Author Archives: Stephen H. Miller

When Liberalism Became Progressivism

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Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report used to be a progressive. Now he’s not. Here’s why he left the left.

An excerpt:

I’m a married gay man, so you might think that I appreciate the government forcing a Christian baker or photographer or florist to act against their religion in order to cater, photograph or decorate my wedding. But you’d be wrong. A government that can force Christians to violate their conscience can force me to violate mine.

If a baker won’t bake you a cake, find another baker, don’t demand the state tell him what to do with his private business.

I’m pro-choice. But a government that can force a group of Catholic nuns—literally called the Little Sisters of the Poor—to violate their faith and pay for abortion-inducing birth control can force anyone to do anything.

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Fake News Revealed

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James Kirchick has penned a thoughtful look at the proliferation of fake news. He’s no fan of Donald Trump, as he makes very clear. But neither can he abide the cascade of, shall we say untruths, from Trump’s critics on the left. For instance, he writes:

I cannot recall the number of times I’ve read or been told that Mike Pence supports “conversion therapy” for homosexuals, the inhumane, pseudoscientific practice whereby gay men and women are made to believe that their nature is unnatural and they, therefore, must work to “change” it through psychologically abusive tactics. Pence is by no means friendly to the cause of gay equality, but as the journalist Carl Cannon recently wrote, nowhere has he ever come out in favor of conversion therapy—not once, ever.

And elsewhere:

The tendency to hyperbolize about Trump is partly influenced by an identity-politics-driven myopia which can’t see the unprecedentedly threatened societal forest because it’s so obsessed with each and every single one of the supposedly endangered trees. In the days after the presidential election, I came across countless social media posts in which the author recited some variation of the following lament: “Trump’s victory will most hurt women, African-Americans, undocumented immigrants, LGBT people, etc.” the list of potential victim groups extending sometimes for an entire paragraph or more. It was as if the authors of these posts were completely oblivious to the joke about the apocryphal New York Times headline, “WORLD ENDS: BLACKS AND WOMEN HARDEST HIT.” The bizarre inclusion of “LGBT” in this litany of victimhood notwithstanding (Trump ran as the most pro-gay Republican presidential candidate in history and made a point of addressing transgender concerns)….

Kirchick has many scathing criticisms of Trump, but he’s not going to let the left’s deluge of fake news go unexposed.

[Added: When “resistance” is premised on false assertions used to advance bogus narratives, it undermines the ability to counter actual bad policies with reasoned and convincing arguments. Remember reasoned and convincing arguments? It’s how people debated policy points before everything devolved into pure emotion.]

More. The Hill columnist John Feehery writes:

The Democrats, and more than a few Never Trump Republicans, imagine themselves to be brave, solitary figures standing against the rise of a brutal dictator.

That’s ridiculous. We not only have plenty of institutional checks and balances arrayed against any potential dictator. We also are, as a people, a nation that takes its liberties pretty seriously. We are not the Weimar Republic. We don’t have inflation hitting 300 percent. Unemployment is not at 30 percent but at 4.8 percent. We might have our fair share of disagreements, but we have a constitutional process to resolve them amicably, without bloodshed.

The Democratic resistance is taking on a form of fanaticism. Its adherents are redoubling their efforts to stop Trump but forgetting what their aim is. They are supposed to be working to make this country a better and more prosperous place for their constituents.

I’d add that LGBT activists (at least those that don’t have a political party’s name as part of their moniker) are supposed to be working to advance LGBT legal equality and social inclusion, not to further the fortunes of the Democratic party.

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LGBT Activists Take Aim at Religious Liberty

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Rights are for me, but not for thee, says just about the entirety of LGBT activists groups.

Attacking religious liberty rights will be the singular issue of the LGBT left (which is to say, the LGBT political movement) going forward. The bogus “license to discriminate” meme will be ubiquitous.

As I’ve said before, balancing competing rights—civil rights (public accommodations nondiscrimination) and religious liberty (the right not to be forced by the state, on threat of punishment, to take action that violates religious convictions)—is what America should be about.

Religious exemptions have a traditional and purposeful place in our civil rights laws, but that’s now under attack. Shameful and sad.

More. Proving my point: Swift LGBT opposition to Gorsuch over ‘religious freedom’ rulings:

Gorsuch also sided with “religious freedom” arguments over the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that employers provide contraception coverage in the 10th Circuit ruling in the case of Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged v. Burwell.

Rachel Tiven, CEO of Lambda Legal, declared opposition to the nominee based on Gorsuch’s “religious freedom” rulings, which she said marks the first time her organization opposed a Supreme Court nominee without any confirmation hearing.

Lambda Legal is going to show those nuns who’s boss.

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Progressives explain it all to you

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Trump supports gay rights, which is code for being anti-Islam, thereby proving he’s a fascist, writes Amanda Erickson at the Washington Post.

More. This is all reminiscent of the left’s attacks on Israel’s support for gay legal equality and inclusion, which progressives call “pinkwashiing,” described by Mark Joseph Stern as the presumption that “the Israeli government has no interest in promoting LGBTQ rights except to help mask its oppression of other groups.”

[Added: Pete Buttigieg, gay mayor of South Bend, Ind., with higher political aspirations, in a Washington Blade interview, lambasts “the level of ‘pinkwashing’ of the Trump campaign.” When nonprogresives support LGBT rights, it’s insidious.]

Furthermore. Vice President Mike Pence tells ABC News: “I think throughout the campaign, President Donald J. Trump made it clear that discrimination would have no place in our administration. He was the very first Republican nominee to mention the LGBTQ community at our Republican National Convention and was applauded for it. And I was there applauding with him.”

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The Gorsuch Nomination

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Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s Supreme Court pick, probably would not have joined the ruling in favor of marriage equality, although he is a former clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored the Obergefell decision.

In 2005, LGBTQ Nation reports, Gorsuch wrote an article for National Review in which he argued that liberals are using the courts too much to advance their agenda, and he cited same-sex marriage:

American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education… .

…too much reliance on constitutional litigation is also bad for the Left itself. The Left’s alliance with trial lawyers and its dependence on constitutional litigation to achieve its social goals risks political atrophy. Liberals may win a victory on gay marriage when preaching to the choir before like-minded judges in Massachusetts. But in failing to reach out and persuade the public generally, they invite exactly the sort of backlash we saw in November when gay marriage was rejected in all eleven states where it was on the ballot.

Marriage equality was eventually achieve through the courts, and—unlike the abortion-ruling aftermath—without an escalation of the initial backlash the Gorsuch noted. But his arguments aren’t those of the fire-breathing LGBT-rights opponent of progressive fear-mongering.

Gorsuch does support religious liberty rights, which will drive the LGBT left berserk. He ruled against the government in a case involving the Obamacare mandate that employer health plans provide no-cost contraceptive coverage to female workers, including drugs some consider to be abortifacients. As LGBTQ Nation notes:

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the corporation argued that its religious beliefs were being violated by the ACA. Gorsuch sided with Hobby Lobby, holding that a for-profit business could have religious beliefs, with which the Supreme Court later agreed.

I agreed, too.

Gorsuch is a conservative, but he’s not a social conservative activist. I don’t expect that liberal media will pay much attention to the distinction.

More. An email just received from Zeke Stokes at GLAAD:

Gorsuch’s record on the federal bench means his appointment to the court could put LGBTQ people at risk, from workplace protections to even marriage equality. Coming on the heels of rumors of a sweeping Trump executive order attacking the LGBTQ community, this appointment could spell danger for LGBTQ people, women, people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized communities — many of whom are already targets of Trump’s actions.

A follow-up from GLAAD explains:

We just got some devastating news. According to breaking media reports, a leaked copy of a draft executive order reveals plans by the Trump Administration to allow for widespread discrimination against LGBTQ people across the country– much like the law Vice President Mike Pence signed as governor of Indiana.

Attacking religious liberty rights will be the singular issue of the LGBT left (which is to say, the LGBT political movement) going forward.

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LGBT Nondiscrimination Executive Order Remains in Place

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White House says LGBT protections for federal workers will remain.

Score one for the Log Cabin Republicans. Guess the fear-mongers were wrong.

I fully support LGBT nondiscrimination policies within the federal workforce. But when extended to federal contractors, I’d favor a reasonable religious exemption so that, for instance, Catholic charities could choose not to participate in adoptions by same-sex couples.

But any change to Obama’s order by Trump would have been demagogued mercilessly as a “license to discriminate.”

The Human Rights Campaign never misses an opportunity to remain irrelevant. Via The Advocate, HRC’s head Chad Griffin tweeted: “Claiming ally status for not overturning the progress of your predecessor is a rather low bar.”

More. Walter Olson at the Cato Institute addresses this issue: An Executive Order On LGBT Issues? Religious Exemptions? Both? He clarifies that while the White House said the president would keep in place Obama’s LGBT order applying to the federal workforce:

The White House did not rule out revisiting other decisions by its predecessor administration on gay rights, such as an order requiring federal contractors to adopt nondiscrimination policies, which pointedly did not provide conscience exemptions for private religious agencies.

Let the outrage begin!

Olson continues:

The effect of a contractor ban without religious objector provisions, I argued, would be to kick various religious agencies out of social service work in public settings in adoptions and foster care, as well as some prison, drug rehab, and various other settings. Ousting conservative religious groups from participation in social service adoption is likely to cut down on the number of successful placements made of children in public care, which would hurt the taxpayer, hurt adoptive parents, and, not least, hurt kids. The more genuinely pluralist approach, I argued, would be to acknowledge conscience exemptions while fully opening these systems to participation by contractors that gladly serve gays, persons of no given sect, religious unbelievers, and so forth.

Sounds good to me.

Furthermore. To clarify, it’s specifically the 2014 executive order that applies to employees of federal contractors that the White House said would continue in place.

“President Donald J. Trump is determined to protect the rights of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community,” the [White House] statement says. “President Trump continues to be respectful and supportive of LGBTQ rights, just as he was throughout the election. The president is proud to have been the first ever GOP nominee to mention the LGBTQ community in his nomination acceptance speech, pledging then to protect the community from violence and oppression. The executive order signed in 2014, which protects employees from anti-LGBTQ workplace discrimination while working for federal contractors, will remain intact at the direction of President Donald J. Trump.”

The New York Times relates:

Leaving those protections, of course, does not preclude another executive order that would roll back gay rights in other areas. Mr. Trump could, for example, still enshrine a religious freedom provision in federal policy.

I hope so, as balancing competing rights—civil rights (public accommodations nondiscrimination) and religious liberty (the right not to be forced by the state, on threat of punishment, to take action that violates religious convictions)—is what America is about.

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Transgender Scouts

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Via the Washington Post, the Boy Scouts of America will allow transgender children who identify as boys to join:

…the organization will now accept boys based on the gender a parent puts on a child’s scouting application, ending a policy of accepting boys based on the gender listed on a child’s birth certificate.

Hope the new policy proves helpful and isn’t misused. We’ll see.

New York magazine, no rightwing rag, on why the issue of what’s best for transgender kids is not always so simple:

A lot of people don’t realize that there is a genuine scientific debate over how to best help out children with gender dysphoria, or those who feel discomfort — sometimes extremely intense discomfort — with the body they were born into….

A concern is that young “effeminate” boys and “masculine” girls, many of whom would otherwise grow into either healthy and happy gay men and lesbian women (or, sometimes, somewhat “effeminate” heterosexual men and “masculine” heterosexual women), are told they’re transgender, perhaps by well-meaning parents, and put on that course.

More. Alternate facts, via an op-ed by Debra W. Soh, a sexual neuroscientist at York University in Toronto, in the Los Angeles Times:

[T]ransgender activists firmly believe that gender is a biological, rather than social, reality—but of course they don’t believe that it’s necessarily tied to sex at birth. They also believe that gender identity is quite stable early on, warranting a transition not only for transgender adults, but also young children who say they were born in the wrong body.

From a scientific perspective, they’re partially right: Gender identity is fixed, but only in adults; the same can’t be said for children, whose gender identity is flexible and doesn’t become stable until puberty.

Currently available research literature—including four studies published in the last nine years—suggests that 61% to 88% of gender dysphoric children will desist and grow up to be gay adults. … They won’t continue to identify as the opposite sex in adulthood. In one study of 139 gender dysphoric boys, 122 (88%) of the boys desisted.

While transitioning can be beneficial for transgender adults, it therefore doesn’t make sense to treat trans children in the same way. Nevertheless, transgender activists and their allies have branded desistance as a “myth,” and those who suggest otherwise are called bigots or, dismissively, trolls.

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LCR Up, HRC Down

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It’s Log Cabin’s time, with the much bigger and dominant LGBT movement organizations (Human Rights Campaign, Victory Fund) having ensured they’ll be frozen out by the Trump administration.

Via the Washington Blade, Log Cabin emerges as lead LGBT group in Trump era:

In another sign of how the political landscape has changed in Washington, the gay GOP group Log Cabin Republicans appears to have emerged as the lead LGBT organization expected to have access to the administration of President Donald Trump.

With most of the longstanding national LGBT advocacy groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, strongly supporting or tilting toward Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the November election, many political observers expect them to have little if any access to the Trump White House and federal agencies that oversee LGBT-related issues.

HRC has joined with others on the left in declaring its implacable hostility toward the Trump administration, and did so before Trump had been sworn in. So it’s good to see Log Cabin going its own way.

I think this is smart, too:

In a break with nearly all other LGBT advocacy groups, Angelo said Log Cabin doesn’t support the Equality Act, the latest version of a federal LGBT non-discrimination bill pending in Congress. He said the group would soon push for a different version of an LGBT non-discrimination bill that would likely gain more support among GOP lawmakers in Congress.

The overly broad Equality Act is an assault on religious liberty rights, rolling back protections under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that Democrats once supported.

[Added: The Equality Act revokes any protection which religious objectors might enjoy under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. I wrote about this last November, here, noting that “staunch opposition to religious exemptions and requiring that the existing Religious Freedom Restoration Act (signed by Bill Clinton) be excluded from applying to any such [LGBT anti-discrimination] measure—as the Human Rights Campaign and others are demanding—is not a strategy that seeks to accomplish anything except to maintain the political standoff so useful in fundraising appeals. A win-win compromise—LGBT legal protections with reasonable and traditional exemptions for religious belief, especially among small, independent service providers—would be in the best interest of everyone except for activists whose power and prestige is based on perpetuating the culture wars.” Jonathan Rauch has also addressed this, as noted here.]

The great irony of all this is that Trump would, quite possible, be amenable to signing a common sense LGBT workplace anti-discrimination bill, but HRC and the LGBT left will work tirelessly to ensure that such an outcome never happens.

More. Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger writes:

For scorched-earth Never Trumpers…the response to this complex challenge is simple: Resist everything. For everyone else, from Doubtful Trumpers to Hopeful Trumpers, more productive ways of engaging with this presidency are opening up.

The media’s mostly Manichaean political model—bad forces arrayed against forces for good—is largely useless. The more productive if difficult path forward will require willing participants to pull out pieces of the Trump agenda and support them, refine them or, when necessary, resist. Full engagement with the Trump presidency doesn’t mean simple assent or rote opposition. …

For those who want to spend four years quaking before Mr. Trump’s kaleidoscopic tweets, the future is predictable. For everyone else, the more familiar struggles of American governance have just begun.

Log Cabin seems to get this; the LGBT Democrats, not so much. From the Washington Blade article:

The HRC message said the group had created a new “defy” logo and encouraged supporters to “resist” action by Trump that would harm LGBT people or roll back LGBT supportive policies put in place by President Barack Obama.. …

The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund…[which] also lobbies for presidential appointments of LGBT people, issued a strongly worded statement on the day following the election leaving no doubt about its opposition to Trump. “Today I am heartbroken that racist, xenophobic, sexist and transphobic demagoguery won last night’s presidential election,” said Aisha Moodie-Mills, the Victory Fund’s president and CEO.

Sure, those are voices that are going to be welcome in administration deliberations.

Furthermore. No one expects the Republican leadership to favor an LGBT anti-discrimination bill. But if the Democrats introduced a common-sense measure with religious exemptions and got behind it, enough Republicans are likely to join them to get to a majority, and I believe Trump might very well sign it. But that’s the last thing the Democrats, and their LGBT auxiliaries, would want to happen.

Final thought. According to their 2015 form 990 filings for tax year 2014 (the last ones you can view for free through online search), total annual revenue was:
LCR: $      289,950.
HRC: $37,406,706.

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Permanent Opposition

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The Washington Post, on inauguration eve, reported D.C. Politics ‘Queer Dance Party’ shakes and shimmies to send a message to Mike Pence.

Entertaining themselves with disco exhibitionism doesn’t sound like an effective lobbying tactic, but then it’s not meant to be. Aside from the Log Cabin Republicans, the organized LGBT groups—many that still claim, somehow, that they’re nonpartisan—will be part and parcel of the Democratic party’s fierce and permanent opposition to all things Trump.

Via BuzzFeed: These Gay Republican Activists Are Making Inroads With Trump’s Team.

As progressives sprint to catch up — or refuse to deal with Trump’s staff directly — these gay activists on the right believe access to Trump’s White House will make them bellwethers for the entire LGBT movement.

But the “movement” doesn’t want anything to do with them. Trump may arguably be the first GOP president who doesn’t oppose gay legal equality (now even accepting marriage equality as a done deal). But instead of capitalizing on that, the LGBT left will be in full Democratic campaign mode from day one.

More. Some of Trump’s appointees, including at the Cabinet level, are not supportive of LGBT inclusion and legal equality (although the nature and depth of their opposition is often overstated, or they were never opposed to our rights, as with Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos (here, and here).

So, is the smart strategy to declare implacable and permanent opposition to Donald J. Trump from day one, or to work constructively with those in the administration, including Trump himself, who have an inclusive and supportive view of gay Americans? Clearly, the LGBT organizational establishment is committed to the former, ramping up partisan polarization to a fever pitch.

[Best line from Trump’s inaugural address: “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.”]

Along similar lines, from Washington Blade columnist Mark Lee:

Such embarrassing foot stomping wins lesbians and gays few friends. We risk alienating actual and potential allies by unseemly hegemony and hatred.

Worse are the ridiculous claims of impending LGBT Armageddon most gays don’t believe and only sabotage a community’s credibility.

We’re not headed to concentration camps, nor is Trump gassing up any transport trucks. Illusory victories won by presidential orders signify we opted for transient gains by seeking only convenience and not consensus.

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And if Chelsea Manning Wasn’t a Transgender Cause Celebre?

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NYT: Obama Commutes Bulk of Chelsea Manning’s Sentence.

From a 35-year sentence, commuted to time served (7 years) for one of the largest breaches of diplomatic and military secrecy in American history—including thousands of classified State Department cables—carried out by an army intelligence analyst.

I just hope her sentence wasn’t reduced because she’s transgender and her cause was taken up, very vocally, by transgender and LGBT activists (perish the thought!).


A pertinent comment left at the above tweet: “Dems ok with leaking military secrets but not DNC secrets.”

More. During his December 2011 pretrial hearing, the New York Daily News reported of the defendant then known as Bradley Manning:

…his lawyers argued his status as a gay soldier before the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” played an important role in his actions.

Lawyers for Pfc. Bradley Manning began laying out a defense to show that his struggles in an environment hostile to homosexuality contributed to mental and emotional problems that should have barred him from having access to sensitive material.

The paper also reported that “The Obama administration says the released information has threatened valuable military and diplomatic sources and strained America’s relations with other governments.”

While her supporters celebrate, a press release from the Log Cabin Republicans says:

Log Cabin Republicans has always condemned Manning’s actions, and consistently stood against efforts by the left to elevate Manning as a paragon of the LGBT community.

“Chelsea Manning is no hero, and the commutation of her sentence is appalling,” Log Cabin Republicans President Gregory T. Angelo stated. “Manning was not imprisoned for being transgender — in fact, the government agreed to accommodate and facilitate her transition during her well-deserved sentence; she was imprisoned for traitorous clandestine activity that put military lives at risk. Her actions — and President Obama’s clemency — are nothing to celebrate.”

Furthermore. James Kirchick writes Bradley Manning is No Gay Hero:

For centuries, gay people have served with distinction and honor in the armed forces, and it is the service of these countless veterans whom today’s gays can thank for the freedom to serve openly. Bradley Manning’s actions are fodder to those who have long argued that homosexuality naturally leads to treason; some on the far right have argued that his actions were intended as “revenge” over the military’s then-enforced anti-gay policy. It is unconscionable that gay activists, of all people, would play into these slanders.

Still more. A “potent symbol for transgender Americans.” Chase Strangio, Manning’s ACLU attorney, said that “Her story really does reflect so much of the systemic discrimination that transgender people face,” adding “She’s an incredibly thoughtful and devoted person,” and that “She’s felt a sense of responsibility to the transgender community and wanted to be someone who contributed to the fight for transgender justice.”

To which the Washington Times editorialized: “No one doubts Chelsea Manning’s feelings of ‘responsibility to the transgender community.’ It’s a pity she felt no such responsibility to her country, and to the men and women who were assigned to the battlefield to defend that country with their very lives.”

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