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A fresh battle looms in the Victorian Liberal Party, with Opposition Leader Matthew Guy facing internal divisions over his election plan to scrap the Safe Schools program.

Twelve months after Mr Guy announced he would replace Safe Schools with a "genuine" anti-bullying initiative if he winsgovernment next year, some Liberals are angered there has been no policy work on an alternative to help LGBTI students.

The issue has become such a sensitive topic within sections of the party that a new Liberal Pride gay group headed by federal Minister Christopher Pyne's adviser, Rory Grant recently met with state education spokesman Nick Wakeling to raise concerns.

But at the same time, conservativeLiberals are holding "information forums" to attack Safe Schools and drum up further opposition among community and ethnic groups in the lead up to next year's state election.

One such forum was recently held with the Chinese community at the Victorian Liberals' Exhibition Street headquarters, featuring presentations from federal MP Michael Sukkar and state president Michael Kroger. Another recently took place in Cranbourne, with upper house state MP Inga Peulich as one of the key speakers.

The divisions are another example of internal tensions that continue to simmer within the Liberal Party, but could prove sensitive for Mr Guy as he attempts to woo voters in the political middle ground against the socially progressive Daniel Andrews.

At the federal level, a broader cultural war exploded in the past fortnight when Mr Pyne was secretly recorded at a bar with factional allies claiming that same-sex marriage could happen "sooner than everyone thinks".

While the Opposition will abolish Safe Schools,Mr Wakeling has also confirmed that the Liberals will not go to the election with a policy outlining what sort of anti-bullying program will replace it.

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"The Victorian Liberal and National Parties committed last year to scrapping the Safe Schools program and replacingit with a comprehensive anti-bullying program thatfocuseson respect and tolerance for all people. This new program will be developed upon the election of a Coalition government," he said.

However, some Liberals are concerned thatLGBTIstudents could suffer without a comprehensive plan, with one source telling Fairfax Media:"The last thing we want to see isLGBTIstudents being placed at risk."

Safe Schools was piloted in Victoria in 2010 after teachers asked for a specific set of resources to help them support students who were "coming out" as same-sex attracted or gender diverse.

But despitereceiving bipartisan support from the Baillieu/Napthine governments, the program became a political powderkeg last year after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ordered a review at the behest of right-wing MPs who claimed it was "indoctrinating children" and pushing a "radical Marxist agenda".

While federal funding ceased on July 1, the Andrews government remains committed to rolling out the programto every public school, with Education Minister James Merlino telling Fairfax Media this week:"All government secondary schools will be Safe Schools by the end of 2018."

However, some changes have quietly been made since the Education Department took over running Safe Schools this year from itscontroversial founder, Roz Ward. Among the new requirements, schools must now have a statement reflecting their commitment to creating an inclusive and safe environment for all students, an "action statement" outlining how they will do this, and they must also identify the intended outcomes they expect to achieve.

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Victorian Liberals face internal divisions over Safe Schools ahead of election - The Age

Police in West Hartford say a Connecticut man wrote threatening anti-Trump graffiti on an elementary school with the hope it would look like liberal hate speech.

The Hartford Courant reports 32-year-old West Hartford resident Steven Marks has been ordered to stay off Morley Elementary School property.

Hes charged with third-degree criminal mischief and breach of peace, and a judge will hear his case Aug. 2.

Police say Marks wrote several phrases threatening President Donald Trump and praising the left on areas of the playground June 15.

Police say Marks told officers he vandalized the school in West Hartford out of anger toward liberals.

Marks previously told the Courant he was sorry, saying it was a stupid thing.

He declined to comment after his recent court appearance.

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Man writes anti-Trump graffiti hoping 'liberals' would be blamed - Wisconsin Gazette (blog)

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Donald Trump's presidency is a disaster. But it's a disaster that may teach liberals a valuable moral lesson.

Most liberals tend to view morality in horizontal terms as a matter of securing and protecting the rights of free and equal individuals. This leads liberals to emphasize procedures and processes that ensure fairness for all. Many other liberals, especially those primarily concerned about issues wrapped up with identity politics, highlight another horizontal aspect of morality: recognition of the value and worth of different groups. This goes beyond equal rights to demand that fellow citizens and the government itself actively affirm the goodness of different ways of life. People don't merely have rights that give them the freedom to live as they wish. They actually deserve to enjoy positive affirmation in the public square.

Leaving aside the very real and important conflicts between these two constellations of liberal moral concern, they both presume and seek to enforce equality or egalitarianism. That's why I've described them as fostering a horizontal vision of morality.

But egalitarianism doesn't exhaust moral experience. On the contrary, morality also has a different dimension one having to do not with equality but with inequality, distinction, nobility, elevation, sanctity, excellence, and virtue. This vertical aspect of morality is absolutely crucial for understanding politics, but liberals tend to neglect it or at least took it for granted until Trump became president.

Trump morally offends liberals in many ways. A number of them have to do with horizontal concerns: offenses against the rights of various individuals and groups, such as the poor, minorities, immigrants, and Muslims. The liberal response to these offenses is to reaffirm the transgressed rights and attack the president for his divisiveness, cruelty, and failure to affirm equality for all.

Then there are Trump's myriad offenses against the rule of law. In response to these, liberals reaffirm the principle and insist that the president be held to the same exacting standards that have applied to his predecessors. Again, equality is the norm and the measure, across presidential administrations over time.

But there's another way that Trump offends liberals (as well as many on the center-right): with his angry and insulting tweets, attacks on the press, and continuous stream of lies. What makes this behavior so bad? Charles Blow of The New York Times spoke for many in a recent column that used a series of terms one now regularly hears tripping from liberal lips: "We must remind ourselves that Trump's very presence in the White House defiles it and the institution of the presidency. Rather than rising to the honor of the office, Trump has lowered the office with his whiny, fragile, vindictive pettiness."

Every italicized word is a term of distinction, referring to and presuming the possibility of making vertical moral distinctions: pure and defiled, rising and falling, honorable and dishonorable, higher and lower. The same kind of distinctions are implied every time someone describes Trump's actions or statements as "unpresidential." Since he's the president, the claim would seem to be self-refuting unless, that is, we believe that the office of the presidency itself, apart from the behavior of any particular president, is honorable, noble, elevated, exalted, something to which we rightly look up and from which a particular president can diverge or fall short.

There are many ways to conceive of and think about such vertical moral distinctions. Aristotle treated them as woven into the fabric of political life and because human beings are political animals, he also assumed they were woven into the fabric of human life, where they could be studied to teach us crucially important lessons about the longings that most powerfully move the human soul. Meanwhile, the political-theological traditions within Judeo-Christianity appeal to the God divinely revealed in the Bible to explain, limit, and complete these vertical moral intuitions. In our time, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has devised his own empirically grounded theory of moral foundations that gives vertical moral distinctions their due.

The liberal political tradition from Hobbes to Rawls, by contrast, has always been suspicious of the vertical dimension of morality, worrying that it fosters aristocratic and illiberal passions that decent politics must constrain, thwart, or channel into less publicly dangerous pursuits. Yet the most thoughtful liberal thinkers have also understood that decent politics necessarily presupposes that citizens affirm the reality of such distinctions.

For those liberals inclined to forget the need for them, or to complacently assume that they will always be there to draw on and elevate public life, the jarring experience of living under President Trump is a potent reminder of just how crucially important (and fragile) vertical moral distinctions really are. It also demonstrates that transgressions of vertical ideals can feel just as wrong just as much a violation of an intrinsic standard of right as transgressions against horizontal-egalitarian notions of equal dignity before the law.

If the nation's bracing experience of life with a profoundly unpresidential president manages to open liberals to the importance of the vertical dimension of morality, it will have had at least one positive result.

See more here:
What liberals can learn about morality from Donald Trump - The Week Magazine

A country afraid of words.

The late, great George Carlin first famously spoke of the seven words you can never say on TV in 1972.

Since then, some of those words have changed. Television has changed. If were talking HBO, Showtime or Netflix, you can say whatever you want.

But when it comes to political discourse on television and in our personal lives, we seem to have strangely embraced a new set of words that we are, for some reason, not allowed to say.

They are words like lie, liar, bigot and stupid.

This is a dangerous prospect.

Im not suggesting that every political discussion should devolve into name-calling or that we shouldnt be respectful of others. But I am suggesting that we should call lies lies, bigots bigots, insincere people insincere, and stupid or baseless accusations stupid.

Carlin, of course, once also noted that we have no more stupid people in this country; everybody has a learning disorder.

But, kidding aside, stupid notions and stupid policies can have actual effects and should be condemned as stupid, not simply different. When someone presents alternative facts, another person should alternate from the usual civil discourse. For some reason, weve gotten rid of shame when shaming is often helpful.

Weve allowed the dishonest to continue to be dishonest without any fear of repercussions. Jeffrey Lord, Boris Epshteyn, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and their ilk can continually dissemble on live TV without any concern that anyone will call them out on it.

They dont have different points of view; theyre just plain dishonest and greedy people looking to benefit from their dishonesty.

Liberals have made the mistake of tolerating dishonesty for too long. We tolerate it so much, in fact, that were often dishonest with ourselves: wed like to believe that the Trump supporters we know our friends, coworkers, and relatives somehow arent bigots.

Yet the rational part of us knows that they either agreed with Trumps racist, bigoted and misogynistic statements and policies or those statements and policies didnt bother them enough not to vote for him.

Heck, Trump was a key figure in the birther movement; he said he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country (and, no, he did not say temporarily) and is currently pursuing that policy; he said would consider having a registry for Muslims; he said that Mexico was sending us rapists; that a judge of Mexican descent couldnt be impartial and that he liked to grab womens private parts. Yet we pretend that his supporters somehow arent bigoted. It doesnt make sense and we know it.

During the presidential campaign, I talked about the War on Truth, and now it is clear that it is indeed an all-out war, with Trump consistently attacking and discrediting reliable media and sending out his minions to do the same.

Liberals have woken up to this fact, yet they still dont know how to combat it. The Republican disinformation machines of Breitbart, Fox News, Newsmax, et al, plus Trumps own Twitter account, have created a scenario in which we are no longer battling on the same field, yet liberals keep acting as if opponents motives are just as pure as theirs and that they are just as informed.

But were not debating David Frum, George Will, or William F. Buckley anymore.

I have a crazy idea: When Kayleigh McEnany or Jason Miller or Sean Hannity lies, we should call them on it not later or off-screen, but right to their faces the moment they do it.

Weve entered this dystopian world wherein being a bigot or a liar is OK, but calling someone a bigot or liar is not.

Respect is something thats earned. Youre not supposed to respect anothers opinion when its insincere or based on prejudice. If you pretend to respect opinions that you know are dishonest, you yourself are being dishonest.

Liberals have to stop congratulating themselves for being so civil and concentrate instead on being 100 percent honest.

FDR famously declared (about the monied interests) that they are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred. He didnt sit around and worry over hurting his opponent's feelings. And his successor, Give em Hell Harry Truman, was no different, once stating, I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Liberals should learn how to give a little hell.

Ross Rosenfeld is a political pundit who has written for Newsday, the New York Daily News, Charles Scribner's, MacMillan, Newsweek.com, Primedia and The Hill.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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It's time liberals start calling out conservatives for 'alternative facts' - The Hill (blog)

For at least two and a half centuries, Americans have argued over the proper size and scope of a central government. Though the abuses of power by a distant monarch and legislature sparked our revolt against England, and though Americans have always remained suspicious of putting too much authority in the hands of our own federal government, the general drift over the years has been toward more centralized power, and thus more centralized decision-making over important issues.

But we may have hit peak centralization.

The very election of Donald Trump spoke to the extreme contempt with which many Americans have come to hold the federal government. Many Americans held their noses while voting like never before, out of a sense of desperation that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton the embodiment of the political class that earned their contempt represented a point of no return regarding the concentration of power. From health care to immigration to energy to the judiciary (and the host of issues it considers from the First Amendment to the Second and beyond) a Clinton presidency could have locked into place that drift toward centralization. Instead, most conservatives and independents cast their lot with a man who at least offered a chance at preventing that.

But to many liberals now, Trumps presidency represents a terrifying mirror image of what the right had feared. They see his actions and attempted actions as a retrogression to be Resisted.Such is their anti-Trump fervor that his presidency appears to be sparking a serious rethinking of their long-held appreciation for federal power. I suggested somewhat tongue-in-cheek right after the election that this should happen. The clearest and perhaps most prominent example that it may actually be coming true can be found within this essay in Politico by the urbanist Richard Florida. Here is the key excerpt:

Its time to confront a simple but stunning fact: When it comes to urban policy and much else, the federal government is the wrong vehicle for getting things done and for getting them done right. Whether it is controlled by the left or the right, no single top-down, one-size-fits-all strategy can address the desires and needs of a country as geographically, culturally and economically divided as America. Big cities and metropolitan regions, far-flung exurbs, suburbs and rural areas are very different kinds of places, with vastly different desires and needs.

If we are ever going to rebuild our cities and our nation as a whole, including our suburbs and rural areas, there is really only one way forward, and it does not and cannot start in Washington. It can only come from our many and varied communities, who know best how to address and solve their own problems and build their own economies. And if that sounds like going back to an old-fashioned, conservative conception of how federalism should work a kind of extreme localism to address the sorts of issues liberals worry about, so be it. America needs nothing less than a revolution in how we govern ourselves, or well only end up poorer, angrier and more divided.

Read the whole thing, but this excerpt neatly summarizes what conservatives have long argued. The thinking is old-fashioned only in the sense liberals have long since deluded themselves into believing more-centralized power could only be good, because it would inevitably be used to achieve their desired ends. That might have been true as long as the right was chiefly devoted to limiting and devolving federal power. But with a president coming from the right who instead is quite interested in seeing what he can do with this large federal hammer the left spent decades fashioning, it seems some liberals are suddenly gaining a Strange New Respect for returning power to those governments closest to the people. Threatening to withhold federal funds to coerce acquiescence to federal prerogatives is apparently less appealing when it comes to sanctuary cities harboring illegal immigrants rather than (as Obamacare attempted) states refusing to expand Medicaid. It seems to have taken Trump to demonstrate to liberals what Reagan meant when he said a government powerful enough to give you what you want is also powerful enough to take it away.

I dont want to overstate this nascent trend, if we can yet call it a trend (Florida names other liberals who agree with him later in his essay). You of course still hear many liberals whose response to Trump on, say, health care is to elect Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in 2020 and get on with the mission of single payer. But the more honest liberals surely recognize what this sentiment amounts to: Get Better Leaders.

The problem is Get Better Leaders is neither a political philosophy nor much of a plan. For one, its fraught with risk, as the election of Trump seems to have shown. And consider the possibility, if a strong-federal-government right truly becomes ascendant, that what follows Trump is not better but perish the thought, gentle progressivist reader! worse. If you dont want a president who can so terrify you with his actions, the best answer is not to have such a powerful president (and executive branch and federal government more generally). More fundamentally, Get Better Leaders is the very conceit of governance our Founding Fathers rejected because of their appropriately dim view of human nature.

It would be ironic if what it took for the left to acknowledge the wisdom of the rights arguments for less-centralized governance were not the arguments themselves, but a president coming from the right who wields power like one from the left. I guess seeing really is believing.

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Opinion: How Trump is prodding liberals to agree with conservatism ... - MyAJC (blog)