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In multiple Senate races, Democrats are hammering Republican candidates over contraception and Personhood, a development that many observers interpret as a sign that Dems are now the ones on offense in the culture wars.

A new ad blitz from Karl Roves Crossroads GPS nicely captures the emerging dynamic. Colorado GOP Senate candidate Cory Gardner has been treated to the most direct and sustained assault over Personhood of any GOP candidate, and a new Crossroads ad appears designed to defend Gardner against it with an appeal to female voters.

Yet the ad does this only by changing the subject. Heres the spot, which is part of a new, $6 million campaign on Gardners behalf:

The ad never mentions Personhood or contraception. Instead, it obliquely refers to Dem attacks as political scare tactics, even as the featured women declare they want a real conversation about issues that matter, such as the economy. But, as Rebecca Berg writes, this ad actually underscores the challenge Republicans have faced this year appealing to women voters.

Now, its true that the economy is the top concern. But its obvious the Personhood movement (which declares that full human rights begin at the moment of fertilization) has, in fact, dogged Gardner. Last spring he disavowed his support for a previous state Personhood effort, admitting it restricts contraception. But Dems have pointed out that Gardner still supports a federal Personhood measure that would raise the same possibility of restrictions to some forms of contraception. Gardner has tried coming out for over-the-counter contraception, but he currently trails Dem Senator Mark Udall by double digits among women.

The broader story here, as Jonathan Martin details, is that after decades in which Republicans successfully exploited cultural wedge issues, Democrats are now on the offensive in the culture wars. Dems are now using social issues to stoke concerns among moderate voters, especially women, and motivate their base. As one conservative concedes, it is Republicans who are now out of touch with the countrys cultural center and must deal with the fact that the center has shifted.

To be clear, Republicans could still win the Senate in spite of this, thanks to the makeup of the map. But over the long term, as Ron Brownstein has explained, even if Dems are struggling to hold red state Senate seats, their embrace of cultural issues will continue to place the party on the side of an expanding majority of public opinion and a younger, more urbanized, diverse, and secular coalition that will give it an advantage in national elections. Meanwhile, these battles continue to reaffirm the GOPs identity as the champion of the forces most resistant to the profound demographic and cultural dynamics reshaping American life. Its not clear that simply changing the subject will cut it for much longer.

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* REPUBLICANS WILL GREEN-LIGHT OBAMAS ISIS PLAN: The Post reports that House GOP leaders have settled on their strategy to give Obama what he wants on ISIS. They will hold separate votes on arming the Syrian rebels and on funding the government:

Rather than inserting the military plan into the government funding bill, it will be offered as an amendment. That will enable conservative hawks who oppose the spending bill to separately back the military plan, and some Republicans and Democrats to support the spending bill. Either way, both proposals pass with a handful of dissenting Republican voices.

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Sargent: Morning Plum: Are Dems now winning the culture wars?

The culture wars have returned to the State Board of Education. Texas public school classrooms will get new social studies textbooks next fall the first in a dozen years. And that's why more than 50 people signed up to testify before the State Board of Education about what's in them.

In Tuesday's Capital Tonight, we looked at the latest fight over what's going into textbooks approved for the state, and why many feel the politics of today are creeping into the classroom.

It's been nearly three months since state leaders announced a surge in DPS troopers to the border. Since then, the deployment of National Guard troops has added a new layer to the mix. So how is it all working out? Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst joined us with the latest on the state's border security surge.

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Attorney General Greg Abbott's campaign is going on the attack against his Democratic opponent, Sen. Wendy Davis, in a new online ad. Political strategists Harold Cook and Ted Delisi weighed in on the strategy heading into November.

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Capital Tonight: Lt. Gov. Dewhurst Responds to Border Surge Criticism

The Culture War is Over
The Culture Wars are over - so says Cardinal Dolan. {CHURCHMILITANT.TV} http://www.churchmilitant.tv/ {RETREAT AT SEA 2015 - CATHOLIC UPRISING} http://www.ch...

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The Culture War is Over - Video

From Conservapedia (Redirected from Culture war)

The Culture War is the name given to conflict over moral or religious values typically between mainstream American political thought and liberals.

European culture wars historically pitted Catholics against Protestants, from the extraordinarily violent Thirty Years War of the 17th century to the nonviolent Kulturkampf in Germany in the late 19th century when Bismarck's German Protestant government sought and failed to suppress Catholicism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries the great battles were over cultural and ethnic nationalism, as well as political contests between clerical and secular forces, especially in France from 1789 to the early 20th century.

Just as violent were the occasional conflicts between Christianity and Islam that led to dramatic battles such as those at Tours (732), Kosovo (1389), Constantinople (1453), and Lepanto (1571). Terroristic Similar outbursts occurred in Chechnya since the 1990s, and in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Bali and elsewhere after 2001.

In Canada, mostly nonviolent cultural tension between English and French ethnic groups has simmered from 1760 onward. Finally in the 1990s Canadians opted for a multicultural compromise that downgraded British heritage and Canadian nationalism in general. The There remain, nonetheless, active Quebec separatists, hovering just short of a majority, groups continue to that seek independence and reject multiculturalism. among Francophones and some native peoples.

Since 1789 there has been a persistent global cultural war between the forces of modernization, secularization, and globalization on the one hand, and traditionalists on the other. The latter expressed itself among Roman Catholics in the 19th century, and Islamists, Hindu nationalists, and Christian evangelicals in the 20th and 21st centuries. In class terms, the upper middle class has typically been the proactive modernizing force, with the peasants and working classes (often joined by the aristocracy) acting in reaction.

Massive great violence accompanied culture wars in Mexico from 1810 to the 1930s that saw clerical/conservative alliances battle anticlerical modernizing forces.

In American history culture wars have seldom escalated into violence. In general the groups at swords point in other lands coexist in America. The rare exceptions were tensions between Catholic and Protestant Irish in the 19th century that erupted in riots in New York (1871) and, Philadelphia (1844) and elsewhere, though these were quickly quelled. More violence and hatred has surrounded racial tensions between blacks and whites (and between whites and Chinese in the late 19th century, and blacks and Koreans in the late 20th century).

The most important culture wars in America have involved questions of morality. The abolitionist movement was one such expression. Before the 1830s many national leaders, North and South, considered slavery a social evil that should be gradually abolished. During the Second Great Awakening, religious evangelicals in the North began preaching that slavery was a personal sin which slaveowners must immediately repent. The novel and play by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) became a best seller in America and Britain, driving home the horrors of slavery. Across the South those suspected of harboring abolitionist thoughts were driven out. More generally the South feared various Yankee "isms" (abolitionism, feminism, and reformism) that threatened to destroy the traditional lifestyle of both subsistence yeoman farmers and slave plantations. The North meanwhile was modernizing rapidly and building an educational system that provided the intellectual and interpersonal skills needed for an upwardly mobile middle class to flourish. The South was nearly as rich the North in 1860, but its wealth depended less on intellectual skills than on the luck of land speculation, gambling, European demand for cotton, and weather. After slavery ended in 1865 and cotton prices plunged, the South fell behind economically and intellectually until it finally broke with cotton and began urbanizing in the 1940s, and abandoned segregation in the 1960s.

The Second Great Awakening (1800-1840) created a series of reform movements that generated culture wars. In addition to abolition there was the Prohibition movement, which moved liquor from a social nuisance to a personal sin in the minds of many pietistic, low-church, revivalist Protestants, and motivated their efforts to destroy the liquor trade and saloons. The robust resistance provided by Catholics and liturgical, high-church Protestants such as Episcopalians and German Lutherans turned liquor into an ethno-religious issue that polarized the political parties along parallel lines.

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Culture War - Conservapedia - Main Page - Conservapedia

In the fall of 1995, a few days after Salon first ventured out into the strange new territory of the World Wide Web, I reviewed the site for an online magazine called Web Review. I said nice things about the quality of the content, but concluded that the medium fails Salons message.

The superb writing, graceful layout and inspired selection of story ideas deserve better than the pale light of my monitor and the discomfort of my desk chair. Theres too much content to sort through and the articles, though shorter than those in the New Yorker, are still too long to be enjoyably read online. And thats the rub. SALON, more than anything else Ive come across on the Web, falls victim to the fundamental deficiencies of online reading.

Ha. Ha. Ha. I was a grumpy codger even when the Web was young. But the joke was on me. A few months later I was freelancing for Salon. A year later I was hired as the magazines first full-time reporter. My beat: The Internet. And God only knows how many words Ive written for the delectation of Salons online readers in the years since.

But eighteen years later, the time has finally come to move on to new challenges. The future of journalism is still being invented and theres a book I want to write. And 18 years, in this day and age, is an eternity to spend at one job.

But its still hard to get my head around the fact that Im leaving. Ive helped Salon cover five presidential elections, the dot-com boom, the bust, 9/11, the great financial crash, and the rise of the smartphone. Ive been a reporter, editor, blogger, pundit and then reporter again. I even tried to write a book on Salon.

When I started out with Salon, I sometimes had to explain to the people I was interviewing what exactly this thing we called the Internet was before I could explain what exactly an Internet magazine was. Eighteen years later, thats no longer necessary. The Internet is embedded in every facet of our existence. And a funny thing happened to me along the way. I made a slow, painful transition from cheerleader to critic. You might even say I switched sides in the tech culture wars.

Of course that kind of binary thinking betrays a mindset too locked down in ones and zeroes to capture the messiness and nuance of whats really going on. I still love technology. I love my smartphone. Im excited by new ways of doing things and the unlimited potential of the future.

And Ive always felt the duty and desire to be a critic. I will never forget how my jaw dropped when my superiors at Salon announced that we were going to have an IPO. But, but, but Id spent the previous year mocking the greed and chicanery of and endless sequence of dot-com fiascos. Oh well. What is it that Chairman Mao wrote? All contradictory things are interconnected.

Still, theres some truth to the Benedict Arnold framing. Where once I evangelized, now I feel disposed to caution. Where once I gleefully trumpeted the way everything was going to change and everybody better get on board the train before they were run over on the tracks, now I find myself wondering when all this change is going to translate into a truly better world, one with greater social justice, a better deal, instead of a raw deal, for labor, and less income inequality, rather than more. And where once I was fascinated and seduced by geek culture, now I am repelled by Silicon Valley arrogance and hubris.

What I will always treasure about Salon is how generously it supported me all along the way, whether I was ranting or reporting, to tell the truth as I saw it. From my first editor, Scott Rosenberg, to my last, Peter Finocchiaro, my idiosyncratic passions have been encouraged and cheered on. From my first editor-in-chief, David Talbot, to my last, David Daley, Salons top bosses have always let me run free. (Except for when they wanted three blog posts a day about the debt ceiling showdown for weeks on end. But Im successfully repressing those memories.)

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How I switched sides in the technology wars