Culture & Identity

The Commanding Heights

by on

[We’re back after a server issue took us offline for awhile]

This National Review piece is somewhat overstated—LGBT people in rural areas, especially, still face discrimination. But it is true that in blue America and throughout the national mainstream media the orthodox view is pro-LGBT. Taken to an extreme, however, LGBT nondiscrimination rights become dismissive of others’ rights, such as regarding speech, expression and association.

America is about finding a balance among competing rights, but progressives are behaving as newly ascendant inquisitors.

Another example of progressive orthodoxy run amuck and attacking liberal (in the classic sense) values. At least this time, there was some pullback in the face of an obvious and disingenuous overreach.

21 Comments

Support for LGBT Acceptance Drops, Say Activists Who Can’t See How They’re Responsible

by on

GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) reports that:

While the past several decades have yielded remarkable progress for the LGBTQ community in the United States, acceptance of LGBTQ people is slipping, and discrimination is increasing, in the face of attacks, bias, and erasure by the Trump administration. This is the first time the Accelerating Acceptance report has shown a drop in acceptance for LGBTQ people.

Even if you accept GLAAD’s finding of a drop in acceptance, here’s an alternative explanation to “Erasure by the Trump administration,” whatever Trump is Hitler hysteria that’s supposed to invoke. How about this: Forcing religiously conservative (but NEVER Muslim) small business owners to craft creative expressions for same-sex weddings seems to many Americans who are willing to live and let live as, well, ugly authoritarianism. Or that the federal government decreeing that public schools make restrooms and locker rooms open to use based on gender identity rather than anatomy seems to many who are OK with same-sex marriage to be an ill considered overstep.

And then there’s this.

The LGBT activist movement has squandered a great deal of goodwill. Blaming Donald Trump won’t restore it.

More. Andrew Sullivan has similar thoughts:

The mainstream media has no other explanation than, well, Trump, and a culture more tolerant of intolerance. That may well be part of it. But no one seems to notice the profound shift in the tone and substance of advocacy for gay equality in recent years, and the radicalization of the movement’s ideology and rhetoric. That is also surely having an impact. …

As many of us saw our goals largely completed and moved on, the far left filled the void. … “Live and let live” became: “If you don’t believe gender is nonbinary, you’re a bigot.” I would be shocked if this sudden lurch in the message didn’t in some way negatively affect some straight people’s views of gays.

The left’s indifference to religious freedom — see the question of Masterpiece Cakeshop— has also taken a toll. So have the PC bromides of the LGBTQRSTUV reformulation.

16 Comments