Culture & Identity

The New Culture Wars

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Transgenderism has transformed what used to be the fight for gay and lesbian legal equality. Now, it’s something very different.

Every time the old Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) was poised to pass Congress, activists and Democratic sponsors changed it so it couldn’t win majority support. First it was a bill to outlaw employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and once that had enough Republican support to pass, it was changed to include gender identity, which didn’t. The Equality Act is ENDA on steroids, vastly expanding the scope of “public accommodations” to include creative-services providers (such as bakers and wedding photographers), gutting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and requiring that bio males who chose to “present” as female (no physical alteration required) be treated as women in all areas, including the right to compete as women in sporting competitions.

The GOP-led Senate won’t pass the Equality Act, and rightly so. But Democrats and LGBT progressive will say it’s because Republicans don’t oppose employment discrimination, as if it were the original ENDA.

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Different View on ‘Mayor Pete’

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Why Democratic Party thought leaders and the media elite are embracing him, and why they moved quickly to tamp down the left-progressives that didn’t find him sufficiently intersectional.

More.

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What Privilege Looks Like

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Jussie Smollett, the most privileged man in America.

Which was the point.

And this:

As for WHY they were dropped — you’ll recall State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recused herself from the case. She reportedly had asked cops to stand down at the behest of Tina Tchen — Michelle Obama’s former Chief of Staff and a friend of Jussie’s family.

With friends in high places Smollett again proclaims he’s innocent despite the grand jury indictments on 16 felony counts that will now go unprosecuted.

And isn’t it racist for Rahm Emanuel to call the Attorney’s Office dropping all charges “a whitewash of justice”?

More. Maybe GLAAD will honor him. After all, as previously noted:

GLAAD, Feb. 14:

“Jussie Smollett was victimized first in a hate-motivated and violent attack in Chicago and has since been doubly victimized as the subject of speculation by the media industry and broader culture,” GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis, said in a statement. … “GLAAD joined with Color of Change to condemn the racism and homophobia that fueled the physical violence against Jussie and today we double down on that stance, while also calling out a culture where LGBTQ people of color are too often the last to be believed.”

As National Review sums it up:
Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff calls up the state’s attorney, the state’s attorney hands off the case to her assistant, and the assistant gives Smollett the deal of the century. And all of this is so egregiously, transparently corrupt that mayor and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is spitting hot fire over this, as is Obama’s former chief strategist David Axelrod.

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In Defense of Western Civilization

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Bo Winegard:
“But, whatever its flaws, [the West] has raised more people out of indigence, misery, superstition, and intolerance than any other civilization in history. Today, it is laudably cosmopolitan and largely free from grotesque forms of discrimination and bigotry. An ideology which fails to recognize this, which insists that racism and sexism are woven into the fabric of everyday life, will probably alienate more people than it convinces and will unfairly malign and misrepresent the state of Western society.”
More below:

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A Movement Unmoored

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As Andrew Sullivan wrote recently (second item):

It is even transphobic, I am now informed, for a gay man not to want to sleep with a trans man who has a vagina. In response to my recent column on the subject, I was told by Sue Hyde, a woman who is at the very heart of the LGBTQIA++ movement, to, yes, give it a try: “Maybe Sullivan … would give [a handsome trans man with a vagina who uses a dildo as a penis] a toss in the hay and next day, be singing a different tune about category woman/girl >>> category man/boy persons’ capacities to uphold and expand the experiences and meanings of homosex.” Maybe. Or maybe I’ll sleep with whomever I want — you know, something we used to call sexual freedom.

But this is how deep the ideology runs. It wants to control not only the public discourse, and language, and rig sports contests, but also insinuate itself into the most intimate areas of an individual’s sex life. Once upon a time, the religious right would tell me that I should sleep with women because I might find the right one and finally be happy. Now the intersectional left is telling me something almost exactly the same. What has happened to this movement? Where on earth has it gone?

Where, indeed. Having achieved the decriminalization of homosexual relations and, shortly thereafter, legal equality for marriage and LGB military service—the two areas where discrimination was government enforced—the LGBTQIA++ movement has become unhinged from any kind of objective reality. Witness GLAAD’s declaration, noted earlier, that to even question Jusse Smollett’s deeply suspicious (and now unraveled) hate-crime story was evidence of racism and homophobia. Or HRC’s near-total dismissal of the Trump administration’s initiative to seek the worldwide decriminalization of homosexual relations.

Other than the mean-spirited misuse of state power to force religiously conservative service providers to craft messages in support of same-sex marriage, and promoting the false narrative that biological sex is irrelevant in light of self-professed gender identity, there’s not much left of a movement that was once devoted to extending the promise of liberty and legal equality to gay people.

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Martina’s Thought Crime

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More. Andrew Sullivan writes (second item):

If you take this argument seriously — that biology is entirely a function of gender identity — then the whole notion of separate male and female sports events is in doubt. A trans woman should, in my view, be treated exactly as a woman — unless, as in this case, it clashes with biological reality. There aren’t many contexts in which this really counts, but sports is one of them. Yes, it sucks. But denying reality is stupid, can easily backfire, and will alienate countless otherwise sympathetic people. And note that if the Equality Act were to pass — a priority for Nancy Pelosi — it would be illegal to bar a trans woman from competing against biological females, as it is already in many states.

It is even transphobic, I am now informed, for a gay man not to want to sleep with a trans man who has a vagina. In response to my recent column on the subject, I was told by Sue Hyde, a woman who is at the very heart of the LGBTQIA++ movement, to, yes, give it a try: “Maybe Sullivan … would give [a handsome trans man with a vagina who uses a dildo as a penis] a toss in the hay and next day, be singing a different tune about category woman/girl >>> category man/boy persons’ capacities to uphold and expand the experiences and meanings of homosex.” Maybe. Or maybe I’ll sleep with whomever I want — you know, something we used to call sexual freedom.

But this is how deep the ideology runs. It wants to control not only the public discourse, and language, and rig sports contests, but also insinuate itself into the most intimate areas of an individual’s sex life. Once upon a time, the religious right would tell me that I should sleep with women because I might find the right one and finally be happy. Now the intersectional left is telling me something almost exactly the same. What has happened to this movement? Where on earth has it gone?

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