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(CNN) A ride based on the story of Disneys first Black princess opens to the public on June 28 in Orlando, Florida, replacing the decades-old Splash Mountain attraction that was beloved by many Disney fans yet also widely criticized.

Walt Disney Worlds new ride, inspired by the movie The Princess and the Frog and its heroine Tiana, is currently in preview mode for groups including employees and annual passholders and has already elicited mixed reactions in the midst of the culture wars.

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A new Disney ride opens soon, splashing right out of the culture wars - The Albany Herald

Sir Keir Starmer has promised to end the culture war if he becomes the UKs next prime minister.

Speaking to the Huffington Post yesterday, the Labour leader lamented that the public is exhausted by culture wars. The Tories have got nowhere else to go but this divisive culture-war area, and I do think that if we do win the election, I do want it to be a reset moment for politics, he said.

You can certainly understand why Labour might be keen to play down the culture war during the General Election. After all, Labours positions on all manner of cultural issues from the trans debate to racial identity politics have tended to place it on the wrong side of public opinion, common decency and objective reality in recent years.

Indeed, even when the allegedly sensible Starmer has tried to sit on the fence, he has ended up impaling himself on it. Who could forget his outlandish claim last year that 99.9 per cent of women dont have a penis? This was supposed to be a compromise between sex realists (who correctly say that no women have penises) and trans extremists (who say that people with penises can be women if they identify as such). But it still implied that potentially one in 1,000 women could well have a penis. Go figure!

Starmers promise to end the culture war should not be seen as some kind of peace offering to the unwoke. It is not as if Labour has seen the light on these issues and will now leave us all alone.

In truth, when Starmer says he will end the culture war, what he really means is that he will have zero tolerance for this kind of pushback. The woke will be free to run amok in our public institutions, but any dissent will be silenced, ignored or condemned. To this end, Labour has even mooted making it a crime to misgender that is, accurately describe the sex of trans people, which would make it harder still to defend womens rights from the gender ideologues.

The end of the culture war? No chance. If Starmer enters Downing Street on 5 July, the culture war will just be getting started.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

Follow this link:
Keir Starmer will not end the culture war - Spiked

(Image: Alexander Grey/Unsplash.com)

The term culture warrior is often invoked, usually pejoratively, to describe a certain kind of conservative Catholic who fights in the political sphere for the Catholic viewpoint to be enshrined in law on certain hot-button issues. I say pejoratively since the charge is often made that these issues are best fought on the cultural level, via the path of persuasion rather than on the political level. Conservatives are thus accused of being simplistic and nave in trying to impose by law points of view that have not prevailed in the cultural domain on the level of argument.

As with all caricatures, there is a modicum of truth in this assessment. And it is indeed true, by and large, that the conservative viewpoint on these issues has lost the cultural battle. This fact makes all political moves seem oriented toward an oppressive curtailment of activities that a majority have come to view as basic civil rights. This is certainly how the mainstream media do portray things, as we saw after Roe v. Wade was struck down. Conservatives were, and are, portrayed as coercive bigots intent on imposing a narrow sectarian view of abortion through draconian laws.

Obvious double standards

Nevertheless, I firmly reject this caricature, and for several reasons. First, while it is accurate to say there is a modicum of truth in the caricature, there is also more than a little deflection at play here. Quite often, when employed by NCR(eporter) Catholics it is used to justify paying no attention whatsoever to the public importance of these issues, relegating them to the putatively private realm of sexual morality, with the use of the utterly crass and inaccurate term pelvic issues. They may pay lip service to the importance of abortion, for example, and claim that it is indeed a part of the seamless garment of life ethicbut then proceed to put it on a back burner as an embarrassment.

Eventually, the mask drops entirely and we see that, for them, not all pelvic issues are equally apolitical and private. How many Pride flags will we see flying outside of Catholic institutions in June? How many comments on X from Fr. James Martin will we see celebrating the political gains made by the LGBTQ+ movement (or community) over the past twenty years? Apparently, the private sexual lives of same-sex attracted persons are a matter of deep public concern and importance. So important, in fact, that those in the Church who fight for this cause are never dismissed as mere culture warriors. Nope. They are instead lionized by leftist Catholics as champions of human rights.

This brings me to the second problem with the caricature. Who within the Catholic world gets to decide what counts as a culture war issue and what doesnt? For example, abortion is a form of homicide, a form of premeditated murder, and yet we are told that we should not agitate in the political sphere to end it and to stick to purely cultural forms of persuasion. But when it comes to a fundamental question of human rightsin this case, the very right to lifethere can be no question of kicking the political can down the road until such time as a more favorable cultural situation emerges.

Meanwhile, we are told that there can be no compromise with the forces of bigotry when it comes to LGBTQ rights. In almost every state where gay marriage was put up to a vote of the people, including deeply Blue California, it was voted down. The LGBTQ revolution happened in large measure as a result of top-down judicial imposition. So it would seem that the very designation of what counts as a culture war issue and what doesnt is largely an invention of the Catholic Leftand is actually a form of rhetorical violence since its aims are malicious and deliberately tendentious. In other words, it is a form of propaganda. Culture has changed as a result of judicial decisions and nobody on the Catholic Left is arguing that these issues should have been resolved apolitically on a cultural level only.

Roe v. Wade is yet another example of a new class of rights, nowhere envisioned by the Constitution, suddenly emerging by judicial fiat. While it is true that a large segment of the American electorate was open to this liberalization, a large segment was not. The imposition of Roe v. Wade created an immediate, massive and ongoing backlash on the cultural level that poisoned our politics at its root, turning every Supreme Court nomination into a cage match, to the death, between deranged political pit bulls. And yet nobody on the secular Left opined that maybe the culture was not ready for legal prenatal homicide via judicial authority alone.

Polluting culture with trendy politics

What these two examples show us (specifically, Obergefell and Roe) is that the law has pedagogical value and that, once enacted, laws can change the culture in deep and profound ways.

A few years ago, Georgia passed a law saying that, in the public schools, there are to be two and only two kinds of bathrooms: one for people with penises and one for people with vaginas. Which is, of course, the pure commonsense realism of the entirety of human history and culture. The Left went berserk, including the sex-and-circuses Catholic Left, and threatened economic boycotts against Georgia and so forth. It was the usual bilge. Yet, today, with only small pockets of dissent, the law has had its effect, which (at the very least) means it has depoliticized bathrooms and returned them to the genuinely private sphere. And if there ever was a mere pelvic issue, bathroom usage, from toilets to urinals to bidets, would certainly be near the top of the list.

Along these lines, do I even need to mention the entire march of civil rights for African Americans? From the Civil War to the post-war constitutional amendments, on through the battle against Jim Crow laws and segregation, there is no way one can say that America waited until there was a deep and broad public, cultural consensus before it sought political and legal remedies to our racial sins. And why is that? Because the issue was deemed far too important, too foundational, and too constitutive of who we are as a people to be left to cultural drift as the only proper remedy.

This is why I think one of the most misused phrases, often employed by those who would dismiss us as mere culture warriors, is politics is downstream of culture. But this is only partly true and when it is elevated to some lofty status as an ironclad law of human nature it is deeply misleading. Because the lines of causation are not just one way, and quite often in our history the reverse has been true. Culture is, in fact, very frequently downstream of politics.

There is also the phrase, You cannot legislate morality! Tell that to Rosa Parks! Furthermore, it is sheer lunacy to suggest there isnt a core moral claim in almost every piece of major legislation. Laws are by nature coercive. A stop sign is coercive. And thank God it is. The purpose of the coercive aspects of the law is to foster a moral vision of the common good on this or that issueno matter how seemingly mundane. I am a notoriously impatient driver and I hate stop signs and red lights. But I am pleased to be coerced into safe driving since I value my life and the lives of everyone else on the road.

But we have gone so far down the path of caricaturing cultural conservatives as potential fascists intent on criminalizing everything fun and pleasurable, that my words here will be construed by many as a call to turn America into Catholic Sharia land. Never mind the Left has turned America into a pornified septic tank and a circus freak show of the dragification of everything. Never mind it is now the case in many States that parents can lose custodial rights to their children if they misgender them. Never mind it is now considered to be a form of rank bigotry if you think eight-year-old boys and girls should not have their bodies surgically mutilated beyond repair. Never mind the Left opposes all laws intended to prevent the soft infanticide of letting babies born alive after an abortion die of neglect. Never mind the modern Left doesnt even have the virtue any longer of being the anti-war party. Or the anti-wealth party. Or the anti-surveillance State party.

Never mind all of that. Because, according to them, the Catholic culture warriors are here to turn all of our daughters into bipedal, ambulatory baby incubators for churning out the future fascists of America.

Rejecting the Catholic Lefts push for political and cultural hegemony

Finally, there is also the fact that many Catholic liberals, not content to criticize the politics of pro-life Catholics, are now moving the goalposts even further and claiming that even focusing on these issues in a purely cultural way, via the path of persuasion and evangelization, is deeply suspicious.

Returning to my last essayon Massimo Faggiolis fever dream of a new Trump-Catholic axis emergingwe see how Faggioli originally lumped Bishop Barron and Word on Fire into that axis. His evidence was that Bishop Barron likes to interview social conservatives, including Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. I guess Professor Faggioli was counting on nobody noticing that in none of these interviews is there even a hint of political advocacy for Trump. But, for him, being a socially conservative Catholic in and of itself is evidence enough of a closeted support for Trump, which (it goes without saying) he believes is awful.

Ponder that fact for a minute. Let it sink in. Because the claim is that not only is it wrong to be a culture warrior in a way that focuses on electoral politics, but it is also now deeply suspicious to focus on socially conservative issues in a way focused on the broader politics of the cultural polis and its many venues for public dialogue and conversation. We are damned if we focus on electoral politics. And now we are damned if we simply focus on the politics of culture, the latter being viewed as a mere cover for the former.

Therefore, it would seem that what the Catholic Left wants is both political and cultural hegemony. What they want is for all of the Catholic deplorables (indietrists!) to crawl back into their buried school buses on their Fatima survivalist compounds and to shut the hell up. But this is how Catholic liberals have always acted and so it should come as no surprise. They have a dead-end ecclesial project, which has failed spectacularly wherever it has been tried, and a theology that is little more than a warmed-over Kantian/Marxist/Mall Rat confluence of faculty lounge pretentiousness and the idolatry of the culture of sex and Mammon. Which is why they resort to the authoritarianism of the ecclesial bureaucratic apparatus. Synodality via Motu proprio. The typical faux democracy of the totalitarians.

While I am at it, I may as well address the fact that the combox attached to this article will remind me I am not a fan of Donald Trump. So how, it may be asked, can I offer up an apologia for pro-life politics all the while dismissing the man who really, more than any other, engineered the overturning of Roe? All I can say is that I give him kudosand big onesfor that, and I harbor no ill will toward any Catholic who will vote for him for that reason. But my overall politics and my reasons for not voting for him or Biden are too complex to parse out here. It has something to do with my post-liberal soul; in fact my opposition to both candidates is not grounded in an indifference to politics at all, but the opposite. That will have to suffice for now until, perhaps, a future essay.

I will end with a proposal. Let us retire the use of the term culture warrior since it is at best a vacuous term meaning whatever we want it to mean. At worse it is a derisive term designed to malign in order to dismiss. I propose instead that we call ourselves by a different name. I would propose we call ourselves Catholic sanity activists.

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On culture wars and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Left - Catholic World Report

Fred McGrath

The Institute for Legislative Analysis has just released themost expansivestudy on U.S. Congressional voting trends nearly 65,000 votes finding Republican lawmakers voted for the conservative position on cultural and social issues 97.33% of the time, but for the limited government position on tax and fiscal issues just 50.63% of the time.

View all 535 Members of Congress Ranked Most Progressive to Most Conservative

The study found more than half of Republicans (146 of 275) voted for the progressive position on fiscal issues more often than the conservative. But on cultural issues (abortion, LGBTQ and gender ideology, and race) all but 23 Republicans voted at least 90% of the time for the conservative position.

The data confirms what many have suspected the Tea Party movement is officially dead. The Republican party is in a new movement grounded on populism and focused on winning the culture wars, said Ryan McGowan, CEO of the Institute for Legislative Analysis. The recent bankruptcy of FreedomWorks coupled with significant ideological shifts within major conservative institutions will likely further gravitate Republican lawmakers to this new policy agenda.

The55-page congressional studyalso found the following:

Fred McGrath is the president of the Institute for Legislative Analysis.

Link:
Culture wars replacing fiscal discipline as calling card of today's GOP - Villages-News

Back to Back Theatre is an internationally lauded ensemble of collaborators based in Geelong. With some members identifying as intellectually disabled and/or neurodiverse, the company has spent more than two decades producing performance works that address the politics of visibility and power.

The company has been described as having an astonishing ability to dissect the unspoken imaginings of society. And its latest show, Multiple Bad Things, directed by Tamara Searle and Ingrid Voorendt, showcases this capacity.

With great sophistication and certainty, the performance takes the dynamics of a workplace and reflects it to the audience to reveal the complex power dynamics, inequitable structures and political tensions that underpin and uphold the damaging status quo.

Taking place in a context that seems part-factory and part-construction site, four workers appear. One (Simon Laherty) directly addresses the audience as a narrator, blithely providing trigger warnings for the work they are about to see, and takes a seat at a desk as if he is a supervisor in his site office.

His computer screen is visible to the audience. He begins playing a game of solitaire, but eventually we watch as he doomscrolls through video clips of highly muscled men working out, fast cars, guns, porn and nature documentaries. Lahertys character implicates the audience in this world, positioning them as present but silent voyeurs.

A second worker (Scott Price) arrives and promptly parks himself on a giant inflatable pool floatie shaped like a flamingo. They are then joined by the other two (Bron Batten and Sarah Mainwaring). Batten appears to be the only non-disabled person on stage.

Batten and Mainwaring appear to have the most work ethic. They begin piecing together the structure that dominates the centre of designer Anna Cordingleys compelling set. It resembles a kind of post-apocalyptic Ikea nightmare: an enormous spiky tangle of poles or pipes that must somehow fit together.

In what appears to be a demonstration of human futility, the workers begin listing bad things while assembling the structure. As they work, apparently banal conversations take place.

At one point, they discuss the international aisle at the supermarket. As Price interjects with the kind of cuisines that can be found in this aisle (Mexican! Dutch! Japanese!), Mainwaring points out British food is now also located in the international aisle. Batten remarks that this seems pointless, given British food also occupies the rest of the supermarket.

These seemingly innocuous exchanges of dialogue underscore a central thread in the work, as the performers begin to wrestle with notions of difference and diversity, and the question of who gets to take up space. As the exchanges take place, we start to see a painfully obvious embodied representation of inequity among the workers, as Mainwaring physically struggles with the task at hand and requests help.

As the show progresses, Batten reacts to Prices perceived laziness by removing the air from the inflatable, triggering a great argument between them. Price claims he has been violently targeted because of his autism. Batten counteracts this by adopting the language of the oppressed to assert her own diversity and need for support.

In doing so, she maintains the system of power that clearly has her at the top of the pecking order as the only non-disabled person of the four.

Mainwaring watches on, at times saying she doesnt understand whats happening between them. Price seems to lose the argument, carrying the deflated flamingo and lying on the floor, proclaimed dead by Batten, who poses hero-like around the structure, celebrating her victory.

This moment reveals the disquieting outcome of Battens self-victimisation. It also speaks to the harm that can be caused by those who come from a place of moral righteousness and certitude.

The structures seemingly set up to support inclusion are revealed as redundant tools through a sly referencing of the workplaces Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and a hopelessly frustrating and hilarious phone call Mainwaring makes to a support helpline. The audience is shown how these tools maintain control and drown out the voices of the most disenfranchised, leaving the workers to manage their own issues without support.

Multiple Bad Things demonstrates Back to Back Theatres leading approach to a growing area of interest in disability arts practice: the aesthetics of access. This is where we see sophisticated ways of incorporating access, for both audience and performers, into the framework and design of the performance.

One example was the use of the oval screen at the rear of the stage used to display subtitles. This text was, thanks to the audio-visual design by Rhian Hinckley, seamlessly integrated into the design of the broader work and at times strategically used to disrupt or underscore the action on stage.

Directors Searle and Voorendt have crafted a proficient, seamless, complex and sophisticated hour-long work. They bring the unique performances and identities of the ensemble, along with an evocative score by Zo Barrie and assured lighting design by Richard Vabre, into symbolic interplay. As these elements weave together, the performance oscillates between playful and poignant, flippant and horrific.

The final moments of the show see Mainwaring alone on stage, completing the assembly herself and it then initiating the final transformation of the spiky poles in a powerful theatrical moment.

Laherty leaves his office post for the third time in the performance and delivers a monologue about computer solitaire. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, he says. You have to be prepared to lose a few games before you win.

Mainwaring and Laherty embrace. In stark juxtaposition to the conflict and suffering we have just witnessed, we see a moment of care between the performers. While much is left unresolved regarding the central question of difference, diversity and who is entitled to take up space, Lahertys reflections on solitaire resonate with this image.

Multiple Bad Things highlights there may be no singular perspective on what is right and wrong. Perhaps, as we collectively negotiate the building of more equitable structures, success relies on what it is were prepared to lose in order to win.

Read more:
Back to Back's Multiple Bad Things takes a sophisticated look at the moral ambiguities of today's 'culture wars' - The Conversation