Politics & Public Opinion

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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Transinsanity and the GOP Victory

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The progressive left’s embrace of promoting the transing of gender-nonconforming kids and letting boys who “identify” as female compete against girls in high school and college sports was one of the reasons sane people chose to vote for Trump, despite everything. Sadly, a rationale approach to treating transgender adults is lost in the extremism targeting (often gay) kids for transitioning, or letting gender-dysphoric boys or often-fetishicistic men (who “identify” as female but are physically male) use women’s locker rooms and showers.

When progressives are challenged, their response is typically to end the debate by lobbing the accusation of “transphobe” or “fascist.” The “slur” in the clip below that caused the progressive to throw a tantrum was referring to male minors who identify as female (or, who have been indoctrinated into getting on the trans train because they are gender-nonconforming) as “boys.”


And this:

Rich Lowry writes: >>The problem is that progressives consider whatever new boutique obsession they’ve come up with at…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Sunday, November 10, 2024


Plus this, from liberal Sam Harris, who endorsed Kamala:

Sam Harris writes: >>I want to be very clear about this: I have no doubt that there are real cases of gender dysphoria,…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Tuesday, November 12, 2024


And from another sane liberal:

Nick Tyrone writes: >>If you’re a grown-up, have had an adequate amount of therapy to rule out other possibilities and…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Wednesday, November 13, 2024

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Democrats No Longer Good for Gays

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Ben Appel explains in Why I’m Not Voting why he can’t vote for a political party whose policies put gender-nonconforming gay kids at risk:

The progressive position, embraced by Democrats, used to be that there was no “right way” to be a boy or a girl. That boys can like dolls and girls can play football. Not so today. Today, so-called progressives tell young boys that if they like pink, mermaids, and long, flowing dresses, they might be girls “on the inside,” and they tell young girls that if they prefer short hair and hate makeup, they might really be boys.
What we have known for years, decades, maybe centuries, is that most gender-nonconforming children—that is, butch girls or girly boys, like the sissy little boy I once was—will grow up to be gay. And yet the Democratic Party advocates for medical treatments that block the natural development of these young people. Medical treatments that leave them sterile and often sexually nonfunctional. Medical treatments that began as nothing more than an attempt to turn homosexual young people into straight adults.
Talk about conversion therapy!
This is not progressive. This is regressive, illiberal, and antigay.
And, like Donald Trump’s election denial, it is inexcusable.

Note: When I tried to post this on the IGF CultureWatch Facebook page, Facebook’s censors removed it as “inappropriate.” It’s true, Facebook is censoring posts that its progressive gate-keepers see as critical of Democrats on the eve of the election!

More from Ben, post-election:

Ben Appel’s election reflections, which hopefully Facebook’s moderators won’t remove (as they did my attempts to post…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Friday, November 8, 2024


And this:

Here's hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court next year will allow U.S. states to do the same.

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Friday, November 8, 2024

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The Side that’s Authoritarian Is Pretty Clear

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It’s well past time for LGBTQ+ activists to stop the lawfare against Jack Phillips, owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Co., and trade their authoritarian (you will do what we say, deplorable) attitude for a more just and libertarian one (you have your beliefs, we have ours, and that’s fine).
From the Wall Street Journal editorial, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted with particular animus toward Phillips’ faith when ordering him to create a custom same-sex wedding cake:

[A]n attorney had called Mr. Phillips to request another custom cake, this one celebrating a gender transition. He also requested a second cake depicting Satan smoking marijuana. Mr. Phillips declined again on religious free-exercise grounds. The attorney then sued. This is the lawsuit the Colorado Supreme Court dismissed this week….

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