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Something Josh Barro Text ColorSwatch/NoneStrokeStyle/$ID/SolidText ColorSwatch/NoneStrokeStyle/$ID/Solid$ID/NothingText ColorText Color$ID/NothingText ColorText Colorrecently wrote in a Business Insider essay struck a raw nerve with me: Except on abortion, where public opinion remains about evenly divided, conservatives have implicitly admitted that they have lost certain parts of the cultural war.

Hes probably right. Most conservatives can see that our culture is changing at what appears to be breakneck speed.

As I observe the changes, the question for me as a conservative is no longer How do I/we stop this? Were well past that stage.

Once in a while in conversations with friends, I allude to the old slippery slope, which instantly makes me the target for their loving scorn. This isnt the slippery slope, Phil. Its progress. The conversation usually ends there, with me stubbornly clinging to my thoughts of humanity at the highest point of the roller coaster, poised to take the plunge straight down into the abyss.

The signs of change are becoming more and more pronounced. A case like Charlie Gard, where the State apparatus has supplanted parental rights, has become legally acceptable. At what point will society decide this arrangement is also morally acceptable? Will it become normative?

It wasnt too long ago that euthanasia was almost impossible to imagine. Now, its becoming increasingly tolerable, even to the point where involuntary euthanasia is being practiced (NCBI/NIH abstract The Illusion of Safeguards 6/2012). Polite discussions about what to do with unwanted or unhealthy children are now taking place, thanks to the work of ethicists like Princetons Peter Singer and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, both of whom advance the grisly idea that killing a child is a morally sound decision. Coyne recently put it this way in a blog posting dated July 13th: This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide is the result of the tide of increasing morality in the world.

Not to be outdone, Gary Comstock, a philosophy professor at North Carolina State University, wrote about the painful death of his newborn son. After reflecting on his agonizing experience, he decided that the repugnant has become reasonable. The unthinkable has become the right, the good. Painlessly. Quickly. With the assistance of a trained physician You should have killed your baby.

How far into the abyss have we plunged? Just this morning I read a piece in the Palm Beach Post about some teenage boys in Florida who mocked and filmed Jamel Dunn, a 32-year-old disabled man, as he drowned. The more Dunn pleaded for help, the more they mocked. Get out the water, you gonna die one teen can be heard shouting. Another yelled to the man aint nobody fixing to help you, you dumb (expletive).

According to Florida law, the teens hadnt done anything wrong. There may be a statute they violated by not reporting a death, but mocking a dying man and making a video of his ordeal isnt illegal. Is it immoral? It probably is now, but will we get to the point where even things like this will become morally acceptable?

I just finished reading Rod Drehers The Benedict Option A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. The book is in part a tome and in part an indictment of the modern Christian church. Dreher bores in right away, arguing that the church, which should be a counterforce to secularism, has become content to be the chaplaincy to a consumerist culture that was fast losing a sense of what it meant to be Christian.

Dreher argues that Christians have some very important decisions to make. As a baseline, he cites the work of Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who saw that the time was coming when men and women of virtue would understand that continued full participation in mainstream society was not possible for those who wanted to live a life of traditional virtue.

Dreher then argues, quite persuasively, that Christians need to pull away from the rest of society? He calls it the Benedict Option.

I think he may be right.

We conservative Christians need to understand we have lost the culture wars. The question for us is no longer how to stop the wheels of the machine, but rather it is now a question of how those who choose to can live a meaningful, Christian life in such an environment.

The signs of the times all point to one thing. The Christian pilgrimage for many right now is difficult. Our input is neither valued nor wanted. The path is narrow; the light seems dim. Yet, in spite of the difficulties, we need to press on, in our own way. As W.H. Auden put it in his short poem Atlantis, we must:

Stagger onward rejoicing

And even then if, perhaps

Having actually got

To the last col, you collapse

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The culture war - Emporia Gazette

Boy Scouts listen as President Donald Trump speaks during the National Boy Scout Jamboree in Glen Jean, West Virginia, on Monday.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

As is often true of Trumps speeches, his address on Monday in front of the Boy Scouts of America would have been reasonably appropriate if he had simply given the speech as written. The scripted version was not great but passable. Trumps asides, as always, sent the speech off the rails, full of references to his win, fake news, fake polls, Hillarys sins, another swipe at Obama, and so on.

Backlash in the world of the Scouts was instantaneous. Those of us raised in ScoutingI say as an Eagle Scout myself, and author of a book on Scoutingknow that a fundamental rule of the BSA is that it is nonpartisan. We were taught never to wear our uniforms at a political event or to act in any way while in uniform that would suggest the BSA would endorse the activity. Indeed, the national office issued a statement Tuesday affirming that the organization is wholly non-partisan and does not promote any position, product, service, political candidate or philosophy and that the tradition of inviting the president of the U.S., as honorary president of the BSA, to speak to the National Jamboree is in no way an endorsement of any political party or specific politics.

When I read Kenneth Kenistons fine book from 1968, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth, years ago, it seemed clear to me that the young men (mainly) who organized the antiwar activities of the Vietnam Summer of 1967 and whom Keniston interviewed for the book could easily have been Eagle Scouts. It seemed equally likely to me that a Green Beret fighting the war in Vietnam could have been an Eagle Scout. Participation in the war or against the war could easily be justified based on the values learned as Scouts. The point is, of course, that the values and leadership skills learned in Scouting do not lead to any single partisan position.

The BSA managed to avoid political controversy for the first 75 years or so of its existence, but the rise of the culture wars in the Reagan years dragged the BSA into battles it would rather have avoided. The BSA policies barring gay boys and men, and atheists, from membership signaled on which side of the culture wars the BSA had landed. Those policies were rooted in religion, and although the BSA was not intended by the founders to be a religious organization but rather an organization open to all, the large number of Boy Scout troops sponsored by churches sustained a membership policy that really was at odds with the tolerance promoted by the BSA. Eventually it did change its membership policies, first, in 2014, admitting boys regardless of their sexual orientation, then in 2015 admitting adult leaders regardless of their sexual orientation. Most recently the BSA announced a policy of accepting members based on the gender identity they stated on their membership application, rather than the gender indicated on their birth certificates, opening the way for the first transgender boys to be Scouts. Though the culture wars have clearly not disappeared in 2017, evolving millennial attitudes about sexual orientation and gender identity have been transformative for the Boy Scouts organization.

Yet its incumbent upon the BSAs current leadership to ensure that the Boy Scouts are a force for good going forward. The event at the Jamboree reminded me of the moment back in September of 2016 when the Rev. Faith Green Timmons, pastor at Bethel United Methodist Church in Flint, Michigan, had to ask candidate Trump to stop turning his visit therewhich was intended to be a recognition of the role of the church in the Flint water crisisinto a Hillary-bashing campaign speech. Trump complied but then publicly excoriated Timmons the next day. So I could imagine the BSA senior leadership standing in the wings of the stage at the Jamboreeperhaps they had seen the written version of the speechcringing as Trumps asides increasingly turned what should have been a nonpartisan speech into a deeply partisan one. And none of those leaders had the courage to do what Timmons had done.

Join Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz as they discuss and debate the weeks biggest political news.

Then there were the audible cheers from some members of the BSA crowd listening to Trumps speech, which drove some critics to denounce the Boy Scouts writ large. I know that that Scouts for Equality had a presence at the Jamboree and their Facebook page chronicles their negative reaction to the Trump speech. Many boys were complaining that their troop leaders required them to attend the speech, against the boys own wishes. No, that crowd was not unanimous in its approval of President Trump, no matter the volume of the supporters.

Top Comment

So the BSA has to issue an apology because the President of the United States is incapable of giving an appropriate speech to a bunch of kids. It's hard to believe this is really where America is. More...

But regardless, Id argue that these cheers should actually serve as a scary reminder of exactly why the Boy Scouts organization is important. The BSA, which was founded in 1910, early on aimed to take the natural instincts of adolescent boys and channel them toward positive, socially beneficial goals. Juvenile delinquency was causing a moral panic among American adults, and the founders of the BSA explicitlyif dubiously talked about the Scouts as the new, socially positive form of the boys gang, offering the boy what he craved as a teenager: a sense of belonging, comradeship, a distinct identity marked by uniforms and insignia, a sense of serving a larger good, and the satisfaction of helping others. These are needs that can be served by organizations espousing a politics of the left or right (hence the Hitler Youth analogy). The BSA tries to sustain a nonpartisan stance precisely because it wants to avoid the excesses adolescent boys are capable of.

The shouts of approval in the audience at Trumps speech confirm for me that adolescence is exactly what the founders thought it was in 1910a malleable time of life when teens and preteens are uniquely susceptible to both peer leaders and adult authority figures. One can hope that there will be a new president for the next National Jamboree in four years and that this new president will return to the tradition of delivering to the assembled Scouts a speech that brings out the best instincts in young people, instead of the worst.

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In Defense of the Boy Scouts - Slate Magazine

Jeff Sessions. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Donald Trump may be bashing his attorney general left and right, but that hasnt deterred Jeff Sessions from deploying his bosss legal agenda. His latest rollback, on what now looks like a banner day for the Trump administration and LGBT rights, was the Department of Justices new position in court that federal civil-rights law doesnt protect employees targeted by anti-gay bias in the workplace.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the crowning achievements of the civil-rights movement, and by its very terms forbids employers from discriminating against anyone on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Since the laws enactment, courts have understood the word sex to mean gender and not sexual orientation, and thus it became standard practice for judges to routinely dismiss cases whenever a worker alleged, say, that his employer denied him a promotion simply because the employer didnt like that the worker hung a picture of his bearded spouse in his cubicle.

In recent years, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which oversees enforcement of Title VII, began to see things differently. And relying on Supreme Court precedent that read existing law as forbidding things such as same-sex harassment and gender stereotyping, the agency started to push the argument that Title VII, indeed, may be read to also forbid taking adverse employment actions against gays and lesbians.

Advocates ran with this position, arguing for themselves and their aggrieved clients that federal employment law, if read the way EEOC and Justice Antonin Scalia read the law that is, textually makes it illegal to fire the gay worker with the framed picture of his bearded spouse. After all, a woman with the same picture frame and bearded husband wouldnt be fired. Thats classic discrimination on the basis of sex: The sex of the workers spouse is the bosss guiding light. And isnt the expectation that a man should only marry a woman de facto sex stereotyping?

In a landmark April ruling, an appeals court bucked precedent and ruled for the first time that the EEOCs position is the correct one. And other courts, including the Manhattan-based federal appeals court, are starting to give a fresh look at an issue they once thought was open and shut. Its in that New York case that Trumps Justice Department filed a brief opposing the view that Title VII protects gay workers. Its view is a familiar one: It should be up to Congress to fix the law if it wants to prohibit anti-gay discrimination. As written, the law just doesnt do that.

But for Sessions and his lawyers to prevail in this particular battle, they will be forced to contend with something their hero Scalia recognized for a unanimous Supreme Court in 1998: that what matters in the end is the laws text, not what Congress may have in mind at a specific moment in history. In his view, statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.

In other words, Sessions could well take a beating here as well. And the Supreme Court, which is the final arbiter of many of our culture wars, is already on deck to deal the painful blow sooner rather than later.

It does away with the individual mandate and defunds Planned Parenthood.

A bad bill designed to avoid scrutiny.

Their shared dark vision of the world unites them.

But the funding probably wont make it through the Senate.

The Dept. of Justices new position is that federal civil-rights law doesnt cover employees targeted by anti-gay bias

John McCain calls for bipartisanship, votes to prevent it from happening.

Reince is a f*cking paranoid schizophrenic. And so much more.

Anthony Scaramucci credited Trump with nailing 3-foot putts, but the White House transcript says they were 30-footers.

All the tactical brilliance that has kept unpopular and divisive GOP health care legislation alive disguises a fatal strategic blindness.

The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the GOP cant roll back Obamacares regulations without 60 votes. That makes skinny repeal more dangerous.

As Trumps religious-freedom envoy, Brownback has a chance to leave the state he wrecked and to take his religious views worldwide.

General Joseph Dunford wrote in a memo that there have been no modifications to the current policy.

Thinking it through before you vote for a huge change to the health-care system is for big-government liberal weenies.

It explains his otherwise inexplicable attacks on staunch ally Jeff Sessions.

Any effort to go after Muellercould be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency, the senator said.

The R train may have been held in the station after a press conference.

The point of skinny repeal of Obamacare is to enact a bare-bones bill to shape in committee. Bulking up could be fatal.

Trump insists that his harassment of Sessions cant be obstruction because he has nothing to hide, is just doing all this out of pointless spite.

It will collide head-on with the doctrine of animus the legal principle guarding against singling out a group for harm.

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Jeff Sessions Takes a Stand Against Protecting Gay Workers - New York Magazine

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It's pointless for Democrats to try to downplay "identity politics." In President Trump's America, identity politics will come to get you no matter what. Indeed, fighting these old culture wars is just about all Trump has left.

That's a prime lesson of Trump's surprise Wednesday morning announcement that transgender people are not welcome to serve in America's military. In making that announcement, Trump usurped an ongoing Pentagon study into the issue apparently even catching the Defense Department off-guard and made a naked, cynical play to appeal to the socially conservative and otherwise traditional voters that make up much of his base.

"This forces Democrats in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin to take complete ownership of this issue," an unidentified Trump administration official told Jonathan Swan of Axios. "How will blue-collar voters in these states respond when senators up for re-election in 2018 like [Michigan Democrat] Debbie Stabenow are forced to make opposition to this a key plank of their campaigns?"

Get that? Even if Democrats want to avoid identity politics in 2018, Trump won't let them.

This ought to be clarifying. Ever since Trump won in November, Democrats have been mired in internal debates over whether they should downplay identity politics issues emphasized by their base of ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities in favor of a broader appeal to the "white working class." The underlying question: How much should Democrats turn their backs on the heart and soul of the party to win elections?

The debate seemed to be resolved this week when party leaders unveiled their "Better Deal" agenda to run against Trump and the Republicans in 2018. It contained some big promises a minimum wage hike, a crackdown on monopolies, apprenticeship programs, and more but notably skipped any issues that might seem to appeal specifically to black or brown or gay people.

Those voters noticed. That the agenda "never mentioned voter suppression, police brutality, immigration, or refugees felt like a low-key dog whistle to me," one observer wrote.

That "Better Deal" effort, however, lasted all of two days before Trump pulled Dems back into the culture wars.

"Transgender Americans are serving honorably in our military," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) tweeted in response to Trump's announcement. "We stand with these patriots."

Just when Dems thought they were out, they get pulled back in.

Good.

Why? Because Democrats can stop debating whether victory requires them to downplay strong stands for LGBTQ rights, for immigrants and against voter suppression policies that disempower African-Americans. Republicans are going to tie Dems to those policies anyway, so the party and its candidates might as well be forthright instead of coy about where it stands on those issues. Maybe Democrats could even trumpet their inclusiveness as a virtue.

This isn't 2004, when George W. Bush came out for a constitutional amendment against gay marriage a plain attempt to divide voters on culture war issues. In the years since then, gays and gay marriage have become increasingly accepted. If history is any guide, today's action will help Trump shore up his base in the short term and be irrelevant in another decade.

But for now, the culture wars will rage again. Trump can't pass a health-care bill (at least so far). Getting a tax cut looks like it might be tricky. The wall he promised looks no closer to reality than it did six months ago. There are real questions these days about whether Republicans are capable of governance.

In that climate, all Trump and the Republicans will have left are identity politics and the culture wars. It's why Trump after promising to be a president who would protect LGBTQ rights came out against them. It's why he spent a Tuesday night speech describing the crimes of illegal immigrants in torture-porn detail.

And it's the reason conservatives are cheering the prospect of Kid Rock making a Senate run against Stabenow; policy, these days, matters to them much less than all the "real America" virtue signalling that the entertainer provides. For Trump Republicans, that posturing is all that seems to really matter.

Identity politics aren't going away. Democrats might as well embrace it, fly their rainbow flags high, and fight back.

Original post:
The culture wars are all Trump has left - The Week - The Week Magazine

President Trump returned the military to the culture wars of recent decades Wednesday with a tweeted declaration that transgender people can no longer serve in any capacity in the armed forces.

Conservative allies cheered it as a step back from what they saw as an effort by the Obama administration to run a social engineering experiment in the military. Transgender people and their advocates denounced it as bigoted, and even some of Trumps fellow Republicans criticized it as shortsighted.

After a 20-year fight by LGBT activists and supporters to open the military to gays, lesbians and transgender people had seemingly been settled in their favor under former President Barack Obama, Trump returned to the battlefield with a series of early-morning tweets.

After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military, Trump tweeted. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.

Transgender people have been allowed to serve openly in the military since last July, when then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced a policy that allowed service members to transition gender in the military, set standards for medical care, and outlined responsibilities for military services and commanders to develop and implement guidance, training and other programs.

The White House was short on details for how Trump would implement his planned ban or how the military would go about removing the thousands of transgender people who are already in the services. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the presidents announcement is something that the Department of Defense and the White House will have to work together on as implementation takes place.

This was about military readiness; this was about unit cohesion; this was about resources within the military and nothing more, Sanders said.

LGBT activists and like-minded politicians promised to fight any ban, and said Trumps tweets sounded similar to earlier orders barring nonwhite and gay people from the military.

There is no resignation at all among us, said retired Navy Cmdr. Zoe Dunning of San Francisco, a lesbian who retired in 2007 and helped lead the fight to overturn the dont ask, dont tell policy that barred openly gay and lesbian service members. There is complete opposition. I hear nothing different in what Trump says from what was used to justify discrimination against African Americans and the LGBT community before the same old thing about disrupting cohesion and effectiveness.

Conservatives applauded the presidents move, saying transgender politics and medical costs they can bring with them small though they may be have no place in the militarys ranks or budgets.

Felicia Alvarado Elizondo served in the Navy during the Vietnam war.

Felicia Alvarado Elizondo served in the Navy during the Vietnam war.

Felicia Alvarado Elizondo serving in the Navy during the Vietnam war in 1966.

Felicia Alvarado Elizondo serving in the Navy during the Vietnam war in 1966.

Transgender effort reopens culture wars

Obviously, were very happy with this decision by the president, said Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage. Like many Americans, we believe its long overdue. President Trumps tweet says the military understand that the military is for fighting and winning wars, not engaging in a massive social experiment.

Brown said he hoped Trumps pronouncement was just the beginning of a larger rollback of LGBT presence in the military. The whole subject of homosexuals in the military needs to be readdressed, he said. Unfortunately what weve been seeing on the part of some Republicans is some weak knees addressing this, but were working on that.

For Felicia Flames Alvarado Elizondo, Trumps tweets provoked two reactions. One was anger. The other was a feeling of deja vu.

Elizondo, 71, was a Navy seaman named Felipe serving in Vietnam in 1967 when she told her commanding officer she was gay. After a quick stint in the brig, she was booted out of the service. Within a few years, she had transitioned into a woman and become a gender-rights activist but nothing, she said, made her any less proud of having served her country.

I was there to fight for my country, and it doesnt matter what your gender is as long as you believe in democracy and fighting for you country, said Elizondo, who lives in San Francisco. People join the military to defend our freedom, and what Trump is doing is horrible. He doesnt know us, or how we are.

Alexander McCoy, a Marine veteran who is now affiliated with anti-Trump, ex-service members, disputed the presidents assertion that the presence of transgender people in the ranks is disruptive. What is disruptive, he said, are military efforts to hunt down people who are in the closet because their sexual orientation or gender identification is banned.

The fact that Donald Trump is trying to return our military to (the dont ask, dont tell era) is disgraceful, said McCoy, spokesman for Common Defense, a national grassroots organization that has 15,000 members in California.

Reaction among politicians was quick, and not always predictable. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Trumps statement unclear and said the panel would hold hearings on the issue of transgender people serving in the military.

There is no reason to force service members who are able to fight, train, and deploy to leave the military regardless of their gender identity, McCain said.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Iowa National Guard, said anyone who is qualified and can meet the physical training standards to serve in the military should be allowed the opportunity. However, Ernst also believes that taxpayers shouldnt cover the costs associated with a gender reassignment surgery, a spokeswoman said.

Other Republicans strongly backed Trump, including Rep. Duncan Hunter of San Diego, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. He called for a restoration of warrior culture to allow the military to get back to business.

US President Donald Trump speaks to the American Legion Boys Nation and the American Legion Auxiliary Girls Nation in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, July 26, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEBSAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

US President Donald Trump speaks to the American Legion Boys Nation...

National security should trump social experimentation, always, Duncan said.

Probably the best-known transgender military veteran Chelsea Manning, who served in the Army as a man and was court-martialed and convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking classified information to Wikileaks tweeted that the presidents move sounds like cowardice. She said denying health care costs to transgender troops while supporting the $400 billion F-35 fighter jet program is further reason we should dismantle the bloated and dangerous military-intel-police state.

Shane Ortega, 30, of Los Angeles, is a transgender man who served in the Marine Corps from 2005 to 2009 and then in the Army from 2009 to 2016. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ortega began transitioning in 2010 while in the military. On Wednesday morning, he woke up to a phone call from a transgender person currently serving in the military who feared what will come next, and now, once again, feels compelled to hide his sexual orientation as much as possible.

Disruption is not something (the president) is qualified to quantify because Donald Trump has never served in a tactical position in his life, Ortega said. Bullets dont police gender. Bullets dont care if youre fat, green, purple or pink.

Estimates of the number of transgender people in the military range from 6,000, as measured by a Rand Corp. study, to over 15,000, as tallied by the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Rand found that the cost of gender-transition procedures related to health care treatment is relatively low.

The total cost of medical care for transgender troops would increase health care costs by $2.4 million to $8.4 million annually, representing a 0.04 percent to 0.13 percent increase in Pentagon health care expenditures, the nonprofit research group said.

Transgender reassignment surgery which not every trans person chooses to undergo can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to nearly $100,000, depending on how extensive it is, said Courtney DAllaird, founding coordinator for the Gender & Sexuality Resource Center at the University of Albany in New York.

A proposal in the House to eliminate transgender surgery funding for service members was defeated last week, with dozens of Republicans joining Democrats in voting against it.

Kevin Fagan and Sarah Ravani are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email:KFagan@

sfchronicle.com, sravani@sfchronicle.com

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Transgender effort reopens culture wars - San Francisco Chronicle