DeVos–and Due Process–vs. the ACLU

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More. As Camille Paglia notes: “The headlong rush to judgment by so many well-educated, middle-class women in the #MeToo movement has been startling and dismaying. Their elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote.”

Furthermore.

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Hate Is Not a Virtue Because You’re a Progressive

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I hope that sharing power in a divided government will make Democrats less likely to continue inciting mob hatred of anyone who dares commit the heresy of disagreeing publicly with progressive and identitarian dogmas. But I’m not hopeful.

Via Tucker Carlson:

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The LGBT Vote

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This seems like it’s in keeping with most recent elections. What’s always surprising is that if you read the LGBT media, or even just mainstream media, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking gay people were 99.9% big-government liberal-left progressives.

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Both Sides Lost

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Megan McArdle writes:

If the left had been a little less visibly eager to condemn Kavanaugh before the trial — and if images of enraged protesters beating on the doors of the Supreme Court had not dominated our televisions —Democrats might have managed to knock the Republican Senate majority down, or perhaps even to shift it to a narrow blue wedge blocking Trump’s nominees. Instead, the Republican [Senate] majority has grown. It will be functionally impossible to remove Trump from office and even more difficult than it already was to stop a steady flow of conservatives into the vacancies on the courts.

I saw few people, however, entertaining such unpleasant thoughts on election night. Partisans seemed focused on the bright side: Democrats happily anticipating their House investigations, Republicans savoring their future judicial appointments. But eventually, these joys are likely to pall in the sight of the opposition’s ongoing victories, and partisans’ attentions will turn to what might have been, if they’d been a little more focused on practical politics and a little less focused on instant, evanescent victories in the culture war.

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The Contradictions of LGB + T

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At some point, the fact that young gay kids are feeling pressured to identify as transgender will need to be addressed instead of ignored.

As Debra Soh writes:

“Transgender activism has successfully piggybacked onto the hard-won victories of the gay rights movement. The public understands that attitudes towards gay people were once abhorrent, and they also understand that many interventions aimed at “changing” gay people were unethical. Most empathic people have consequently been persuaded that being transgender is the same, in this regard, as being gay—that it is something that shouldn’t be questioned and is also immutable.

Yet of children who exhibit signs of gender dysphoria, we aren’t yet able to tell who will fall into the category of those who will desist (which is the majority) as opposed to the minority who persist and who would actually benefit from transitioning.”

And then there’s this. As Claire Fox writes:

“The bile that has been heaped on a single journalist for going against the trans activists’ script on the Gender Recognition Act is replicated in academia, political parties, and a whole manner of public institutions. The price for even raising the debate is to be labelled a bigot and to have one’s reputation trashed.”

Julie Bindel writes:

“On reflection, I should have known when I accepted the invitation from Goldstein that trouble would follow. One of the scheduled performers was Reece Lyons, whose poem, “I am a Woman, and I have a penis,” has been viewed 2.5-million times on YouTube. Following my ouster, Reece declared that “the concept of me and Julie Bindel even sharing the same space is, at the very least, debilitating to my mental welfare and to other LGBT members of the audience/line-up.”


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HRC’s ‘Partisan Political Propaganda’

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Brad Polumbo writes: “Apparently, holding conservative views on abortion and immigration now makes you an anti-gay bigot in the HRC’s estimation.” Actually, this is nothing new for HRC. As Polumbo notes, “The organization’s ratings are basically just partisan progressive propaganda.”

More. Originally, the (then) Human Rights Campaign Fund focused on congressional races, supporting Democrats and Republicans who favored legal equality for gays and lesbians. Now, HRC finds reasons not to endorse gay-supportive and openly gay Republicans, such as if the aren’t pro-abortion or don’t toe the line on other progressive-left issues. That would be OK if they branded themselves as what they are—the LGBTQ outreach arm of the Democratic party. Instead, they claim to represent the whole LGBTQ community, and raise funds based on that claim.

Furthermore. One of the most disingenuous HRC press releases ever: Trump-Pence Admin Reportedly Planning to Erase Non-Discrimination Protections for LGBTQ People Across Federal Agencies. What’s actually being considered: not extending the meaning of “sex” discrimination in existing federal laws and regulations to include discrimination against people for being transgender. I’d actually favor covering transgender people under “sex” discrimination” but it arguably is a stretch, and there is a strong conservative argument for not creating new law by redefining words in current law. What’s not about to happen is what HRC is scare-mongering about.

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Lambda Legal’s Travails

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From Huffington Post, which skews progressive left. That said, hard to see who is/isn’t most at fault. Downplaying support for marginalized LGBTQ communities such as the incarcerated in favor of marquee cases that gin up fundraising and name recognition seems bad. But making the agenda intersectional to embrace all marginalized communities and progressive causes seems bad for the mission, too.

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When Progressive Politics Becomes Your Religion

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Letting politics become your religion is a bad idea. The state is not God, and political power is not redemption.

And relatedly:

Sen. Ben Sasse writes:

Americans have always had political disagreements with their neighbors, but in the past, political differences could disappear when Friday night ballgames rolled around and the whole town turned out wearing the same colors and cheering for the same team. Today our towns are hollower, and we’re not on the same team anymore. …

If too many Americans feel like we’re not “in this together” right now, it’s because we’re not. We are screaming at each other, and the country no longer has enough real social texture to absorb and wick away the hatred. The only way out is to rebuild our communities and launch new ones—one person-to-person relationship and one local institution at a time.

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