions not necessitated by the mother’s health would.

These fears are not just theoretical. In New Jersey and in California, Catholic hospitals have been sued by transwomen for refusing to perform hysterectomies as the initial step in gender realignment.

Another argument against the Obama-era policy is that bureaucrats shouldn’t reinterpret statute so broadly as to go well beyond Congress’s intent. “When Congress prohibited discrimination, it did so according to the plain meaning of the term, and we are making our regulations conform,” said the HHS Office of Civil Rights.

Because this issue involves healthcare, which can be a matter of life and death, partisans are in full throttle. But not all healthcare is emergency treatment, and so far LGBTQ advocates, despite their heated rhetoric, haven’t shown that transpeople face discrimination by doctors and hospitals that puts them at risk, as opposed to the inconvenience of going for reassignment treatment at facilities that are not religiously affiliated.

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A Better Way

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LGBTQ activists who say we need the Equality Act to end discrimination refuse to agree to a bill that would protect the conscience rights of religious traditionalists not to be forced to engage in messaging and creative activities that violate their faith. It’s not a big compromise; it’s a win-win. But somehow the activists and their progressive representatives don’t seem to be actually interested in winning (other than winning re-election for themselves and their party by keeping the issue unresolved, election after election).

Worth repeating:

More.

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Anti-Narrative

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More. Progressive Yale professor Greta LaFleur disdains Buttigieg’s marriage as insufficiently rad.

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