Culture & Identity

Taking a Stand

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James Kirchick writes:

If the public face of the ACLU was Ira Glasser during the latter part of the previous century, today that honor can be claimed by a staff attorney named Chase Strangio … the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice. Like many activists consumed by this issue, he is uncompromising in demanding strict adherence to a set of highly contestable orthodoxies, and merciless toward anyone who dares question them. Two women who have—J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, and Abigail Shrier, author of a book about the role of “peer contagion” in the rising rate of teenage girls declaring themselves transgender—are “closely aligned with white supremacists in power,” Strangio declared on Twitter, offering not a shred of evidence for this claim. “Stopping the circulation of [Shrier’s] book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he wrote, a rather bizarre position for an ACLU employee to endorse. …

Strangio is of course perfectly entitled to his views about the fairness of allowing natal males to compete against natal females in high school sports, and to advocate for an “information climate” suppressing books he doesn’t like. What’s puzzling is why someone with such pro-censorship inclinations would want to work, of all places, at the American Civil Liberties Union. … Puzzling, that is, until you realize that—like so many other institutions whose worthy missions we naively assumed to be inviolable—the ACLU is no longer itself.

Plus this:

And when other constitutional rights have come into conflict with a First Amendment freedom even more unpopular with progressives than speech—that of religion—the ACLU has made it all but official policy to consider claims of religious conscience as smokescreens for discrimination, arguing that an evangelical Christian baker must make cakes for same-sex weddings against his will (a violation of both expressive and religious freedom), and that Catholic hospitals must perform abortions.

Purposely misleading:

The downward spirals goes on and on … and on

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The Authoritarian Impulse

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He adds:

More than any other value, the brave men and women who started the American gay rights movement in the middle part of the last century advocated freedom—the freedom of sexual expression, the freedom to hold a job, the freedom to publish, the freedom to associate (whether at a bar free from police harassment or in a political meeting free from FBI surveillance), the freedom to serve openly in the military, and the freedom to marry. Now that it has achieved those freedoms and a cultural influence once thought impossible, much of what passes for gay activism today is driven by an impulse which is the very opposite of freedom: control.

As I’ve written before, the pagans bloodily persecuted the Christians, and then the Christians came to power and bloodily persecuted the pagans. Communists began as a small, radical movement for workers’ rights, but everywhere they’ve attained power they’ve been ruthless, murderous totalitarians. Those who were formerly outlawed and subject to arrest and worse, once the tide turns and they have the power of government to force others to bend knee, are totally assured of their own moral superiority in doing so.

Along related lines, but about woke-ism generally:

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Buttigieg Ends His Historic White House Bid

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And finally…

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Hopefully, the Voice of a New Generation

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Relatedly:

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