Gov. Haley Infuriates Culture Warriors All-Round

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South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley delivered the GOP response to President Obama’s final State of the Union address Wednesday night. While Donald Trump and the trumpians took offense at her call for “welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of their race or religion. Just like we have for centuries,” it was her other remarks on religion that riled up social conservatives and won her few friends among LGBT progressives.

Haley said of the GOP, “We would respect differences in modern families, but we would also insist on respect for religious liberty as a cornerstone of our democracy.”

For many of a libertarian-leaning disposition, and among a wide swath of political moderates, those remarks seem like common sense. But the response from other quarters was blistering. “Even the terminology ‘modern families’ evokes the ABC sitcom featuring a homosexual couple raising a child,” huffed Lifesite.com, while religious far right radio host Bryan Fischer ripped Haley for embracing “sodomy-based marriage and the entire homosexual agenda,” Right-Wing Watch relates.

But LGBT progressives aren’t likely to be won over. Right-Wing Watch, for instance, has complained that “framing opposition to LGBT equality, abortion and contraception as religious liberty issues is a core strategy of right-wing culture.”

Gay Republicans welcomed Haley’s remarks. “I was far more impressed by Gov. Nikki Haley and her call to ‘respect differences in modern families’ while at the same time balancing that respect with a concern for religious liberty—a position Log Cabin Republicans has long advocated,” said national Log Cabin Republicans President Gregory Angelo, quoted by PrideSource.com. “It was refreshing to see a Republican explicitly acknowledge that on a major national stage,” he added.

It’s not easy to defend religious liberty for private individuals, however, when religious conservatives insist on making the issue about government civil servants. As was widely reported, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis attended the State of the Union address as a guest of Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan. Davis spent a few nights behind bars for refusing to let anyone in the Rowan County clerk’s office issues marriage licenses to same-sex couples, citing her Christian beliefs.

As I’ve noted before, government officials are responsible for following the law of the land, even when doing so is at odds with their own religious beliefs. They are public servants, not private, self-employed service providers.

The religious right remains committed to government discrimination against gay people in general, and married same-sex couples in particular. The progressive left remains committed to using government to force independent business owners with faith-based objections to provide services to same-sex weddings, as no religious dissent against government coercion of the citizenry is tolerable. Authoritarians of left and right feed off each other in a symbiotic relationship that keeps the culture war roiling.

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Trans Kids or Gay Kids?

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A fault line should be developing between those who advocate defining pre-pubescent children with gender dysphoric behavior as transgender and starting them down the road to transitioning (including hormones to block puberty), and those who believe it’s way too early to make that call—and that if left alone, many of these kids will grow up to be healthy gay or lesbian adults.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (firewalled; try googling The Transgender Battle Line: Childhood), Debra W. Soh writes:

How best to deal with [children who identify with the opposite sex] has become so politicized that sexologists, who presumably would be able to determinine the helathiest approach, are extremely reluctant to get involved. They have seen what happens when they deviate from orthodoxy.

She gives as an example the experience of Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist in Toronto who was charged with practicing conversion therapy, which aims to change a patients’ sexual orientation. Writes Soh:

But he had not been trying to dissuade anyone from being transgender. Instead his therapy facilitated exploration of gender identity. For example, in addition to thinking about transitioning, gender-atypical males could consider being boys who simply liked female-typical things. One doesn’t necessarily need to be a girl to enjoy nail polish or bedtime stories about fairy princesses.

Pointing that out to a gender-dysphoric child isn’t the same as practicing conversion therapy…. Of the boys and girls seen in clinics like Dr. Zucker’s, a high percentage—up to 80% in a study of 44 gender-dysphoric boys—grow up to be not transgender, but bisexual, gay or lesbian adults. Thus, helping prepubescent children feel comfortable in their birth sex makes more sense than starting a lifetime of hormonal treatments and surgeries that will in all likelihood turn out to be unnecessary and unwanted.

Soh concludes:

The silencing of those who oppose this sends the message to parents that early transitioning is the only valid and ethical approach for a gender-dysphoric child. This message—pushing children to transition at increasingly younger ages so that they will fit neatly into one of two gender categories—is false and unscientific. It is more progressive to offer them the time and the space they need to figure out who they are and what is ultimately best for them.

Similar points are made in a recent New York Magazine article by Jesse Singal, Why Some of the Worst Attacks on Social Science Have Come From Liberals.

Allowing effeminate boys and masculine girls to develop and decide (after puberty kicks in) whether they are, in fact, transgender or gay/lesbian is the least we owe these children.

More. Tweet by Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger): “I’m getting a lot of mail from gay and lesbian adults who say they believe they would have been pressured to transition gender if then=now.”

Furthermore. In a critical letter to the editor, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, an affiliate of the nation’s largest LGBT lobby, predictably dismisses Dr. Zucker’s efforts and Ms. Soh’s commentary:

By relying on “data” produced by Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist whose gender-identity clinic closed last year after an external review found it “out of step with current operational practices,” Ms. Soh thoroughly undermines her own nonscientific musings.

Note the scare quotes around “data,” and the fact that being “out of step with current operational practices” means that attempts to explore whether or not children with gender dysphoria are actually transgender is now out of bounds (and, in some places, illegal).

HRC continues:

What’s really happening here is that doctors and parents are finally supporting our [transgender] lives, even the youngest among us. To do otherwise dangerously denies transgender children their very humanity—and their safety and well-being.

The real threat to “safety and well-being” seems to be directed at gay kids at risk for being put on a premature and unnecessary path to sexual reassignment. As another letter puts it, a child’s gender identity is “a difficult and complex issue that needs serious attention and should not be decided on the merits of gender-identity politics.”

And finally. From the New York Times Magazine, How the Fight Over Transgender Kids Got a Leading Sex Researcher Fired.

Dr. Zucker encouraged effeminate boys and butch girls to be content with their gender. For that, he was fired. The progressive line is now is that you can’t be an effeminate male or butch woman (and if so, you must gender transition). Once again, the progressives show just how reactionary and authoritarian they truly are.

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The New Year and Beyond

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2015 was the year of marriage equality, a goal that brought together gays and lesbians from across the political spectrum. 2016 and beyond is likely to see a continuing divergence among collectivist progressives, live-and-let live moderates, and individual-rights libertarians.

In the presidential election, the GOP looks unlikely to nominate one of the candidates who can bring the party into the 21st century on LGBT issues. Whether limited-government gay voters pull the lever for Hillary, sit the election out, vote Libertarian, or go with the Republican nominee will depend on how bad the GOP candidate is on social issues, and how bad Hillary is on economic/government overreach and over-regulation. The result (most likely a Clinton presidency) isn’t likely to be good for the country.

The institutional LGBT advocacy establishment will push for The Equality Act, which will go nowhere. The act would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and expand that act’s definition of public accommodations to cover “any establishment that provides a good, service, or program” including “an individual…who is a provider of a good, service, or program.” Take, that, wedding planners, caterers and photographers!

Religious exceptions under The Equality Act would be limited to houses of worship, and perhaps only to ministerial positions, and the measure explicitly sidelines attempts to claim religious liberty rights by legislating that “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.”

The Equity Act demonstrates that LGBT activists are no longer interested in any kind of a reasonable workplace anti-discrimination bill that might obtain the support of moderate conservatives and libertarians.

Transgender issues will continue to dominate LGBT discourse. There will be greater acceptance of transgender people as part of a diverse society, but if compromise is rejected over the issue of public restrooms and, especially, gender-discordant nudity in locker rooms, expect to see more backlash. Progressives will be mystified by this.

Political correctness, with all its authoritarian-left overtones, will continue to be the dogma coming out of the progressive universities and the liberal media establishment, and it will persist in producing push-back among many Americans who value freedom of speech and freedom of religion, including the right of citizens not be to compelled by the state to engage in expressive activity that violates religious belief. Progressives will continue to be contemptuous of such intransigence.

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Agenda: Maintain the Ideological Divide

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Wall Street Journal political columnist Gerald Seib takes note of the growing ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans, citing a WSJ/NBC News poll conducted Dec. 6-9. Tellingly, among the findings:

  • Asked if they were a supporter of the traditional definition of marriage as being between one man and one women, 69% of Republicans said yes versus 25% of Democrats.
  • Asked if they were a supporter of the gay-rights movement, 63% of Democrats said yes versus 14% of Republicans.

One conclusion might be that gay people and their friends should only support Democrats, a view held by many leading national and regional LGBT advocacy groups. A more strategic take-away would be that winning over Republicans should be the key aim of those self-same groups.

In post-marriage-equality America, it seemed at first as if culture war divisions might give way to a new consensus, with conservatives seeing married gay people as a positive—akin to what’s happened in the U.K., where Prime Minister David Cameron has said, “Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us. Society is stronger when we make vows to each other and we support each other. I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a conservative.”

But in the U.S., polarization on gay issues is hardly abating, as the WSJ poll shows. And here, a major factor, I believe, has been the well-publicized efforts by LGBT social justice warriors to prosecute small business owners with conservative religious beliefs (including wedding planners, photographers, florists and bakers/caterers) under anti-discrimination laws, using the power of the state to put them out of business if they refuse to provide their services to same-sex marriages.

Conservatives place a high value on religious liberty, which today’s secular progressives frequently dismiss as if it were of no consequence. So a cynic might suggest that perpetuating polarization through such prosecutions—instead of tolerating a minor amount of religious dissent—while not in the best interest of ensuring wider acceptance of LGBT equality, could be in the best interest of professional advocates whose continued existence and full coffers are predicated on keeping the culture wars burning.

Social conservative politicos and activists are fanning the flames, but it’s intolerant progressives who keep striking the match.

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The Kentucky ‘Compromise’

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Via the conservative-leaning PJ Media news site:

Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, said Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin gave Kim Davis and all the other county clerks in the state a “wonderful Christmas gift” by protecting their religious rights and freedom.

Bevin issued an executive order two weeks after taking office that removes the names of all county clerks from marriage licenses issued in Kentucky. Staver said that will enable Davis and all other county clerks to do their jobs — issue marriage licenses to everyone, including same-sex couples — without compromising their religious principles.

Over at Instapundit (also part of PJ Media), the comments ranged from:

“Do we have a secular or sectarian society. While I respect Ms. Davis beliefs, rewriting law just for her was not the right [thing] to do.”

To:

“It wasn’t just for her, it was for everyone like her, and a very reasonable way to accommodate the rights of all parties.”

Another commenter said, “Removing the clerk’s name from the license is a very hollow victory,” and I tend to agree with the observation, although the commenter may have been lamenting that marriage licenses are being issued to same-sex couples at all.

Government officials are responsible for following the law of the land, even when doing so is at odds with their own religious beliefs. They are public servants, not private, self-employed service providers.

But it’s for the good if a small, symbolic action can defuse a contentious “culture war” face off and serve civility without diminishing individual rights, and I tend to see that happening here.

More. Scott Shackford, at reason.com’s Hit & Run blog, notes there have been other recent compromises:

The conflict with Davis was the most visible representation of resistance, but it’s not the only one. … In North Carolina, lawmakers passed legislation allowing county employees to opt out of duties performing marriages or issuing licenses if they have religious objections. But the county is also obligated to make sure magistrates or clerks are available to pick up the slack and that the county keeps regular hours.

In Alabama, state law gives county probate judges complete discretion as to whether to issue [any] marriage licenses at all. In response to the Obergefell decision, some judges have opted out entirely.

These responses, too, seem like reasonable ways to move beyond culture war confrontations without denying gay couples the right to wed.

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Unintended Consequences Undermine Gay Rights in Africa

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U.S. Support of Gay Rights in Africa May Have Done More Harm Than Good, and that’s the New York Times’ summation.

The paper reports:

After an anti-gay law went into effect last year, many gay Nigerians say they have been subjected to new levels of harassment, even violence. They blame the law, the authorities and broad social intolerance for their troubles. But they also blame an unwavering supporter whose commitment to their cause has been unquestioned and overt across Africa: the United States government.

The U.S. support is making matters worse,” said Mike, 24, a university student studying biology in Minna, a town in central Nigeria who asked that his full name not be used for safety reasons. “There’s more resistance now. It’s triggered people’s defense mechanism.”

And there’s this:

Since 2012, the American government has put more than $700 million into supporting gay rights groups and causes globally. More than half of that money has focused on sub-Saharan Africa. … But tying developmental assistance to gay rights has fueled anger across the continent.

Anti-gay American evangelicals have blood on their hands here, but resistance to liberal America’s attempt to impose its values also is a significant factor.

Good intentions expressed through heavy handed actions by a foreign government can and will backfire. A better strategy would be quiet support by privately funded NGOs backing locally controlled LGBT efforts, rather than the U.S. government throwing money around and issuing ultimatums, even if that’s what U.S. LGBT lobbies want to see.

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Let’s Celebrate the End of DP Benefits

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Some LGBT advocates can’t recognize a sign of victory, or feel it’s not in their organizational interest to do so.

As the Washington Blade reports in Future of domestic partner benefits uncertain, “the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic ruling in June legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states…has prompted more private sector employers as well as public employers…to drop domestic partner benefits for their employees.”

Remarked Camilla Taylor, an attorney with Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, “that’s unfortunate because we believe people should not have to get a legal marriage in order to be respected as a family.”

But this isn’t about “respect”; it’s about reasonably limiting employer-provided benefits to spousal relationships with a commitment to permanency, as demonstrated by becoming a legal family unit with mutual obligations and responsibilities toward each other.

Moreover, the Blade reports:

Lambda Legal and several other national LGBT rights organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, have issued statements calling on employers to retain domestic partner benefits for unmarried employees.

Some LGBT rights advocates have said forcing employees in a same-sex relationship to marry as a condition for receiving partner benefits such as health insurance coverage could subject them to discrimination in states where anti-LGBT discrimination remains legal.

News flash: If you’ve signed up with the HR department to receive same-sex domestic partner benefits, your employer already knows you’re gay.

While the activists want to paint the ending of DP benefits as a retrenchment, it’s just the opposite. And the employers ending these stop-gap programs haven’t suddenly turned anti-gay. As the Blade noted, according to corporate benefits attorney Todd Solomon, “the companies he knows that have dropped domestic partner benefits have a record of being LGBT supportive due, in part, to their earlier decisions to promote those benefits to same-sex couples that were barred by law from marrying.”

Which, of course, makes sense.

In a companion story, State Dept. considers phasing out DP benefits, the Blade reports that a gay entry-level Foreign Service officer said:

the State Department’s domestic partner program “was the thing that really made” him “feel welcomed” in the agency.

“While it’s great that we can get married much more easily now, my partner and I are not looking forward to being forced into a shotgun marriage due to a policy change that takes away the benefits we were promised.”

Sorry, but absent a contract, benefits are subject to change. And an employer doesn’t owe your boyfriend or girlfriend subsidized health care.

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The LGBT Movement Today

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I watched some of the live stream from Unfinished Business: The Atlantic LGBT Summit held in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 11. A friend commented, “the identity politics—trans, bi, LGBT youth of color, why isn’t disability being discussed?—was too much for me.”

For me, as well.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s reporting at reason.com strikes the right notes about what she terms “an event filled with both thought-provoking speakers and brain-numbing PC platitudes.” For instance, on the panel discussion on legal barriers to transgender equality, she sums up:

Welcome to the minefield that is discussing LGBTIQ* issues circa 2015. By the time panelists had sorted out who was micro- or macro-agressing against whom, there was little time left for the planned topic of the panel, trans civil rights. (Unless the right to be on an Atlantic panel is at the forefront of the trans agenda.)

* Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and questioning

On the issue of whether the LGBT movement should allow tolerance for religious dissent, Brown writes:

Those who stuck out most during the day’s sessions were figures like David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, and writer and pundit Andrew Sullivan. Boaz and Sullivan are both gay and have long histories of gay-rights activism. But their belief in religious freedom set them apart from most of the crowd and speakers gathered yesterday. One of the biggest cheers of the day, in fact, came after an audience member accused Boaz of being “on the wrong side of history.”

As I’ve said and others have noted, progressive activists believe that nondiscrimination supersedes all other constitutional liberties (here’s an example in a different context, regarding Title IX and freedom of speech). The summit showed the strident opposition to the suggestion that there is a liberty right not to be forced to provide services to same-sex weddings when doing so violates religious belief, or even a positive value is showing tolerance for religious dissent by a small number of service providers.

Brown notes that “the historic alliance between libertarians and the LGBT community when it comes to political activism” is pretty much over, as “the area of common ground seems to be shrinking.” Hard to argue with that.

More. A positive development on the LGBT front! As the New York Times reports:

In a surprise announcement, the Empire State Pride Agenda, a leading state group that advocates gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues in New York, will disband next year, citing the fulfillment of a 25-year campaign for equality.

Having secured marriage equality in New York before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling, and with broad nondiscrimination measures in place that include transgender men and women, it was mission accomplished. But, as the Times also notes:

State Senator Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat, seemed shocked by the news. “There’s a lot more work to be done on L.G.B.T. rights in New York, so declaring ‘Mission Accomplished’ seems premature,” he said, noting that his legislative chamber had not passed a “single piece of L.G.B.T. legislation” since 2011. “I hope a new political group picks up the mantle,” he added.

The gay equality agenda may be met, but hey, there’s lots of progressive policies to coral LGBT support behind, not to mention embedding LGBT lobbies into the identity politics spoils system!

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GOP Trumped

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I fervently hope Donald Trump isn’t the GOP nominee, but it says a great deal about the state of the union that he so far seems unstoppable. Given the Democratic alternative, it’s a depressing campaign season indeed.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Aaron Zitner and Dante Chinni, in Donald Trump Forges New Blue-Collar Coalition Among Republicans (subscriber firewalled), shed some light on the predicament:

Mr. Trump’s appeal is a form of secular populism rarely seen in Republican primary races, and one he is pressing in part with appearances in working-class communities in Iowa that include independent voters and even Democrats who may be lured into the caucuses. …

Past nominating contests have often boiled down to two-person races in which an establishment-backed front-runner beats a socially conservative candidate who appeals to working-class voters—a role Rick Santorum filled in 2012, as did Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Pat Buchanan in 1996. Now, Mr. Trump appears to be opening a new, third lane in the GOP, drawing on a large share of voters who don’t have a college degree and don’t identify strongly with the party’s touchstone social issues, such as opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage.

That raises the prospect that the 2016 contest could narrow to a three-person race featuring the leading choice of social conservatives, the top pick of the party’s establishment wing of centrists and business-friendly Republicans—and Mr. Trump.

Gay-baiting isn’t among Trump’s fascistic tendencies. He is not a social conservative. He’s not much of an economic conservative, either. He favors the crony capitalism that made him rich. He is, instead, a populist demagogue.

What Trump will mean to the future configuration of the GOP is yet to be determined.

More. Via LCR:

Log Cabin Republicans remains committed to the eradication of radical Islamic extremism and believes it poses an existential threat to our culture and members of the LGBT community in particular, but inciting the politics of fear will not achieve those ends.

Plus this observation:

Considering Mr. Trump’s insistence that pursuit of a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality is futile as it would never be realized, we hope he likewise comprehends that his position advocating a carte-blanche ban on Muslim immigrants is equally fanciful.

As others have pointed out, on LGBT equality issues, Cruz and Rubio (among the main contenders) are far worse.

Meanwhile, how Hillary Clinton is bringing the nation together, as usual. Like Obama, her ire is most provoked by the one true enemy, Republicans.

OK, there is some justification if she were addressing Cruz, Carson and Huckabee, but no, not Bush, Kasich, Paul, Christie or (on Muslims) Rubio. Her partisan hyperbole is red meat for the base, and not what the country needs.

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A Better Response to Attack Ads

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Houston Mayor Annise Parker commented recently on the defeat of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance. As reported by the Washington Blade:

After the defeat of the ordinance, Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin told the Blade LGBT advocates should call on TV stations not to run anti-trans ads like the kind seen in Houston, an idea Parker said she endorses. “I think there should be a certain level of social responsibility because while they were horrific ads, they were clearly fear-mongering and deliberate lies,” Parker said.

Anyone is free to organize protests and otherwise make their views known to the media. The problem is that almost all political ads are seen as “unfair”—by the other side. And often, that’s exactly what they are—remember those Democratic ads showing Republicans rolling grandma in her wheelchair over the cliff by supporting Medicare reform.

The Houston ads against the ordinance, raising the spectre of threatening “men” (instead of transgender women) using women’s restrooms, are only more so.

But if the best response advocates of anti-discrimination measures can propose is to pressure TV stations not to run opposition ads, that’s a rather stark admission that they can’t mount an effective counter-argument and organize effectively to get their message out. And that raises comparisons to the recent wave of campus protests that seek to forbid speech that progressives view as advocating incorrect views. It’s all of a piece of the new illiberal intolerance.

More. Mark Lee writes in the Washington Blade:

That whooshing sound you may have heard when reading Washington Blade reporter Chris Johnson’s interview last month with Chad Griffin was likely the air being sucked out of the room due to gasps by First Amendment adherents. The Human Rights Campaign president offered a shockingly stark strategy for avoiding future ballot defeats on nondiscrimination measures such as the recent loss in Houston.

“In politics, there’s often two sides to a debate,” Griffin acknowledged, before dissecting the degree of debate he would tolerate. “There’s also right and wrong, and there’s lies, and there’s defamation of an entire population of people. And that’s what happened in Houston. And so, I am hopeful that in the go-forward we as a community, as an organization, local campaigns can be more aggressive with station managers, quite frankly.” Griffin’s “solution” to losing seems to be roughing-up news stations running opposition ads or reporting on opponent positions, rather than winning hearts and minds. Sort of similar to something Donald Trump might say.

We are collectively losing sight of the fact that the defense of liberty and free speech only matters when protecting the right to expression of unpopular opinion.

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