Politics & Public Opinion

The Sermon (and who is actually putting ‘gay kids’ at risk)

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Ben Appel writes about the Inaugural prayer service sermon that LGBTQ+ activists and progressive media have been celebrating:

By now, you may have heard about the sermon that Bishop of Washington Mariann Edgar Budde delivered during the inaugural prayer service…. Near the end of her sermon, Budde addressed President Trump directly. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” she said. “There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives.” …
I hadn’t planned to write about this topic until I came across a New York Times headline on Wednesday, which appeared to take a page right out of a Democratic strategist’s playbook. “Bishop Asks Trump to ‘Have Mercy’ on Immigrants and Gay Children,” the headline read. Yes, Budde did mention gay and lesbian kids as well as trans kids. But let’s not pretend that that’s the population the Democrats, the mainstream media, and LGBTQ activist organizations are constantly fretting about “protecting”: gay kids. …
We need to be very clear: President Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology extremism,” just like the Florida legislation before it, is a direct result of the total capture of our institutions by the pseudoscientific religious belief of gender ideology. If blue-haired radicals hadn’t entered schools and told kids that sex is “assigned” rather than simply observed, that the sex they feel like inside supersedes the material reality of their bodies, and that some kids don’t have a sex at all, then these measures wouldn’t even be a figment in the GOP’s imagination. …
For years now, gay people like me have been pleading with Democrats, mainstream news outlets, and activist organizations to consider the implications of affirming feminine boys and masculine girls as “transgender,” when the research (not to mention our own experiences) tells us that nearly all of these gender-dysphoric/gender-nonconforming/whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-them kids, if not socially transitioned, will grow up to be gay and choose not to medically transition. …


And this, a welcomed development:

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More Americans Oppose Female-Identifying Males in Women’s Sports

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Added: The LGB Alliance USA praises President Trump’s executive order. It’s arguable if the order goes too far by not recognizing adults who transition, but there’s no question that the ludicrous over-reach by transactivists, especially regarding putting gender-nonconforming kids on the trans train and obviously bio males in women’s locker rooms and sports teams, led to this.

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Even Most Democrats Oppose Medicalized Conversion Therapy for Minors

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Just-released results from a New York Times/Ipsos poll show that 71% of Americans (including 54% of Democrats) believe…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Sunday, January 19, 2025


Ben Appel makes clear why big-money LGBTQ+ groups are so wrong:


And an Inauguration Day post from the LGBT Courage Coalition:


A thought from the LGB Alliance: “Some people believe girls who like football need puberty blockers and a double mastectomy. We believe they need football boots.”

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A Nomination Based on Merit, Not DEI

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America and the GOP have come a long way since the days when George W. Bush tried to ban same-sex marriage.

At his confirmation hearing for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent thanked “my spouse, John Freeman” and their two children, Cole and Caroline. His family sat behind him.

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Friday, January 17, 2025


Bessent was not nominated because of his sexual orientation in order to check an identity group box. He was nominated regardless of his sexual orientation, which is how it should be.

Scott Bessent explains how his dream of attending the U.S. Naval Academy and, later, his effort to join the foreign…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Saturday, January 18, 2025


Could the silence from progressive LGBTQ+ activist groups be because his appointment was based solely on merit and not mandated by DEI identity-group hierarchies?

Chuck Ross at the Washington Free Beacon reports: >>President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Treasury secretary, Scott…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Tuesday, December 17, 2024


Update:


Here’s Roll Calls breakdown of the confirmation vote.

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Odds & Ends

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We’re seeing more indications that the smug, elitist, soft authoritarianism known colloquially as “woke” finally may be receding, leaving it its wake a legacy ranging from lost rights to freedom of speech and equal treatment under the law, to civil disasters, some deadly. Turns out, for instance, that replacing merit and ability as hiring and promotion metrics with identity group “equity” doesn’t work out so well.
But key constituencies on the left, including the LGBTQ+ progressives who dominant what was once the movement for gay and lesbian legal equality and social acceptance (what a quaint idea!), remain committed to the woke ideology in all its critical race and critical gender glory.

Maybe her primary goal should have been preparing the LAFD to fight fires. Adam Lehrer at The Scroll reports: >>In 2022,…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Wednesday, January 8, 2025


And this:


Added: GLAAD comes out full force against ending woke censorship at Facebook. The group has long favored silencing voices it disagrees with.

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Hopes and Warnings for 2025

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Andrew Doyle’s wish list for 2025 includes “a complete ban on puberty blockers” and that “we need to stop basing public…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Friday, January 3, 2025


Clearly, the fight to protect gay kids will heat up this year, with the LGBTQ+ left all-in on promoting transitioning for gender-nonconforming kids, most of whom we know would otherwise go through puberty and recognize themselves as gay. Here are a few worthwhile recent posts on this struggle.

Jesse Singal writes: >>It’s very strange to deny the possibility that social transition may alter a child’s…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Tuesday, December 31, 2024

And:

Matt Margolis writes: >>A user on X accused [J.K. Rowling] of having a “hateful focus on trans kids” and declared it…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Monday, December 30, 2024

An interesting idea:

The “Our Duty” Substack argues that “transgender ideation” is a better term than “gender dysphoria”: >> Terms like "…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Monday, December 23, 2024


And worth repeating:

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Gay Activism: New vs. Old

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Newer organizations such as the LGBT Courage Coalition and the LGB Alliance USA focus on protecting gays and lesbians — and gay kids — while the intersectional queer ideologues who run the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and other groups threaten the hard-won advances of earlier generations.

More from Ben Appel and the important work that groups like the LGBT Courage Coalition are doing. Ben writes: >>An…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Friday, December 6, 2024

Unfortunately, so many well-intentioned gay people continue to fund the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), thinking it’s the same organization that it was 10 years ago:

Daniel Cameron writes that the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index has steadily increased leftwing demands…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Thursday, December 5, 2024


Also sadly, local/regional LGBTQ+ groups are often no better, pushing gender-confused gay kids onto the trans train. Increasing, LGBTQ+ = anti-gay.

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Trump ‘Anti-Gay’?

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Supposedly "anti-gay" president-elect nominates a gay guy married to a man to lead one of the most important departments in the federal government.

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Saturday, November 23, 2024


What LGBTQ+ activists often mean when they say Trump is “anti-gay” is that he favors banning child sex-change procedures and opposes biological boys who identify as female competing in girls sports.

Trump’s support for excluding transgender people from the military is more complicated and as of this writing it’s unclear what his administration will propose. However, what progressive media isn’t reporting is that just as people with diabetes who use insulin are generally not allowed to join the U.S. military (in part because they’re dependent on a medical regimen that would be unavailable if they were deployed in combat areas), so, too, there are practical issues concerning transgender personnel with a life-long dependency on cross-sex hormones.

Defense Secretary-nominee Pete Hegseth argues that, in particular, those who join the military and then seek to transition medically, at the government’s expense, can’t be deployed and should receive medical discharges.

Transmen and transwomen who have chosen to keep their original genitalia pose other familiar challenges, such as women service members sharing intimate spaces (including barracks and showers) with biological males who identify as women.

These are issues that need to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as “transphobic” or falsely equated with the former ban on gay and lesbian service members.


And this:

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Friday, December 6, 2024

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More Election Post-Mortems

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Andrew Sullivan explores further how the Democrats lost their way. He writes, regarding the party’s support for bio-male boys playing in girls’ sports and sex-transitioning for gender-nonconforming kids:

One thing you notice about the [social justice warrior] pushback: they never actually rebut any of the concerns about fairness in sports, which is the nub of the issue. They don’t rebut it, because they cannot rebut it, even though some have tried. Nor do they ever engage with the fast-changing facts and research on “gender-affirming care,” i.e. sex reassignment for children. In fact, they do all they can to suppress journalism and hound reporters because this subject has been determined “not up for debate.”

And so transness is sacralized, made inviolable, and any weighing of the evidence is regarded not as part of a reasonable debate but as a kind of blasphemy.

More from Sullivan below.

Andrew Sullivan writes: >>…the transqueer activists then portray themselves as merely the latest people to be “on the…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Friday, November 15, 2024


Here’s Guy Benson on the fear-mongering by LGBTQ+ activists that’s left many gay people convinced their marriages are about to be annulled (so send you checks today!!!!):

:Exhales: Okay, here we go: No. 1) Obergefell isn’t going anywhere & I’d bet SCOTUS lacks the votes (they’d need 4) to even take up a hypothetical challenge. 2) Even if they somehow overturned that case (they won’t), Congress passed a bipartisan law, signed by Biden, further protecting/enshrining same-sex marriage. 3) SCOTUS expanded LGBT protections in a ruling authored by a Trump appointee (Bostock/Gorsuch). 4) Whatever else you think of him, Donald Trump is *openly pro-SSM.* He even hosted a gay wedding at his house. I’m not asking liberal or progressive gays to become Republicans. I am asking them to stop fear-mongering about this.

And posted by Ben Appel:


If you have an hour to spare, watch Brianna Wu on a post-election TRIGGERnometry podcast, on how Democrats (she's one) lost their way on gender and other issues.

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Friday, November 15, 2024

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