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For the second time in four years, Texas legislators are returning for a summer special session mixing culture wars, political confections and just to try to get the Democrats in the House and Senate to show up a couple of issues that dont get much attention at conservative rallies and town halls, like foster care and extra retirement checks for teachers.

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But the list of legislation Gov. Greg Abbott wants lawmakers to consider puts the politics of 2022 into clearer view. Heres an early betting line on some of the issues youll see in campaign ads by some of the states top Republican candidates: tougher voting laws, bans on critical race theory, restrictions on transgender athletes in public schools, abortion drugs, and building a wall between Texas and Mexico.

Some of those topics have been on the governors list for a while. He had election integrity and changes to the states bail laws on his list of emergency items at the beginning of February. He didnt get what he wanted from the Legislature, and both of those items made the summer menu.

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And some topics that were emergencies arent on the special session list. Reorganizing electric regulations and other responses to the electric outages during the February freeze including pricing corrections, a subject dear to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick were late additions to the governors list of emergency items during the regular session. Despite calls from Patrick and Democratic officials with other priorities, no mention of the states electric grid made it onto the agenda for the summer session.

Abbotts list of special session agenda items includes his brand of censorship blocking teaching of critical race theory in public and charter schools; and his brand of anti-censorship giving legal remedies to people wrongfully excluded from a platform for their expressed viewpoints by social media companies.

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Censorship of the public kind is a hot ticket at the moment. At Patricks urging, the Bullock Texas State History Museum canceled a virtual event with two of the authors of Forget the Alamo, a recounting of the role of slavery in the states fight for independence from Mexico.

Like a lot of controversies, that cancellation seems to have benefited both the striker and the stricken. Patrick got a lot of attention, and sales of the book skyrocketed. The only real victim appears to be the state history museum that pulled itself out of a discussion about state history at the behest of elected chickens in high perches.

One spending item the Legislatures own budget is getting a lot of attention, since Abbott vetoed it in anger when Democratic House members blocked passage of a restrictive voting bill at the end of the session. Lawmakers are expected to vote their section back into the state budget.

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Getting less attention are the governors efforts in this special session to spend more money on his border security plan, which includes more law enforcement along the border, money for jailing migrants arrested for violating state laws and the governors call to revive former President Donald Trumps unsuccessful effort to build a wall along the Mexican frontier.

State officials have already lifted $250 million from the state prison system, saying theyll pay it back before its missed in the next budget, and that could be a special session project.

But that border wall plays on other lines, like the one between government and politics and the one that separates national business like foreign affairs and international borders from state business.

To keep the Democrats in the game, or to try to, Abbott included family violence prevention, enhancements to foster care and a one-time 13th check to retired teachers accustomed to getting 12 monthly checks a year. The House Democrats walked out to kill that voting bill in May denying the necessary number of legislators required to conduct business.

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Abbott has offered those issues as a carrot to the Democrats, alongside the stick of threatening to kill legislators state budgets.

He needs all of the legislators back for a month, to work on his state priorities and some of his political ones, too.

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Analysis: A special session of culture wars, politics and unfinished business - KSAT San Antonio

Since the 1970s, White American evangelicals, a large subsection of Protestants who hold to a literal reading of the Bible, have often managed to get specific privileges through their political engagement primarily through supporting the Republican Party.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan symbolically consolidated the alliance by bringing religious freedom and morality into public conversations that questioned the separation of church and state. In 2003, President George W. Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act into law. In October 2020, President Donald Trump appointed a conservative Christian, Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court, and went on to win 80% of the White Evangelical vote in the following months election.

Trump went so far as to appoint a faith consultant board composed of influential Evangelical leaders. They included Paula White, a well-known pastor and televangelist; and James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, a leading organization in Evangelical efforts to embed family values into politics. These panel members heralded gestures by Trump, such as signing the Presidential Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty, which targeted enforcement of the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 tax law requiring houses of worship to stay out of politics in order to remain tax-exempt.

Although ithas debated what specifically constitutes an Evangelical, many agree that they are conservatives who are highly motivated by culture war issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and sexuality. But even though Evangelicals are often presented as monolithic in the media, current research signals a more complex picture.

Over the past six years, I have been working with an interdisciplinary team of scholars at the American Academy of Religion to analyze generational shifts in Evangelicalism and religion more broadly in the United States. We are finding that some of the younger Evangelicals are openly questioning their religious and political traditions. In short, the majority of White Evangelicals are aging and a portion of younger Evangelicals are engaging in both religion and politics differently.

Leaving the faith versus reforming from within

My research consists of hours of participant observation within younger Evangelical faith communities, along with 50 in-depth, qualitative interviews with individuals who were raised in the politically charged evangelicalism in the southeastern United States, a region dominated by Evangelicals.

Taken together, this research indicates increasing disaffection among White millennial and Gen X Evangelicals with the cultural and political preoccupations that have strongly motivated their parents and grandparents. There is a growing number of Exvangelicals who disavow their previous stances on same-sex marriage, race and sexuality.

Evangelicals, often citing the biblical text, typically maintain that marriage is between one man and one woman. Over 75% tend to worship in racially segregated congregations and favor gun rights and ownership more than other faith groups.

But my interviewees tend toward intense critiques of their previous religious tradition, as well as rejecting the Evangelical faith completely. This data parallels other scholarship unearthing racialized structures within White American evangelicalism, like the work of sociologist Robert P. Jones and religious studies scholar Anthea Butler. Likewise, historian Kristen Kobes Du Mez examines how hypermasculinity is embedded in American evangelicalism.

Expanding religion and politics

My research reveals communities of younger Evangelicals who are expanding their religious boundaries and rethinking their stances on culture war issues, as well as questioning the merits of the culture war. These younger Evangelicals are trying to reform their communities from within the tradition as loyal but highly critical members. Sometimes these groups are called emerging Evangelicals or progressive Christians, with some debating whether Evangelical as a label is redeemable.

I observed several younger Evangelicals working within their religious communities to encourage acceptance of those outside of the Christian tradition as co-religionists on similar faith paths. They herald interfaith interactions as positive. One interviewee proudly detailed to me how her church partnered with the local imam and Muslim community to educate each other on their religious practices and volunteered together at a local food bank. This kind of attitude typically is resisted by their older Evangelical counterparts, as I learned in previous research. Many traditional Evangelicals believe that their faith is the sole path to religious redemption, and interfaith cooperation might harm their followers.

Additionally, some younger Evangelicals tend toward adopting spiritual resources outside of the Christian tradition. Whether incorporating meditation techniques or yoga, my interviewees highlighted the ways in which they are exploring their religious and spiritual beliefs.

This contrasts with older Evangelicals who perceive their tradition as providing all necessary resources for spiritual growth and reject any outside or Eastern influences. One interviewee noted that she had to change Evangelical churches after her evangelical church prohibited her from being both a church member and a local yoga instructor.

Losing interest in the culture war

Many of the younger Evangelicals in my study stated that their stances on culture war issues were significantly different from the Evangelical majority of the past 50 years, which aligns with the findings of a 2017 Pew Research Center poll. This survey found that younger generations of millennials are more liberal than older Evangelicals on numerous political issues.

My interviewees cited an acceptance and welcoming of those who identify as LGBTQ into their communities as both members and leaders. They support and ally with the objectives of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. In sum, they are actively dismantling many of the insider/outsider distinctions established by older White Evangelicals and transforming what it means to be a politically engaged Evangelical in America.

Furthermore, many of the people that I spoke with cited a culture war fatigue. Some believe that evangelicalisms multi-decade investment in campaigning for these conservative stances and alliance with the Republican Party actually harmed the Evangelical tradition instead of empowering it, while others are simply trying to opt out of the culture war and focus on their faith instead.

Interviewees also told me that often their views are creating familial conflict, since their parents and grandparents cannot understand why any Evangelical would not be committed to the older generations conservative political causes.

Political conversion

Research to date, including my own, has yet to measure how widespread these shifts of attitude and belief among young White Evangelicals may be. But there is other evidence of internal unraveling. Take a recent announcement by Beth Moore, an influential Evangelical speaker and author, that she has decided to leave the Southern Baptist Convention the largest Evangelical group in the United States and end her relationship with a prominent Evangelical publisher.

Or consider former Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president and pastor Russell Moores recent departure from the Southern Baptist Conventions leadership, amid leaked communications over the denominations handling of racial issues. These developments indicate a growing internal struggle over who can legitimately claim authority for the Evangelical tradition.

The last several decades of American politics have been dominated by culture war issues, with White Evangelicals in positions of national power. But as my research is documenting, a political transformation seems to be underway. With younger, White Evangelicals rethinking their alliances and continued participation in the culture wars, it is possible that conservative politicians may not be able to count on White Evangelical support for much longer.

This could have broader implications for the American political landscape. Without Evangelical support and influence, the issues that are often at center stage could drastically change.

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Conservative Culture Wars: Why White Generation X Evangelicals are losing faith in the Republican Party - Milwaukee Independent

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roadcast media is backing itself into a culture war for reasons which seem unavoidable and yet fail a vital test of usefulness to audiences. If I tune in to a BBC news or current affairs show, from the agendas of the Today programme through to the 10pm news, am I likely to have any view I adhere to challenged or uncomfortable information or analysis tested? Or am I simply enjoined to switch into a conversation which feels like a rinse-repeat cycle of pre-agreed emphases and omissions?

The latest flashpoint is Tyrone Mingss attack on Home Secretary Priti Patel alleging hypocrisy over her denunciation of online racism against his team-mates in the aftermath of their Euros defeat.

In a week when football took on religious intensity and broadcasters threw their weight behind reporting racially motivated attacks on people of colour in the England squad, the response is now back in the headlines. Tropes correlating Marcus Rashfords activism on free schools meals with his penalty success were crass and reprehensible. But in an eventful world, one might also ask for how many of the various news and analysis shows should they provide the main talking point? Are we asking for the platforms to intervene? If so on what terms? If not, what is the criteria for more news with more people piling on a story about what someone else said?

Not everyone agrees with my criteria even in my own kitchen. To my daughter, monitoring her Instagram and asking testing questions about what is news?, the answer is often different to mine. She thinks news is what people are talking about which is the prevalence of casual, aggressive racism on social platforms. There is some truth in this, buried or dismissed for too long. Yet I have often found that the most important stories I reported or commented on were shifts and changes in the world that people were not talking about so loudly and I wonder what happens to those subjects while we are distracted.

Having listened to a handful of TV and radio news and analysis on this, I was still not much wiser on the relative scale of stupid and hurtful comments or how it differed from the norm of nastiness. I had consumed a narrative and argument without much analytical clout. And if the licence fee model is about something distinctive from other models of journalism, this matters a lot.

Culture wars in Britain are more like gripes grinding on than all-out combat. They have hit the BBC (again) in the case of a stand-off over the proposed appointment to a senior news role of a former HuffPost UK editor who sits squarely at the Leftish end of the spectrum and also brings experience from editing a disruptive digital platform after a stint at the Beeb. Jess Brammars proposed appointment came under critical scrutiny from a new non-executive director, Sir Robbie Gibb, who is also a former insider at the Corporation. He shares the view of a senior insider who observes that the wheel on the BBC News shopping trolley automatically veers Leftwards.

Call me Solomon, but they are both right to a degree and that is the bigger lesson of these spats. It should require a very high hurdle to seek to interfere (as alleged) in editorial appointments and this is usually a bad idea. The BBC is obliged to be impartial but not to be liked by a government of the day.

At the same time, a changing executive guard might also remind itself that the Corporation is often less questioning about the strengths and weakness of international organisations than its domestic scrutiny (try the recent Today programme on why the UK had not signed up to a particular UN protocol for a prime example) and that its scoping of candidates can feel too cosy.

The publication of its own report this week shows that male viewers are increasingly likely to feel that the BBC is not for people like them. Audiences are starting to look sceptically at what they see and hear. Niche players such as (uber-male) LBC and (insistently un-BBC) GB News see the chance to carve out their own space.

Something goes missing, however, in this fog of cultural wars the attempt to distinguish between significant events and ephemera and the habit of asking testing questions about what we know and light beyond heat. News, they used to say is what someone does not want you to print.

An overhauled version might be that it should test whether noise and counter-fury are the same as news or where the difference lies. Because it is a hard question, it is the one to ask.

Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor at The Economist

What do you think about the BBCs news coverage? Let us know in the comments below.

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Were at risk of losing sight of what matters in the fog of culture wars - Evening Standard

Mr. James Mageaus June 28 letter to the editor titled Any teacher teaching CRT should be fired contains a number of errors about critical race theory and American history. CRT has nothing to do with promoting the use of gender-neutral pronouns nor does it seek to dissuade the recognizable differences in gender. Students, whether in a public school, university, or law school, are not being forced to take CRT training and made to believe that they are oppressors because they are white. The struggle for equality and civil rights for African Americans did not end when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. Despite this laws success in hastening the end of Jim Crow, the discrimination the Civil Rights Act sought to address was too deeply embedded in the fabric of American society to be eradicated as thoroughly as Mr. Mageau seems to think it was. Its true that the 14th Amendment was to be the means to guarantee certain protections to all people. However, the Southern states found devious ways to subvert the 14th Amendment and thereby deny those protections to African Americans before the ink used to sign it was dry.

Mr. Mageau also cites Dr. Swain as evidence to support his false assertion that CRT is, among other things, a Marxist organization. Since he did not present a link to a source for Dr. Swain, one must surmise he is citing her comments from an interview found in The Epoch Times. This publication is affiliated with the secretive and relatively obscure Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong that became, with the support of Donald Trump, a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation, according to the New York Times.

Misconceptions and dubious claims such as these have fueled a culture war against CRT. To ensure it was not being taught, the Nevada Family Alliance recommended that teachers be fitted with body cameras while instructing their classes. In school districts across the nation, including in South Kingstown and in Westerly, citizens have filed hundreds of harassing requests for records and materials to prove their presupposition that CRT is being taught to children. School board members who either support CRT or who are seen as not being sufficiently opposed to it have been the subject of recall petitions and demonstrations. In some states raucous crowds of people, some from out of district, have disrupted school board meetings to protest the supposed teaching of CRT. In some cases, people have become so aggressive that police have had to escort board members to their cars when they have left a meeting that included CRT on the agenda. According to an NBC News analysis, there are now at least 165 local and national groups that are trying to disrupt or block lessons on race.

This last detail is especially important, since it points to how CRT has been made into a catchall that includes anything having to do with race or racism. This was made clear by an article about Mr. Robert Chiaradio in the June 24 edition of The Westerly Sun. In this article, Mr. Chiaradio states that he was asking for textbooks and reference materials; all slides and materials from inherent bias training sessions for teachers and staff; and any correspondence from the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and three teachers, mentioning phrases such as race, bias, systemic racism, white privilege, black and brown people, Black Lives Matter, the 1619 Project or George Floyd.

The goal of this nationwide tactic was also made clear recently on the MSNBC show The Reid Out hosted by Joy Reid. On June 23, one of her guests was critical race theory opponent Christopher Rufo. Toward the end of the discussion that evening, Reid quoted Rufo as having said, We have successfully frozen their brand, critical race theory, into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory. We have decodified the term and we will recodify to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

Whether at a place of higher learning like West Point with a course on CRT, or a high school with a discussion on Black Lives Matter, or an elementary school with a project on black and brown people, what is there about studying race and its history in this country that brings up such a variety of strong negative reactions from some people?

David Madden

Westerly

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Letter: CRT obsession is a tactic in the culture wars - The Westerly Sun

Gareth Southgate, England manager and perhaps one of the most likeable men in the British Isles, is feared to be a tool of deep Woke, a Financial Times op-ed claimed on Monday. It seems a consortium of Conservative supporters believe some conspiracy is afoot, and Southgate is a mere pawn to woke-ify the nation. All of which prompts a question: has everyone lost their minds?

Woke is already a rather tricky word. To some it simply indicates an awareness of societal injustice; a term that guides us to a fairer world. To others, wokeness refers to a cultural climate in which we must follow rigid orthodoxies in thought and opinion. And any attempts to deviate from those orthodoxies may see you condemned from the altar of public opinion.

So where does Southgate fit into all of this? He has been roundly praised for his paean to progressive patriotism (an open letter titled Dear England published prior to the Euros), and for his endorsement of players taking a knee prior to kick-off in protest of racism. Of course if he really is a tool of deep Woke this cannot be a function of Southgates inherent decency, but rather it must be a part of a secretive and insidious plot (exactly what the aim of this plot might be is, as of yet, unclear).

Casually making such ludicrous assertions in respected newspapers is probably a sign that everyone needs to have a lie-down. We must have finally reached the apex of the culture wars. The discourse is saturated and no one can think straight. The term woke has lost all meaning and will soon lose all potency.

Not so fast. Though it is easy and encouraged to direct ridicule at anyone who believes Southgate to be a propagator of deep Woke (whatever it is supposed to mean), wokeness and all of its accoutrements may have a deeper hold on democracy than we assume. In fact, it may be the biggest dividing line between voters from here on in. At least thats what one veteran pollster reckons.

Step into the ring Frank Luntz, an American pundit and political language consultant who advised the Republican party over the course of nearly three decades. Luntzs repertoire includes advocating for the use of the term climate change in place of global warming (it sounds less frightening he says), and the renaming of the estate tax to the much more evocative death tax.

Luntz has since renounced his Republican identity, and has come to the UK to warn it of its fate: Britain is heading in the same political direction as the deeply divided United States, and is in desperate need of course correcting. In fact, Britain could descend into a full-throttle US culture war in no time at all. And wokeism may have no small role to play.

In research conducted with the Centre for Policy Studies, Luntz found that wokeism was among voters major concerns (more so than sexism or populism). And via focus groups and several polls he concluded that voters believed woke versus non-woke to be a more significant social divide than young versus old or men versus women.

It is certainly noteworthy, but we would be wise to maintain some scepticism that the UK is about to experience a seismic American-style political reckoning. The UK and the US are not the same place. And they often most of the time, in fact wildly misunderstand each other, assuming greater commonality thanks to a shared language and a foggy notion of a special relationship. Only a cursory glance at the culture shock both the British and Americans experienced over Meghan Markle is evidence enough of this. Attempts to view the UK (or Ireland) through an American lens will fall short.

So it seems unlikely that we are about to import the USs political culture to the UK or the EU wholesale. But we would be wrong to dismiss culture wars long bubbling under the surface as a frivolous concern. The furore over whether Rule Britannia would be sung at the proms; the ongoing rows over statues erected to imperfect historical figures; and the establishment of GB news, a broadcaster that appears to take its editorial cues from the likes of Fox rather than the BBC, are all indicative of this culture war gathering in speed and momentum.

And the problem here is simple to diagnose but difficult to solve. It suits the short-term electoral interests of certain parties to stoke these flames and capitalise on an apparent anxiety voters share over wokeness. If it really is set to be a significant (if not the most significant) political division in coming years, then politicians will want to stake their claim to the right side of the debate.

That may well be antithetical to the curation of a moderate, centrist and healthy society. But it may soon become a quick ticket into office.

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Finn McRedmond: UK culture war gaining speed and momentum - The Irish Times