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Can the gaslighting on gender and sexual identitarianism from the left get any more absurd? The Washington Post last month ran a story about how a decision by the community center in McLean, Virginia to co-sponsor a Drag StoryBook Hour for children during Pride Month has, in their awkward wording, set off culture wars.

The May election for three open seats at the community center has attracted nine candidates, including Katharine Gorka, a former Trump administration official who has criticized the diversity, inclusion, and equity policies that resulted in the drag event. WaPo reporter Antonio Olivo observed, with editorial flourish, that this is an example of how nothing is safe from the nations raging culture wars.

A suburban community center hosts a drag queen story hour (DQSH) for elementary school students, yet its conservatives who are the ones stoking the culture war by complaining about it? A Florida school board member last year chaperoned a group of elementary school children on a field trip to a gay bar and the states community centers promote DQSH, but its conservatives who are the dangerous extremists for supporting a Florida parental rights in education bill?

Drag queens do bizarre, borderline pornographic acts in front of children, but its conservatives who are responsible for miseducating and damaging American youth? Come on.

DQSH, as Gorka recently told me, is not, as the American Library Association dishonestly describes it, an effort to combat marginalization and underrepresentation. Rather, as the DQSH website itself declares, it is drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores in order to capture the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.

That word play is a bit concerning, especially given the sexually explicit nature of DQSH, and the many allegations that this pedagogy equates to grooming. A drag performer at one DQSH event in D.C. last year sang shirtless with duct tape on her breasts, sported a thong, and pretended to have fake sperm over her mouth.

Another DQSH event in Portland, Oregon in 2019 showed photos of children lounging atop of the costumed queens on the floor, grabbing at false breasts, and burying their faces in their bodies. This is not exactly light-hearted, appropriate public entertainment, notes Gorka.

It would be more accurate to say that DQSH events bring the culture war directly to Americas children, with an ideological gameplan expressly dedicated to sexualizing our nations youth and urging children to consider themselves gender dysphoric. The first DQSH event in the United States was held in San Francisco in 2015. Since then, the events have spread across the country.

As of 2020, the official DQSH website boasted almost 50 independently operated chapters across the United States, including in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. It is also supported by the American Library Association, whose extensive resource page includes information on how libraries can resist and censure people in local communities who object to these events.

Terrifyingly, the grooming charge is reality. In 2021, the former president of an organization that served as a sponsor for the Milwaukee Drag Queen Story Hour was charged with possessing child pornography depicting the sexual abuse of underage boys, including toddlers. In 2019, the Houston Public Library admitted a registered child sex offender to read to kids in a DQSH event. Allyn Walker, a transgender former assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia, sought to defend people who are attracted to minors.

As I noted in a recent Federalist article, the media and schools aggressively promoting transgenderism have created a national crisis. There has been a dramatic, unprecedented surge in people identifying with sexual identities other than heterosexual.

As Abigail Shrier documents at length in her alarming book Irreversible Damage, the consequences for those who seek hormone treatment and/or sexual reassignment surgery are lifelong. DQSH marks an attempt to push the boundaries even further, not only for children entering puberty but to early elementary school and pre-K.

This truly is a national challenge. DQSH now reportedly has chapters in 29 different states, which means there is plenty of local political work to be done. As Gorka notes, pornographic books such as All Boys Arent Blue can be found in hundreds of school libraries across the country, thanks in part to the fact that The Young Adult Library Services Association (a division of the American Library Association) put the book at the top of its Teens Top 10 book list in 2021.

This makes the lefts abusive and hyperbolic rhetoric on conservative resistance to DQSH and other grooming activities all the more insulting and infuriating. The Washington Post provocatively featured a political cartoon in April portraying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as responsible for the deaths of trans children. Liberal media outlets are claiming that conservatives should be held responsible for the suicides of children struggling with dysphoria.

Yet who encouraged prepubescent children to think about myopic topics like gender dysphoria in the first place? I certainly never heard of such things when I was in grade school in the 1990s. Who told children that their gender and sexual identity were the most important thing about them, and that misidentifying or misgendering amounted to the worst possible offense? Who is making millions of dollars off lying to and emotionally damaging impressionable, easily-manipulated children?

The answer is those advocating DQSH and the many other ubiquitous forms of sexual and gender propaganda influencing millions of American youth. It is they who are deceiving and often permanently damaging an entire generation of Americans for the sake of their own ideological agenda, the normalizing of bizarre, pornographic behavior.

No, conservatives did not inflame the culture war over trans ideology and drag queens. But we sure would like to stop it.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelors in history and masters in teaching from the University of Virginia and a masters in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.

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No, Conservatives Did Not Inflame Trans Ideology In The Culture War - The Federalist

Former Treasurer Josh Frydenbergs shock loss to an independent running on a climate action platform wasnt a fluke event. Teal independents have ousted five of Frydenbergs colleagues, all harvesting votes from conservative heartland and all calling for more action on climate change.

Amid the wreckage, Frydenberg was asked whether the Liberals needed to rethink their policies on climate change. His response that he didnt believe Australia had been well served by the culture wars on climate change deserves analysis.

Who started the culture war on climate change? And are we nearing its demise? Our research, published this month, provides some clues.

We found that approximately a third of Australians predominantly conservatives maintain that climate change is not caused by human activity, but rather by natural environmental fluctuations.

Crucially, however, we also found signs the conservative position against climate science has weakened over time. The election results reinforce this message, with a projection of six teal independents nationwide and two new Green seats in Queensland.

As such, this election may well be remembered as the first cracks in the dam wall of conservative-led climate scepticism.

Historically, science has been excluded from left and right political culture wars. Science, it was agreed, was best left to the scientists.

For example, shortly after definitive evidence emerged that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were eroding the ozone layer, an international treaty committed to phasing them out. The response was swift and apolitical: in the 1980s you couldnt tell how someone voted from knowing their stance on CFCs.

Unfortunately, this cant be said for climate science. In 1965, there was enough scientific buzz about the dangers of carbon emissions that US President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered a message to Congress sounding the alarm.

Read more: The big teal steal: independent candidates rock the Liberal vote

But the seeds of climate culture wars were sown soon after. With the ear of senior politicians and supported by think tanks and private corporations a campaign of misinformation was started that came straight from the Big Tobacco playbook: to convince people to do nothing in the face of impending danger, you need to convince them the science is not yet in.

The campaign to scramble the science on climate change was remarkably effective: in the 2000s, 97% of climate scientists agreed about anthropogenic climate change, but people incorrectly believed scientists were divided on the issue. A scientific conclusion had been effectively positioned as a debate.

Originally, this had little to do with conservatism. In the early 1990s, educated Republicans saw more scientific consensus around climate change than Democrats. But this pattern has since dramatically reversed.

Climate mitigation became perceived by conservative elites as ideologically toxic a Big Government response designed to regulate industry and the freedoms of individuals. Among the Right, politicians, think tanks, and media all started to coach other conservatives how to think about climate change.

The consequence was that a scientific issue became a political issue. Researchers investigating the predictors of climate scepticism found political allegiance blew everything else out of the water: more important than peoples personal experience of extreme weather events, their levels of education, or even their science literacy.

Read more: The teals and Greens will turn up the heat on Labor's climate policy. Here's what to expect

In the early 2010s, the culture wars on climate science in Australia escalated dramatically.

It became routine for conservative politicians to question climate science (former Prime Minister Tony Abbott famously proclaimed climate science as absolute crap in 2009) and one-third of mainstream newspaper articles were climate sceptical.

We recently analysed 25 polls conducted by Essential Research over ten years, collecting representative data on Australians beliefs about climate change.

We found scepticism levels were staggeringly high by international standards. Over the last 10 years, about four in ten Australians either said climate change isnt driven by human activities, or that they dont know whats causing it. Most of these people were conservatives.

But scepticism has tailed down from the high-water mark in 2013, and particularly among conservatives. Our data suggest the trigger for this change was the string of record-breaking annual global temperatures since 2015.

Read more: Climate wars, carbon taxes and toppled leaders: the 30-year history of Australias climate response, in brief

As the Liberal party and conservative voters ponder what happens next, its worth remembering that rejection of climate science is not an inherently conservative position. International data suggest the link between conservatism and climate scepticism is largely an issue for the US and Australia.

In most countries there is no reliable relationship. Indeed, in the UK it was the conservatives who led the phasing out of coal in their country.

Pro-climate conservative leaders around the world such as Malcolm Turnbull, Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Kasich remind us that mitigating climate change is something that dovetails with conservative values: protecting traditional ways of life, maintaining national security and independence, and catalysing green jobs and innovation.

The success of the teal independents highlights that many conservative Australians want climate action. The election result could pressure the Liberal party into deleting climate science from the culture wars.

This will not be easy. Australia is the worlds leading exporter of coal, and in the past inaction on climate change has been an effective wedge issue to harvest traditionally left-leaning, blue-collar votes.

But extracting climate policy from the culture wars would be game-changing in terms of our ability to unite in the face of the climate crisis, and conservatives are the ones most equipped to do so.

As the Liberals reflect on the loss of a generation of future leaders in blue ribbon seats, they may just decide that now is the time.

Read more: The election showed Australia's huge appetite for stronger climate action. What levers can the new government pull?

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The election shows the conservative culture war on climate change could be nearing its end - The Conversation Indonesia

Igers replacement as Disney CEO, the more conservative but less diplomatic Bob Chapek, stayed silent on the bill which provoked a mutiny at Disneys more avant-garde subsidiary Pixar. There was a staff walkout, and an irate statement claiming that nearly every moment of overtly gay affection [in Pixar films had been] cut at Disneys behest.

Chapek promptly swung hard the other way, pledging $5million towards LGBTQ rights organisations, and announcing Disneys goal to repeal the contentious law. In a ping-pong game of cultural outrage, DeSantis responded by revoking Disneys control of a district the company has run almost autonomously for half a century, declaring that in Florida, our policies [have] got to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of woke corporations.

That district which has been called a Vatican with mouse ears was incorporated in May 1966 to facilitate one of the strangest examples of Walt Disneys grandiose ambitions. Walt wanted to create an ideal community called Progress City, showcasing new concepts for urban living, so begged the right to effectively secede from Florida state law on planning, building codes and so on. After his death in December 1966, corporate enthusiasm for Progress City waned, and, in 1971, the site became Walt Disney World.

Today, it lies in a special tax area which covers 100 square kilometers in Orange and Osceola counties, and includes two small cities where Disney runs the fire brigade, ambulances and emergency medical services, drainage, electricity utilities, roads and so on. It pays for all this with its own municipal bonds, which come with tax advantages.

The effect of repealing the legislation is unclear. There is no obvious winner. Disney will lose huge tax benefits in Florida, but DeSantis has also taken massive donations from the corporation, which will dry up. Meanwhile, Orange Countys mayor has warned that the cost of taking over Disneys emergency services would be catastrophic.

The reason DeSantis is pushing this is because he wants to run for president in 2024 and hes out-Trumping Trump in using government power as an instrument in the culture war, one studio insider tells me. (Its a mark of the debates toxicity that Hollywood sources will only speak anonymously.) Theres not much Disney can do. They cant shift a park thats the size of San Francisco, so theyre stuck.

Looking down from Disney Heaven, Walt would be appalled by the woke corporation that bears his name. He was fervently pro-Republican and rabidly anti-Communist, testifying enthusiastically before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and tipping off the FBI about alleged communist animators.

For the 21st-century firm, he is an increasingly embarrassing memory: a member of the anti-Semitic Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, he took Hitlers cinematic protge, Leni Riefenstahl, on a tour of his studios just one month after Kristallnacht.

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Nazis at the gates: inside 'woke' Disney's culture wars - The Telegraph

Former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrorysaidSunday that policymakers trying to tighten gun laws must remember that fear of crime is a prominent cultural issue and that Republicans are scared of looking weak and losing primaries.

Mr. McCrory, a Republican, lost a recent U.S. Senate primary by 34 percentage points to Rep. Ted Budd, who enjoyed former President Donald Trumps endorsement.

Mr. McCrory said that,as mayor of Charlotte,he reduced the murder rate by 50% due to some tough law enforcement and some mentoring and other programs.

Even so, I lost a primary two weeks ago to a congressman who had a gun in his front trousers in a commercial, he told NBCs Meet the Press. And that was a more powerful message to the constituency voting in that primary. He was tougher. I was weaker, and yet my record of accomplishment and fighting crime is unsurpassed.

Mr. McCrory offered the example as Congress debates stricter gun laws in the wake of the shooting that killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Mr. McCrory was at the forefront of the culture wars in 2016, when he failed to win another term as governor amid pushback over a bathroom law that ordered transgender people to use the public restroom for their sex at birth. Today, Mr. Trump and others are casting him as a timid RINO Republican in name only.

SEE ALSO: Texas state senator disgusted by police response in Uvalde shooting

In that vein, Mr. McCrory said fellow Republicans are being pushed to the right on gun laws, partly as a backlash to liberal policies that result in courts releasing dangerous people.

Weve got people who dont trust right now the criminal justice system, he said. Were letting criminals go you see the DAs in L.A., the DAs in some of these cities where theyre letting criminals go crime after crime after crime, and people are going, You know, Im gonna take this into my own hands. Im gonna protect my family. Im gonna protect my home.

Originally posted here:
Former NC Gov. Pat McCrory: GOP lawmakers are pushed to right on guns due to symbolism, culture - Washington Times

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As the gunman approached her family in the corner of the restaurant, Suzanna Hupp wanted nothing more than a gun in her hand.

But Texas law in 1991 didnt allow that, leaving her defenseless. Her father was fatally shot when he ran at the gunman, unarmed. Her mother died holding him on the floor of that Lubys restaurant in Killeen. Twenty-one other diners and the gunman also died that day.

The Lubys shooting, as it became known, shocked the nation and galvanized Hupp, who escaped through a window. She spent the next 30 years, including 10 in the state Legislature, fighting to give others the option she did not have.

Unlike other mass shooting survivors who advocate for gun restrictions the parents of Sandy Hook Elementary students or the teenagers who watched their classmates die at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Hupps goal has been eliminating gun regulations.

For all the conversation about common sense and compromise, these are the two fundamental choices: The answer to preventing future tragedy is either fewer guns or more.

At their core, these philosophies do not form a Venn diagram. They are ideologically distinct and incompatible worldviews.

While there will be discussions in the coming weeks about incremental steps and public support for tightening gun regulations, the political reality is that three decades of Republican dominance in the state have erased the middle ground. In Texas, the chosen response to mass shootings is a gun and a prayer.

The states elected officials, influenced by an ultra-conservative religious movement and profit-driven gun companies, have chosen the path of least regulation, elevating firearm ownership into a referendum on faith and freedom.

Addressing the state Wednesday after a gunman massacred 19 students and two teachers, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made it clear how the state should respond to mass shootings.

In these other shootings Sutherland Springs, El Paso, Odessa, Santa Fe its God that brings a community together. Its God that heals a community, Patrick said. If we dont turn back as a nation to understanding what we were founded upon and what we were taught by our parents and what we believe in, then these situations will only get worse.

Texas is on a path that may not reflect public opinion but absolutely reflects the larger political forces sweeping the state. And its not just Texas: Republican state legislatures, data shows, are 115% more likely to pass legislation loosening gun laws in response to mass shootings.

Texas remains among the more heavily armed states in the country more than a third of Texas households have a gun, and while the rate of household gun ownership has declined nationally since the 1980s, it has not declined as quickly or consistently in Texas.

More than 1.7 million Texans have an active state firearm license, and Texas has more federally registered guns than any other state. Nationally, data shows two-thirds of gun owners own more than one gun, and nearly a third own five or more guns.

If the states are laboratories of democracy, where we figure out what policies work, you might think over time wed converge on a set of policies, said Chris Poliquin, who researches gun laws at the University of California, Los Angeles. But you dont actually see that on gun policy.

When the pickup truck crashed through the plate glass window of the Lubys in Killeen, halfway between Austin and Waco, Suzanna Hupp assumed it was an accident.

When the driver pulled out a gun, she assumed it was a robbery.

It wasnt until he started shooting picking off patrons, one by one that she realized what was happening.

It took me a good 45 seconds, which is an eternity during something like that, she said. Now, it would be the first thing your mind goes to, but back then, we hadnt had anything like that before.

It was 1991, long before the era of active shooter drills and school lockdowns. It would be another eight years until the shooting at Columbine High School and three decades before a man walked into an elementary school in Uvalde and massacred 19 students and two teachers.

It was also an era of much tighter gun laws in Texas. Hupps handgun was in the glove compartment of her car. She had not brought it inside for fear of losing her chiropractors license if caught violating the states prohibition on carrying a concealed weapon.

I realized we were just sitting ducks, she said. That is just the most sickening feeling in the world to just wait for it to be your turn.

Hupp emerged from that shooting with a new mission, and the gun rights movement had a new crusader.

I testified in, I dont know, 25 different states, some of them a couple of times, she said. And they all have concealed carry now.

Her argument has been simple but effective: Stricter gun laws would not have stopped the gunman who killed her parents. A gun would have. She believes the key to preventing more gun deaths is more guns mental health treatment and better risk assessment, too, but most importantly, more guns in more places.

Heres the truth of the matter that no one can argue with, she said. If Id had my gun that day, even if I had screwed it up somehow, it would have changed the odds, wouldnt it?

When Hupp first got involved in the gun rights movement, many states banned concealed carry and the United States was on the verge of passing a federal assault weapons ban.

But a change had been building for some time. Since the 1960s, the country had been in the process of shifting from what Wake Forest University researcher David Yamane calls gun culture 1.0 guns for sport or recreation to 2.0 guns for self-defense.

A lot of people in developed, suburbanized parts of the country who maybe previously thought they didnt need a gun anymore, because theyre not on the frontier, start to develop the notion that they might have to defend themselves, Yamane said. That link has become much more prominent these days.

Hupps story capitalized on a previously unimaginable idea that a man might come into the restaurant where youre eating and just start shooting. This free-floating fear has morphed in recent years depending on the moment gun sales spiked during the original COVID lockdowns and amid the 2020 racial justice protests, and they tend to rise after mass shootings like the one in Uvalde.

In the 90s and 2000s, people really do start to see guns increasingly as a viable option to face down crime, uncertainty and unrest, Yamane said. Theres an element of defensive gun ownership that looks at the gun as a tool of last resort for when the worst possible thing is happening.

At the same time, the National Rifle Association began bringing more of its lobbying firepower to state legislatures, fomenting the idea that the world was full of things that needed defending against.

The NRA built this identity around gun ownership and then it portrayed that identity as being threatened, said Matthew Lacombe, the author of Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force. So the minority of Americans who oppose gun control are historically more politically active than the majority that support.

In Texas, like other red states, the NRA slid sideways into the newfound alliance between evangelical Christians and the Republican Party, aligning gun rights with the religious right.

Gun ownership became a symbolic weapon in fighting the culture wars.

I am not really here to talk about the Second Amendment or the NRA, but the gun issue clearly brings into focus the war thats going on, said then-NRA President Charlton Heston in a 1997 speech. Mainstream America is depending on you to draw your sword and fight for them.

And Texas did fight. In 1994, George W. Bush beat Ann Richards for the governorship after she vetoed a concealed carry law. In the decades since, Texas passed open carry, allowed guns on college campuses and in churches, prohibited cities from passing stricter gun laws and deemed the state a Second Amendment sanctuary.

Hupp left the Legislature in 2007. In the years since, shes watched ideas she said her colleagues once dismissed as nuts pass into law like permitless carry and allowing teachers to carry guns.

As the Texas Legislature has steadily embarked on a conservative crusade, gun rights hasnt just been on the list of priorities. In many ways, its the linchpin of the whole thing.

In 2018, after a gunman killed 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre spoke to a conservative convention.

There is no greater personal, individual freedom than the right to keep and bear arms, the right to protect yourself and the right to survive, LaPierre said. It is not bestowed by man, but granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright.

The idea that God has granted Americans a fundamental right to bear arms is not a new one, but its become an article of faith.

True believers derive the inherent right to self-defense by drawing a line from the Declaration of Independence that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to the Second Amendment as the legal representation of Gods will.

This is the cross that some gun owners have chosen to bear that their defense of gun rights is not just about firearms, but about ensuring the continued manifestation of Gods will on Earth.

Andrew Whitehead, author of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, said equating gun rights with the will of the sacred essentially erases any hope of finding a middle ground.

If we do anything about gun control, we are turning our backs on Gods desire and plan for this country and the Founding Fathers and all of those things, Whitehead said. Its so strongly ingrained and has become so central to that identity, so to float the idea of gun control is almost to attack, in their view, their Christian identity.

Christian nationalism is an effort to more closely intertwine evangelical Christian morality and American civic identity. Its associated with a slate of other conservative political agenda items, all framed around bringing America and its citizens hearts back to God.

Modern Christian nationalism tightly defines a true American and a true Christian in largely white, evangelical, conservative terms, emphasizing capitalism, traditional gender roles and parents rights.

Not all evangelical Christians subscribe to Christian nationalist ideas. But some of those ideas have taken hold in the Texas Legislature in recent years.

In 2019, after the second mass shooting in Texas in a month, state Rep. Matt Schaefer, R-Tyler, tweeted that he was NOT going to use the evil acts of a handful of people to diminish the God-given rights of my fellow Texans. Period.

Schaefers tweet thread went on to say he opposed gun reform measures, including universal background checks, bans on assault weapons and mandatory gun buybacks. Instead, he said he would support praying for the victims, for protection and for hoping God would transform the hearts of people with evil intent.

He also endorsed the idea of giving every law-abiding single mom the right to carry a handgun to protect her and her kids without permission from the state, and the same for all other law-abiding Texans of age.

Schaefer did not respond to request for comment.

By citing Texans God-given rights, Schaefer and his fellow state legislators transform a gun into a symbol of morality, piety and identity.

The ability to craft and create that narrative gets politicians who might not even be that interested in Christian nationalism in touch with people who are activated by that rhetoric, said Whitehead. And that can be very powerful.

Its not just gun control. Support for Christian nationalist ideas is a predictor for support for a slew of other political agenda items, Whitehead said, including the most high-profile right now: ending abortion.

Gun rights and abortion access occupy the same philosophical space in the Texas Legislature, where the conversation is centered more on morality and theology than facts and science. Government has a responsibility to defend life in the womb, the argument goes, and individuals a right to defend themselves.

There is more of an entrenchment with the gun issue than almost any other issue, said state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin. Theres little room for any kind of discussion, any kind of debate, any willingness to look at compromises even with abortion, there was more room to negotiate a few things.

After 10 people were killed in a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, in 2018, Gov. Greg Abbott suggested considering a red flag law. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick then nixed it.

After 23 people were killed at a Walmart in El Paso and seven people were killed in Midland-Odessa in 2019, Patrick discussed expanding background checks. Instead, the Legislature passed permitless carry.

But after the mass shooting in Uvalde, neither Patrick nor Abbott indicated any interest in reforming the states gun laws. On Fox News, Attorney General Ken Paxton said its unreasonable to think we can stop bad people from doing bad things.

We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly, he said. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.

While Democrats expressed their outrage some more immediately than others none of this came as any surprise to people who study gun issues.

Poliquins research shows that Republican-dominated states tend to pass legislation in the wake of mass shootings that make guns more readily accessible. Democrat-led states dont see a statistically significant increase in gun laws of any kind after these events, in part, Poliquin hypothesized, because they already have strong gun control laws.

Republicans in Texas are acting on their partys ideology on guns, which emphasizes more guns in more places as a deterrent to acts of violence. And even if that doesnt reflect public opinion, they have no reason to anticipate backlash in the voting booth.

Even conversations about compromise are enough to rile up the faithful, and in a polarized and gerrymandered state like Texas, the political fringes are where a politician's career can be made or lost.

The more the gun control advocates try to put in place what they euphemistically call common-sense gun laws those of us that believe in the Second Amendment and everything it was set in place to protect tend to hold much tighter, Hupp said. We recognize what their ultimate goal is, which is to completely disarm citizens.

Howard, one of a minority of Democrats in the state Legislature, said Texas approach to gun policy reminds her of the bumper stickers she would see in the 1960s: America: Love it or leave it.

It feels like her fellow legislators are telling her and any Texans who want gun control if you don't like it, you can just leave, she said.

Thats not something I have felt until recent years, she said. This is my home, and the fact that what I believe and people like me believe, and the way we would like to have society structured, is just totally discounted, it feels like we don't matter.

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A gun and a prayer: How the far right took control of Texas' response to mass shootings - The Texas Tribune