IGF CultureWatch

David Bernstein writes at the Washington Post‘s Volokh Conspiracy blog:

“Many religious Christians of a traditionalist bent believed that liberals not only reduce their deeply held beliefs to bigotry, but want to run them out of their jobs, close down their stores and undermine their institutions. … I hope liberals really enjoyed running Brendan Eich out of his job and closing down the Sweet Cakes bakery, because it cost them the Supreme Court.”

I think there’s truth to that. LGBT progressives along with gay libertarians and center-right conservatives worked to achieve marriage equality. Then the left, instead of accepting victory and seeking to live (and let live) with those of differing views, went the authoritarian route and decided to use the power of the progressive state (federally and in in left-leaning localities) to force Christian conservatives to provide creative services for same-sex weddings, among other assaults on religious liberty.

Bernstein points to, as a turning point, U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli saying during the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Obergefell that religiously affiliated schools might lose their tax exempt status if they refused to recognize same-sex marriages. I’m not sure that particular statement “cost his party the election,” but it was part of a larger culture war attack strategy that did.

Bernstein also cites a recent column by Megan McArdle at Bloomberg, The Left’s Doomed Effort to Coerce the Right, that notes:

Over the last few years, as controversies have erupted over the rights of cake bakers and pizza places to refuse to cater gay weddings, the rights of nuns to refuse to provide insurance that covers birth control, the rights of Catholic hospitals to refuse to perform abortions, and the rights of Christian schools to teach (and require students and teachers to practice) traditional Christian morality, some Christians have begun to feel that their communities are under existential threat. …

I’ve heard from a number of evangelicals who, despite their reservations about the man, ended up voting for Donald Trump because they fear that the left is out to build a world where it will not be possible to hold any prominent job while holding onto their church’s beliefs about sexuality. Discussions I’ve had in recent days with nice, well-meaning progressives suggest that this is not a paranoid fantasy. An online publisher’s witch hunt against two television personalities — because of the church they attend — validates the fears of these Christians.

And Tammy Bruce writes at the Washington Times:

“As a gay woman, I find it embarrassing to watch gays publicly harass individuals simply for who they are. For several years now we have watched so-called gay leadership and their affiliated activists target Christians and their businesses to either punish them and send a message to everyone else — either conform to the liberal narrative or suffer grave consequences.”

For the past few years I’ve been raising these issues and warning the LGBT left of how counter-productive its attacks on people of faith were. The response was typically to mock me for not recognizing the new order in which there would be no tolerance of religious exemptions from government-mandated behavior. The brewing backlash was evident to all, excepting those who have eyes but could not see, and ears but could not hear.

Mark Lee writes:

It’s been embarrassing to witness the online hysteria and public angst exhibited by an astounding number of gays and lesbians in the wake of the election. Social media postings intone epithets like “racist,” “fascist” and “Nazi” to describe the president-elect and his supporters. These inflammatory remarks have become the angry post-defeat version of Clinton’s mocking campaign denunciation – now sweet sounding by comparison – that those not supporting her included both the “deplorable” and “irredeemable.” …

The question for LGBT voters is why some so eagerly align with and defend a political party so disconnected from those we most want to persuade as to be of nominal value to converting recalcitrant hearts and minds.

Continuing from the blog post below, I’ll reference another Conor Friedersdorf post-election article, How Stigma Sows Seeds of Its Own Defeat, in which Friedersdorf writes:

Today, pioneering gay-marriage proponents like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch express dismay that, after majorities came to embrace their position, the coalition that used persuasion to accomplish one of the great civil rights expansions of the 21st century shifted from a posture of persuasion to a posture of stigmatization. …

I wonder if today’s students are as well-equipped as older cohorts to persuasively articulate why racism or sexism or denial of equal rights to gays and lesbians is wrong, let alone to explain the value of other aspects of the liberal project on which they’ve never focused, having never lived when they were seriously threatened. …

Americans need to avoid leaning on stigma even when it seems both solid and warranted. Insofar as a position is worth defending, it is worth defending on its merits.

Unfortunately, the whole progressive project of “political correctness” is based on stigmatizing and silencing those with “incorrect” views, despite (as Friedersdorf points out) its failure as a political tactic.

More. Writing recently in the Boston Globe, Clinton campaign volunteer Diane Hessan recounts:

Last week, I reread all of my notes. There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice. It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails or Bill Clinton’s visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”

All hell broke loose.

George [a source in northeastern Pennsylvania] told me that his neighborhood was outraged, that many of his hard-working, church-going, family-loving friends resented being called that name. He told me that he looked up the word in the dictionary, and that it meant something so bad that there is no hope, like the aftermath of a tsunami. You know, he said, Clinton ended up being the biggest bully of them all. Whereas Trump bullied her, she bullied Wilkes Barre.

Let’s recall that Clinton’s remarks were made at an LGBT fundraising in NYC featuring Barbra Streisand, with ticket prices ranging from $1,200 to $250,000, and many paying $50,000, according to reports. And that those wealthy LGBT donors enthusiastically applauded Clinton’s calling millions of Americans “deplorables” who are “irredeemable.”

Furthermore. Nothing learned. Via the front page of the Washington Blade: Trump’s deplorable cabinet picks.

It was a bad year for culture-war zealots. As noted below, Oregon labor commissioner Brad Avakian, prosecutor of people whose faith isn’t secular-progressivism of the statist/authoritarian variety, lost big-time his race for Oregon secretary of state. He thought driving a mom-and-pop bakery out of business because its proprietors declined to bake a wedding cake for two lesbians, while offering to find another baker to do so (as it would violate their religious beliefs to participate in a same-sex wedding) would be his winning ticket. Wrong.

In North Carolina, it looks like Gov. Pat McCrory, who pushed through a law requiring the use of bathrooms in conformity with one’s birth certificate in government buildings and public schools (thereby overturning a newly passed Charlotte anti-discrimination ordinance) has lost, or might just barely squeak through after a recount.

Just two examples, but I think it’s indicative of the national mood. Sexuality and religion culture-war instigators were not in favor this year, whether on the pro- or anti-LGBT side. And that’s a welcome development.

A fundraising email from Log Cabin Republicans’ President Gregory T. Angelo makes some salient points. Excerpt:

For the past three weeks, I’ve been in regular communication with the Trump Transition Team, the group tasked with organizing personnel and policy for our president-elect.

While Log Cabin Republicans was working to have a relationship with our nation’s incoming chief executive, the LGBT Left was busy demonizing Donald Trump and fundraising off of bogeymen. …

After working for decades against Republicans rather than with them and putting all their faith into the failed candidacy of Hillary Clinton, purportedly “non-partisan” LGBT advocacy groups now face GOP majorities in the House and Senate, and a Republican in the White House….

Collectively, LGBT advocacy organizations on the Left have staff in the hundreds. Budgets in the millions. And yet, they don’t have a single point of contact in the incoming Trump administration. …

While LGBT liberals were breathlessly lamenting this fact to the New York Times, Log Cabin Republicans was quietly working behind-the-scenes to ensure the advances in LGBT freedom we have made thus far remain secure and continue in a Trump administration. No one else is doing this.

If interested in donating, here’s a link.

The New York Times article referenced above reports:

The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency sent panic through much of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, which for the first time in eight years will face an administration hostile to its civil rights goals and a president-elect who has expressed a desire to reverse many of its political gains.

Jay Brown, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights organization, said its office had received calls throughout the day on Wednesday from frightened people who wanted to know what the election results might mean for them.

And yet:

Mr. Trump has no reputation for personal animosity toward gay people, and the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay and lesbian political organization, congratulated him on his victory. He employed gay people in the Trump Organization, spent most of his life in socially liberal New York City, and surprised some Republicans this year when he said transgender people should “use the bathroom they feel is appropriate,” a view held by few others in the party.

But many L.G.B.T. leaders said they were unmoved by accounts of Mr. Trump’s personal tolerance.

Of course they were.

More. Given that the big LGBT political lobbies, which officially say they’re nonpartisan but operate as Democratic party auxiliaries, are now sending out their own fundraising appeals around their opposition to all things Trump and Republican, it’s worth repeating this observation from a recent post:

For more than two decades the Human Rights Campaign has failed to pass its signature legislative goal, which for most of that time was the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and is now the Equality Act. This includes periods with both a Democratic president and Democratic congress (under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama), and periods with a Republican congress but enough GOP support to push ENDA through. What happened? Every time the measure was poised to pass, activist groups would insert some new provision that would lose majority support (adding transgender protections most prominently, and now the expansion to include public accommodations). Or, as with ENDA under Harry Reid’s Senate and Nancy Pelosi’s House, the Democrats would strangely fail to move the bill out of committee, with nary a protest from HRC—until Republicans were back in charge.

All else aside, I think there’s much to be said about how the liberal-left has alienated itself from middle/working class, non-urban mid-America. In this Vox piece by Emmett Rensin, The smug style in American liberalism, I couldn’t agree more with this bit:

“Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style. It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid. The smug liberal found relief in ridiculing them.”

As I wrote in a Sept. 10 post on Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” speech at an LGBT fundraiser with Barbara Streisand:

Trump supporters, to a large extent, see failed Democratic policies on the economic and international fronts, and while many believe Trump to be flawed, they view him as a better choice than Hillary when it comes to reviving economic growth and defending American interests. But progressive Democrats can only see the world through a self-justifying lens of rote identity politics, so if you don’t believe in bigger, more intrusive government chipping away at economic prosperity and expressive freedom, you’re a bigot.

And as I noted in a follow-up post, “In the end, however, Hillary’s LGBT smugfest with Barbra may turn out to be one hell of a costly fundraiser.” I think clearly it was.

Related. Robby Saove at reason.com has some pertinent insights:
Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash:

I have warned that political correctness actually is a problem on college campuses, where the far-left has gained institutional power and used it to punish people for saying or thinking the wrong thing. And ever since Donald Trump became a serious threat to win the GOP presidential primaries, I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok—so furious that they would give power to any man who stood in opposition to it.

And post-election observations from “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance on Life Outside the Liberal Bubble. He writes, “To suggest that Trump voters are worried about anything real is to invite scorn from certain corners of the mainstream media.”

Furthermore. Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Finally, the more Clinton Inc. talked about the Latino vote, the black vote, the gay vote, the woman vote, the more Americans tired of the same old identity politics pandering. What if minority bloc voters who had turned out for Obama might not be as sympathetic to a middle-aged, multimillionaire white woman? And what if the working white classes might flock to the politically incorrect populist Trump in a way that they would not to a leftist elitist like Hillary Clinton? In other words, the more Clinton played the identity politics card, the more she earned fewer returns for herself and more voters for Trump.

And Joan C. Williams writes in the Harvard Business Review:

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables.

Stein’s Law holds that “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” We don’t know what the era of Trump will mean but the status quo was stifling for too many Americans and it will no longer go on.

It’s easier to discuss what a Clinton victory could have meant: four more years of lagging economic growth, bad regulatory policy, union-dominated public education, a misguided and interventionist foreign policy. And, with Clinton, four years of abject political corruption because that is who she and her husband are and always have been.

With Trump, we’re already seeing a market meltdown [well, that didn’t last very long; back up by Wednesday afternoon!]. Trade will suffer, and that will be bad. But the hope is that saner regulatory and tax policy will again unleash America’s entrepreneurial spirit.

For the record, I voted for Gary Johnson despite some policy disagreements and with regret that his running mate went renegade. It was a message that both parties had nominated unacceptable choices. Nevertheless, I think Clinton would have been at least as bad or worse for the country than Trump, although she’d be better on LGBT issues. But by “better,” I also mean more likely to stoke the culture wars by using the regulatory state to force small business owners to provide expressive services to same-sex weddings in violation of their religious convictions, which is something I adamantly oppose and believe will eventually be viewed as a stain on the gay rights movement.

As for judges, Clinton’s left-liberal big-government advocates would have been worse for the country than Trump’s conservatives—and the idea that Trump’s justices would overturn marriage equality was far-fetched at best. He is not, and never has been, a social conservative and while his initial Supreme Court appointment will probably be in the Scalia mode (because the late justice’s textualist perspective deserves to be represented in court deliberations), there were also names on Trump’s prospective list of future judicial appointments that lean libertarian.

Of course, there’s the larger issue: The white lower-middle and working classes have been through the wringer not only economically but as the object of left-progressive contempt, whether they were denigrated for clinging to their guns and religion, or dismissed as despicable and irredeemable for rejecting the tenets of big government progressivism and the rule of the bureaucrat kings. If your party keeps kicking half of the population in the shins, eventually that half is going to take control. That’s now happened.

More. The LGBT and liberal mainstream media did a good job of promoting the “Trump is anti-gay” meme. NBC’s exit polling shows that Trump got 14% of self-identified LGBT votes, down from Romney’s 22 percent in 2012—and Romney supported amending the U.S. Constitution to block marriage equality (which Trump, by the way, does not).

As NBC (now) reports, “Clinton’s strong support among LGBT people comes in spite of Trump’s direct attempt to court the group this year with targeted appeals in speeches and even campaign merchandise, an unprecedented move for a GOP presidential candidate.” But those efforts went mostly unreported by the LGBT and mainstream media while the campaign was underway.

As I’ve noted before, I am not a Donald Trump supporter, finding him unfit by dint of his positions on immigration, trade and civil liberties, as well as due to his hair-trigger personality. I am also not a Hillary Clinton supporter, given her long history of corruption and dishonesty, and her awful positions on taxes, spending and regulation. [Not to mention her rolling foreign policy disasters as Sec’y of State.]

That said, if there’s one thing good about Trump, it’s that as the GOP presidential nominee he has reached out to, as he puts it, “LGBTQ” Americans. In response, the LGBT political activists who are basically an auxiliary of the Democrat party, and LGBT media of which the same is true, have promoted the lie that Trump is anti-gay.

I think it’s a good thing for gay people who find Trump’s politics and personality acceptable to be supporting him. The Washington Post reports that:

If the only gay voices you hear are Trump foes and Clinton boosters…you could easily assume that all LGBT voters are in the Democratic presidential nominee’s camp. Well, think again. A Gallup poll released Wednesday reports that 12 percent of LGBT adults view Republican nominee Donald Trump favorably. Granted, that’s compared with the 55 percent who have a positive view of Clinton, but it’s still a surprising number. Even more eyebrow-raising, the poll found that fully 21 percent of older (55+) LGBT people gave Trump a favorable rating.

That’s a 12% favorable rating; the actual gay vote for Trump is likely to be much larger.

[Update: According to Reuters polling: while in March Trump had just 13.5% support from LGBT voters, in May LGBT support rose to 18.3%. Trump’s numbers took a slight dip in June before rising to 23% in late July. However, a New York Times exit poll put LGBT votes for Trump on election day at 14%.]

The newsite buzzfeed joins the fray with a post that’s dismissively headlined Donald Trump’s Top “LGBT” Supporters Are Largely Gay White Men. The story notes that:

On Sunday night in Greeley, Colorado, Donald Trump spotted something he wanted in the crowd. He gestured to a supporter, who handed a wad of rainbow fabric up to the stage. Trump unfurled it for the fans and cameras — a pride flag scrawled with the words “LGBTs for Trump.” He strutted stage left, grinning and nodding to the audience with a literal sign of his diverse support.

Despite buzzfeed’s snark, it’s a startling photo of the likes we’ve never seen from a GOP presidential nominee, and shows why Trump’s gay support isn’t crazy.

More. Commenters have pointed to Chad Felix Greene’s deeply thoughtful essay at HuffPost, I’m Gay, But I’m Not ‘LGBT.’ Here’s Why. It’s long but well worth reading. Toward the end he addresses what has now become the Trump flag controversy:

#GaysforTrump supporters handed Donald Trump a rainbow flag they had written a supportive slogan on at an event which he held up for the cameras. The act was completely mundane in that Trump has never been hostile towards gays and he tends to be enthusiastic about all of his supporters, often showing open public support for them. Trump holding the flag was simple, it wasn’t staged, and it wasn’t a planned photo-op at a gay event to pander. It also wasn’t done with political biting-of-the-tongue because he had to. Trump was handed the flag by supporters and he did what he always does, he held it up and smiled.

Zack Ford, the LGBT editor for ThinkProgress.org, tweeted that “Putting a slogan on a flag is considered desecration. Also, the flag was upside down (red goes on top). What am I supposed to respect here?”

To which Greene responded:

The LGBT media instantly pounced on the idea that the flag was ‘upside down’ and Ford ranted endlessly, clutching multiple strands of pearls at once, about ‘desecration’ of what is now, apparently, a sacred flag. This is cult-like behavior. Its tribalism. The flag is usually presented with the red stripe at the top but there has never been a question of a correct side. The notion it is being held ‘upside down’, especially with the implication given to say an upside down cross, is nonsense. Gay people wrote on the flag, it wasn’t desecrated. I find the sudden treatment of this symbol as holy disturbing.

Indeed. Some might even say it’s crazy.

Furthermore. Trump’s holding up of the gay flag happened last Sunday. Not a word about it in the following Friday’s weekly Washington Blade, the strongly pro-Clinton LGBT paper in the nation’s capital.

The city’s conservative paper, the Washington Times, ran a supportive op-ed titled “Donald Trump holds high the flag for gay equality,” which indicates that conservatives may be more comfortable with a gay-inclusive GOP than the LGBT establishment is.

Update: In mid-December, Out magazine was still complaining that “It’s telling that when Donald Trump awkwardly waved a rainbow flag during a Colorado rally in October, the banner was upside down.”