Thursday, March 28, 2024

Five Reasons Why Social Conservatives Lose

Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Ellen DeGeneres is very unhappy.

New York’s Andrew Cuomo, and the governors of four other states, are banning official travel to Mississippi.

Charles Barkley is asking the NBA to take the All-Star Game away from North Carolina. PayPal is cancelling plans to expand there. And more than 100 corporations are attacking North Carolina over a bill protecting women from having to share bathrooms with transgender biological males.

Meanwhile the president’s administration has unilaterally redefined the gender-discrimination provisions of Title IX so that its rules forbidding gender discrimination now forbid “LGBT discrimination.” Meaning: Your daughter must shower with transgender biological males or else her school district will lose all federal funding.

All this is in response to fairly minor efforts to prevent courts and administrative agencies from taking away the rights of gay-marriage dissenters — or, in the case of North Carolina, protecting the privacy rights of women — and just a few short months after Houston’s liberal Democratic voters told elites just how unpopular such a measure was at the ballot box.

What does this show us?

This is not about having the best arguments: There is no good argument for forcing little girls to undress in front of strangers with penises. The Human Rights Campaign only has to call it vile or “hateful” or anti-gay and it’s enough to unleash an explosion — and enough to get many GOP governors like Georgia’s Nathan Deal to fold.

It doesn’t matter if those accusations are true or not. As social conservatives, our problem is not that we lack arguments. Yes, the best scientific evidence suggest transgenderism is a real phenomenon, a form of mental misattribution not unlike others (which is why for some men it seems as natural to decide it feels better to identify as a dragon woman), but that doesn’t mean we should allow biological males to use the women’s locker room. We know ordinary people do not support this stuff. That is not our problem.

Our problem is a problem of power: Where does it come from and can we get some?

Let us face up to exactly where we are today: Call it “Maggie’s Five Big Truths about Why Social Conservatives Lose.”

Maggie’s first Big Truth:

1) The Left controls the narrative, and they do not care about truth or fairness to dissenters — only “social justice.”

[…]

Read the full article at National Review.

Maggie Gallagher is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project and can be followed on Twitter @MaggieGallaghe.

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