Politics & Public Opinion

On Charlie Kirk

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In 2019, Charlie Kirk said “I believe marriage is one man, one woman,” but he sought dialogue and debate with people who held opposing views.

Podcaster Dave Rubin, who is openly gay and married to a man, met Kirk in 2017 and “went on to do dozens of college campus events where we both relished discussing our differences — not only with each other, but with the huge crowds of college students as well. … What started as spirited disagreements on politics, culture, religion and activism turned into a meaningful friendship and a turning point, pardon the pun, in my career.”

Other openly gay critics of leftwing extremism, including Andrew Doyle and Andy Ngo, have praised Kirk’s commitment to free speech and respectful dialogue. And in a statement, Log Cabin Republicans said that Kirk “worked tirelessly to bring American education back to its roots of civil debate, free speech, and tolerance for differing points of view. His work was, and will continue to be, an inspiration for LGBT conservatives to proudly defend their own views against those who may loudly and hatefully disagree.”

In a quote now being widely shared, Kirk himself said this: “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens. Because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity.”











And putting it all together:



Addendums:

Well said by Debra Messing: “The idea that disagreement could justify erasure is barbaric. And the fact that so many are celebrating it is horrifying.”



OsborneInk (Matt Osbrone) writes:

… GLAAD, the once-hallowed civil rights nonprofit … claimed that Kirk “spread infinite amounts of disinformation about LGBTQ people.” GLAAD is particularly put out by “Turning Point’s college campus campaigns featuring speakers such as Riley Gaines, Chloe Cole, and Pastor Junsun Yoo, who regularly spoke against transgender people.”
I have met one of those people, Riley Gaines, and watched her speak. … Gaines was denied her Title IX rights to fair sports competition, as well as the safety of a single-sex locker room, because William ‘Lia’ Thomas has special gender gremlin inside him that makes it okay, according to the new leftist dogma everyone has been forced to accept as a civil rights project. …
… I actually know Chloe Cole personally, having met her three times and interviewed her. She did not “speak against transgender people” because she never does. Chloe tells the story of how her breasts were cut off while she was a minor child, during the very same time that GLAAD and ‘the left’ were gaslighting America that no minor children were being surgically transitioned, passing off this lie with the compliant help of the media.


More: Will this hold up? We’ll see.

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Same-Sex Marriage Won’t Be Overturned

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Despite the scare-mongering by the left (Big LGBTQ+ now joined by Hillary Clinton) and the fever dreams of the anti-gay right, it’s not going to happen. There are huge legal and moral differences between marriage equality and abortion, as well as the justices’ differing past positions on these two issues (i.e., Roe critics who supported marriage equality in Obergefell).









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Democrat Presidential Wannabees Trip Over Trans Issues

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I’ve updated my post looking at how potential “moderate” Democratic presidential candidates are trying to appeal to centrists on transgender issues while not provoking too negative a response from the party’s increasingly gender-extreme base.

How’s that working out?

I take a look at the views and actions of former Chicago mayor and Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanual, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Pennsylvania Gov Josh Shapiro, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — as well as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is by no means a moderate but made a brief feint at playing one.

https://stephenhenrymiller.substack.com/p/democrat-presidential-wannabees-trip



Related:


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Another Identitarian Big Lie

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A message for Trump critics: spurious attacks that are easily proved false to anyone but the party base don’t win support for your side. For instance, progressive identitarians want low-information Democrats to believe the Trump administration is racist and homophobic, with progressive media backing up their narrative. But the truth will out.

T. Becket Adams responded to a Washington Post op-ed:


I previously addressed some of these issues in a Substack post, “Scott Bessent: A Nomination Based on Merit, Not DEI.”

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Renaming the ‘Harvey Milk’

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I can’t deny that ordering the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk at the start of Pride Month shows a certain animus toward gay people/homosexuality (in the LGBTQ+ mix) on the part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Milk, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was a gay activist who became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S. He was assassinated in 1978.

While in the U.S. Navy for four years, Milk served during the Korean War on a submarine rescue ship and then as a diving instructor. He was issued an “other than honorable discharge” in 1955 after his superiors learned he was a homosexual, the New York Times reports.

A brief digression: I’ve written on transgender service members elsewhere (but briefly, if you’re on cross-sex hormones, you can’t be deployed – just like diabetics on insulin aren’t eligible for service; and if you self-identify as trans but haven’t physically transitioned, your excludible for all the reasons why we don’t allow men and women to be naked together in shared spaces).

But back to gays. I believe military symbolism should be limited to what unites us as Americans, not what divides us on culture-war fault lines. While a gay (or LGBTQ+) person might appreciate serving on the Harvey Milk, how would a traditionally religious person feel about it? We have a right to equality under the law in our relationships, but we don’t have a right to require others to endorse homosexual relationships.

And then there is the issue of Milk’s age-discordant sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy with substance issues, as reported by Milk’s friend Randy Shilts in his biography “The Mayor of Castro Street.” This fact is noted in all the “conservative” media reports and in none of the “liberal” media reports I’ve seen. Whatever you may think about a 16-year-old’s right to self-agency, and despite the misreporting from the right calling this pedophilia, it’s still problematic for a lot of people who are not “bigots.”

Others are free to disagree, but that’s my take.


Also see:


Addendum: Right-Wing Anti-Gay Bile

Right-wing influencer Matt Walsh crosses the line into ant-gay invective when discussing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to rename the USNS Harvey Milk at the start of Pride Month.

I understand conservative reaction to LGBTQ+ wokiness, but pure, unadulterated hate toward gay people is still potent on the right, along with racism and anti-Semitism.

From his video, 11 minutes in, Wash claims:

“He [Milk] was a champion of the quote gay rights movement, and what good has come of that exactly? In what way has the quote gay rights movement improved society? Look around at society right now what area can you point to and say “Oh yeah, that is better now right?” Like people’s lives are better in this area because of this person and because of this movement. I don’t think you can do that.”

So you have Walsh’s complete lack of awareness of what gay lives are like, and especially were like under sodomy laws, conversion therapies (the real kind), mainstream religious denunciations of our humanity, and intense, daily, all-encompassing family and social ostracization.

Then Walsh continues with a straw-man argument:

“Every leftist will tell you that Harvey Milk deserves to be honored and remembered more than somebody like Columbus. Columbus, who is responsible for one of the great achievements in the history of Western civilization. Our entire civilization looks different in in a in fundamental ways we can’t even conceive of if Columbus didn’t exist.”

Well sure, Harvey Milk wasn’t Christopher Columbus. But hardly every naval ship or military installation is named for a Columbus. Most are often named for people who are otherwise unknown to the vast majority.

Does Walsh think this is actually a convincing line of argument? Apparently so, and so do his fawning, equally or even-more-homophobic right-wing commenters.

So we have the woke LGBTQ+ left and the still potent anti-gay right, and actual gay and lesbian people caught in the crossfire.


My Substack column:

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The Backlash Is Real

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More:

“Gender ideology” has re-opened the door to expressions of homophobia in the guise of being against LGBTQ+ craziness. All the more reason why the total embrace of TQ+ by formerly LGB groups is so counter-productive.


And this:


Along with the obvious positions that Americans overwhelming reject — social and/or medicalized transitioning of confused minors; males in girls sports — the pronoun and nonbinary madness is driving the backlash.


Relatedly, Detransitioner Maia Poet argues that “restricting access of gender medicine to legal adults (18 year olds and above, in most countries) will not be enough to meaningfully protect kids and young people from being harmed in mind and in body by gender ideology.” From her recent speech for Detrans Awareness Day:

We must understand that what started as a rogue medical experiment confined to a few European hospitals nearly a century ago, has morphed into a widespread ideological assault on reality which has invaded every institution within Western society, which has thoroughly pervaded youth culture. We are beyond the point where legislation alone is capable of neutralizing the threat of this ideology to our young people. If these kids are anything like me, they will need to be de-radicalized and they need proper mental healthcare and guidance. If we truly wish to end the death grip of gender ideology on our society, as a start, we need to face the distress that these children are facing in an aggressively honest, compassionate and practical way.

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