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If you say something even vaguely critical, or something that is even perceived as critical of the move to allow boys and girls to transition from one gender to the next, you run the risk of being suspended from social media, fired from your job or shunned by your friends. That can even happen if you are a respected United States senator at the confirmation hearing of a deputy secretary of health. Well get to that in a minute, so hold that thought.

I sometimes make jokes about the fact that people are now using personal pronouns in the way prior generations used hair color, tattoos and love beads: An effort to express ones identity. Th people who usually laugh at the jokes are the ones who understand that playing around with grammar to make yourself feel better about whoever it is you think you are is rather ridiculous. The ones who dont laugh are the kind of people who think that (1) a single person calling himself they is perfectly reasonable and (2) would absolutely let their adolescent daughter take hormones so she can become their adolescent son.

Have I been canceled yet? Are you still able to read this column? On the assumption that you can, lets move on to the respected U.S. senator.

Last week, Rand Paul questioned Pennsylvanias erstwhile Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine, about gender reassignment procedures for adolescents. We used to call it sex-change operation, but in this more enlightened age with experts who tell us that there are more than just two genders, we use the term gender reassignment. I suppose thats because we dont want to admit that anyone is really changing anything. Or, as some have said, God doesnt make mistakes, humans just mislabel.

Levine was appearing before a Senate committee on her nomination to be assistant health secretary in the Biden administration. Rand asked her a very pointed question about a fundamental trans issue, which is extremely fair since Biden has made a very big deal about nominating a trans woman for such an exalted federal office:

Do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life-changing decision as changing ones sex? Critics have pointed out that Sen. Paul used the wrong terminology since they would argue nothing is being changed, let alone sex. Remember, its gender, and its being reassigned. But even with that little clarification, there was no answer from Levine.

Then Paul asked, Do you support the governments intervening to override the parents consent to give a child puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or amputation surgery of breasts and genitals?

Again, Levine did not answer the question, other than to politely suggest that she would be more than willing to meet with the senator if and when she were confirmed, so they could hash these things out after the fact.

Of course, the whole point of a confirmation hearing is to determine whether someone is even qualified to be in a position to hash these sort of things out, and it is incumbent upon the senative to advise and give consent on any nomination that requires the confirmation.

Rand Paul was destroyed in the media because of his blunt comments. The legacy print media went after him as a bigot, and the LGBTQ (hard to keep up, am I missing a letter?) and their cis/straight/single-pronouned allies went ballistic. How dare he question whether a 13-year-old is qualified to make such momentous, permanent decisions about their bodies! How dare he suggest that a kid who isnt yet old enough to drive a car is, however, able to determine whether he wants his penis or her breasts removed, or whether they should take drugs to block the onset of natural puberty?

I mean, who does he think he is, a doctor? (Actually, yes, he is. But lets not let the facts get in the way.)

This was not Marjorie Taylor Greene getting into a dust up with her colleague in the House, the one who planted a rainbow flag outside of her office to support her trans daughter.

This was not some Facebook commentary about there only being two genders or a Twitter hashtag like #BelieveTheScience.

This was a medical doctor using his expertise to help inform his obligations as an elected public official. This was a senator, stating the case that so many of us believe to be the truth but who are prevented from making, namely, that allowing adolescents to make these decisions is tantamount to child abuse.

There are numerous cases of children who were allowed by their parents to choose their identities and then dealt with the devastating consequences later in life. One of them was profiled in a National Review article. Keira Bell was a 14-year-old who read about transsexuals on the internet, convinced her parents to let her have surgery, had her breasts removed, and now at the age of 23 deeply regrets the move. In the piece written by Madeleine Kearns, she says: I made a brash decision as a teenager, as a lot of teenagers do, trying to find confidence and happiness, except now the rest of my life will be negatively affected.

You might say that each case is different, and that we shouldnt judge how someone decides to deal with complicated identity questions. But society does that all the time, when it comes to kids. We make laws that protect them from themselves, and we even limit the authority of parents in order to safeguard the welfare of minors. We also have laws that absolve minors from criminal liability. We erect walls between what they want, and what they need.

We do it because kids are not equipped to make these decisions, no matter what the experts in this new boutique area of gender science might say.

Thats not bigotry, my friends. Thats common sense.

Its troubling that Dr. Levine cant admit it.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a Delaware County resident. Her column appears Thursday and Sunday. Email her at cflowers1961@gmail.com.

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Christine Flowers: We have to protect children from themselves - The Delaware County Daily Times

Trans activists, like Bidens pick as assistant health secretary, Rachel Levine, say schoolkids can choose to have puberty blockers and sex-change surgery. But confused children are too young to make such life-changing decisions.

We all know the mantra by now trans women are women, and trans men are men. Deep down we may know it to be nonsense, but unless we pay it lip service we risk being labelled as bigots or worse despicable people who question the very humanity of trans people, to use the language of theNew York Times.

Victims of this ideology include women, whose boundaries and spaces are being violated by male people who claim to feel like women, and trans women like me who had been getting on with our lives. Nobody consulted with me before social justice warriors made us their cause clbre. Depicted falsely as one of the most vulnerable groups on the planet, many of us are relatively privileged, only transitioning after our male bodies helped us secure our places in society.

But the biggest casualties in my view are children. Confused young people, perhaps struggling with identity and nascent sexuality, are being told that if they are unhappy with their sex, then they can change it, with potentially disastrous consequences on their bodies. Nevertheless, this has become a major industry. The US Human Rights Campaignlists no fewer than 57 clinical care programs for gender-expansive children and adolescents in the United States and Canada alone. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and referrals for surgery are the go-to treatments.

Last week, Republican Senator Rand Paul decided he needed answers when Rachel Levine appeared before him. Levine is President Bidens nominee for assistant secretary of health and, like me, transitioned in mid-life after fathering children. One would expect, therefore, that Levine would be aware of the issues and dangers facing transgender-identifying children. Even so, Pauls question could not be clearer:

Dr. Levine, do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life changing decision as changing ones sex?

Levines attempt at obfuscation appeared to rely on a prepared text, Transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field, with robust research and standards of care that have been developed. After Paul explained his question, the exchange descended into farce when Levine again refused to answer and repeated word-for-word, Transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field... Paul was unimpressed at Levines reticence and noted, the witness refused to answer the question.

The video clip of the exchange encapsulates the dire state of what should be a serious political debate about the medicalisation of children:

Equally remarkable was Senator Patty Murrays response to the episode. Murray praised Levines thoughtful and medically informed responses, and even appeared to suggest that Levine had not been treated with respect.

In his questioning, Paul cited the case of Keira Bell, a British woman who had been prescribed hormone therapy as a teenager. Now aged 23, she regrets it. Recently, she brought a case to the High Court of England and Wales against her erstwhile clinic. She claimed that she had been too young to give consent. I am relieved that the courtagreed with her. Throughout childhood, I struggled with gender dysphoria and had gender affirming treatment been available to children in the 1980s I would have clamoured for it. But at best it is a palliative solution; had I taken it in my teens, I would never have had children of my own.

Following the Bell judgment, public health clinics in England and Wales can no longer prescribe puberty blocking drugs to children without the permission of a court, to protect young people from the folly of their own immaturity. But even so, children are not safe. Where there is money to be made, unscrupulous practitioners will look for openings.

On Saturday, we learned thatGender GP an online clinic working with children in the UK was prepared to use a legal loophole to supply testosterone, a class 3 controlled drug, to someone they thought was a 15-year-old girl. She was actually an undercover reporter at the Daily Telegraph. But Gender GP did not know that, having never actually met their patient, let alone examined them, and had never spoken to her parents.

Campaigning group forwomen.scot described it as a shocking dereliction of medical care.

Pictured in the featured image is Marianne Oakes, the lead counsellor at Gender GP, and a transwoman.Personaltestimony on the Gender GP website suggests that Oakes transitioned recently, having first been referred for treatment in September 2015, three months after qualifying as a therapeutic counsellor, with a view to realising my dream of working as a female therapist.

Oakes told the 15-year-old girl/Telegraph reporter that they did not require her parents permission. Staff accepted at face value the reporters stated belief that she was really male, telling her were not worried about your truth because theres no debate about that.

The Telegraph went on toreport that,

[The Prescription] was signed by a doctor in Romania, who the Telegraph has identified as a geriatrician also trained in administering Botox. GenderGP does not offer patients the chance of an appointment with her, even though she authorises the medication. Instead, they are directed to a doctor in Egypt, who told the reporter that it was excellent that, aged 15, she knew she never wanted to have children.

Appallingly, British children continue to access cross sex hormones, despite the Keira Bell judgment that they cannot even consent to puberty blockers.

Vulnerable children are being put at risk. The adults involved need to be called to account, transgender adults included. We may have first-hand experience of gender dysphoria, but we have no more idea than anyone else what it might feel like to be a member of the opposite sex. Nor can adult transitioners like Levine, Oakes or me, indeed ever really empathise with children who are being forced into life changing decisions about their future fertility before they know what it means to be an adult.

I never thought I would agree with a right-winger like Rand Paul. I started out as a socialist and I think I am still a socialist, but however wide the political gulf between us, it is transcended by something far more important the safeguarding of children.

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As a socialist and a trans woman, I never thought Id agree with Rand Paul. But on this issue of protecting children, hes right - RT

I know many liberals will disagree with me on this, but in 1988 there really was a liberal media. I found it very hard to get honest-to-God news that interested me as a conservative, even as a White House staffer. It had to be sought out in small-circulation magazines like Human Events and National Review or from the very few conservative columnists in major newspapers.

When the established media lost its gatekeeper function, it led to a vast proliferation of crackpot ideas that circulate unimpeded today.

I didn't need validation of my views, as was the case with many grassroots conservatives. I wanted intellectual ammunition I could use to design and promote conservative policies in government. Contrary to popular belief, the Reagan administration took analysis and research seriously.

Unlike the Trump White House, which often sent out documents with typos in them (a firing offense when I worked there), the policy development process in the Reagan White House was reasonably competent.

A key reason for making sure that there were proper analysis and documentation for administration proposals is that they would have been picked apart in the media otherwise. Not only was the American press generally skeptical of our philosophy, but it was exponentially more powerful in those days and could make or break a policy proposal very easily.

Frankly, I think Democrats on Capitol Hill, who controlled the House of Representatives during Reagan's entire eight-year term, tended to outsource their criticism of Republicans to The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Beat reporters for the major newspapers were gatekeepers, refusing to even mention any proposal or idea that was insufficiently worked out, lacked empirical data or academic support or just seemed stupid. Back when I worked for Jack Kemp, it took me years to get The Wall Street Journal tax reporter to mention Kemp's tax cut planeven after it had been endorsed by the Journal's editorial page.

Liberal Media Rules

And in those days before the internet, politicians were very heavily dependent on the mainstream media to get out their messages. About the only other way of doing so was direct mail. But printing and mailing newsletters was very expensive, and it took an enormous amount of effort to build a mailing list.

Like it or not, conservatives in the pre-talk radio, pre-Fox News, pre-internet era had to work through the liberal media and play by its rules.

Rules of the once-dominant mainstream media were mostly good. When the established media lost its gatekeeper function, it led to a vast proliferation of crackpot ideas that circulate unimpeded today. Even members of the prestige media have found themselves unable to keep nutty conspiracy theories from affecting their reporting as they document what is motivating Republican voters and politicians. But in reporting the existence of crackpot ideas and fake news, the mainstream media implicitly validates them and publicizes them.

When Limbaugh first went on the air, he was a breath of fresh air for conservativeseven those working in the White House. He was an essential source of news. As all of his listeners know, Limbaugh hoarded a "stack of stuff" consisting of news clippings, press releases, faxes and whatnot that caught his eye and formed the basis for his monologues.

He was as much a news consolidator and reviewer as he was a commentator in those days. And he frequently had an intelligent spin on the news, often picked up from the many politicians and policymakers he talked to off the air.

Master of Radio

Of course, Limbaugh was also a blowhard, and his massive hubris was off-putting. But it was part of his schtick and one of the reasons he was popular. Say whatever else you like about him, but Limbaugh was a masterful radio personality. He really understood and loved the medium. His foray into television just didn't suit his style and was soon abandoned.

As is well known, what made Limbaugh's breakthrough moment possible was the abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine by Reagan's Federal Communications Commission in 1987. Previously, the expression of political opinions on television or radio required that time be provided for differing opinions. Since this was costly, it was easier for stations simply to present no opinions at all.

Those who want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine often fail to note its limitations. It applied only to over-the-air broadcast channels. It didn't apply to newspapers, magazines or cable television, which was already becoming a force. CNN went on the air in 1980. Naturally, it did not apply to the internet or any of its content.

Moreover, the Fairness Doctrine was under heavy legal assault as an infringement on the First Amendment. Personally, I think it was inevitable that the Fairness Doctrine would have been killed by the Supreme Court if it hadn't been repealed.

Savior of AM Band

The abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine coincided with more sweeping changes in the radio market. For some years, the AM band had been in decline as people switched to FM, where sound quality was better for listening to music.

But the AM band was perfect for talk radio, and that became its financial savior. Once Limbaugh showed how profitable talk radio could be, it took over AM radio, where it appealed to a certain demographic of working men and women and others who liked listening to the radio while they worked.

One reason I enjoyed listening to Limbaugh is that I had his private email address. Oftentimes, while he was on the air, I would have some thought or an obscure fact that fit with whatever he was pontificating about. Literally within minutes, I would hear him repeating what I told him. It was exhilarating.

Perhaps the most important long-term effect Limbaugh had on the media is that his success helped convince Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch to launch Fox News. Longtime Republican political consultant and television producer Roger Ailes drew up the plans for Fox and helped Limbaugh go national with his radio show. (For almost 20 years before meeting Ailes, Limbaugh had labored in the vineyards of small radio stations in Kansas City, Sacramento and elsewhere.) Without Ailes's help, Limbaugh would have never become what he was.

No One on the Left

It's also well known that liberal commentators have never been able to duplicate the success of Limbaugh. Even Al Franken, a skilled entertainer with deep political knowledge, failed to find an audience for a contra-Limbaugh radio show. I think the reason for this failure is simpler than it appears: Progressives already have their own talk radio network with a broad reachNational Public Radio. It's not as ideological as conservative talk radio, of course, but NPR produces exactly what liberals want radio to do, and it does so very, very well. Moreover, I think liberals are basically content with the mainstream media: The New York Times fulfills their news needs almost perfectly. That's why they get so upset when it strays from the liberal path by publishing conservative commentary.

In truth, the Times attracts precisely zero conservative subscribers by publishing the likes of Bret Stephens. I know this from many years in the conservative movement. I even remember the first moment when I realized how closed the conservative mind had become.

It was in 2004. As I have mentioned earlier, I had been quoted extensively in an article by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind that ran in the Times magazine. When I asked my conservative friends what they thought of it, they universally said that they never read that leftist rag. I was shocked because I had built my career on getting stuff into the Times and had gotten pretty good at it.

I stopped listening to Limbaugh and watching Fox News in 2006, as I was beginning to shift my perspective leftward. I didn't do this so much because I no longer agreed with their ideology, but because I disagreed with their news judgment. I found myself paying attention to stupid memes circulating on the right that did not deserve any attention at all.

One of the most important things Fox and the rest of the right-wing media do is establish prioritiestelling their audience what is news and what isn't. To this day, I'm not sure if Fox viewers even know what happened on Jan. 6 or that Donald Trump was impeached for it.

Even before Limbaugh's death, there were press reports indicating that right-wing talk radio was dying. (And Fox's ratings are also collapsing.) I seriously doubt that the Limbaugh phenomenon can be duplicated, although his syndicator will undoubtedly try. I suspect that AM radio will find something other than right-wing outrage to sustain it in the post-Limbaugh erathough what that proves to be is likewise far from clear at the moment.

Bruce Bartlett is president of the DCReport board of directors.

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A Never Trump colleague asks why I didnt support a second impeachment of Donald Trump, given that I say that I want the conservative movement to move beyond Trump. The answer isnt difficult.

For starters, the impeachment trial from the outset was a political spectacle, a rash judgment by Democrats. First, there was the debatable question of whether a non-sitting president can be impeached. Moreover, there were crucial questions not only of whether Trump instigated what happened on Jan. 6 but how House Democrats could immediately rush to an impeachment vote before an investigation had even been done on whether what happened was pre-planned well in advance (as everyone from the likes of CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The Washington Post and the FBI have reported), or whether those assaulting the building started before Trump even finished his speech (The Washington Post and The New York Times printed timelines before Democrats evidently thought of one). Theres also the crucial question of why tens of thousands present at the Trump speech were not instigated vs. a few hundred who allegedly were.

In sum, this was a snap House vote without an investigation, without witnesses (not even in the Senate trial) and without due process against the person charged. A political rush job and hack job by Democrats. The country needs to move on. You want unity, then pursue unity.

Of course, the deeper motivation by Democrats and certain anti-Trump Republicans was to use a second impeachment as a tool to disqualify Trump from running again. Thats what perplexed my colleague about my position: If I genuinely would like to see the conservative movement move beyond Donald Trump, why not support a move to disqualify him from running again? The answer is that the ends dont justify the means that is, a partisan exploitation of the impeachment process.

But as to the matter of the conservative movement moving beyond Trump, thats something Ive longed for since 2015, regardless of whether I concede that Trump as president did things that conservatives should applaud, from being a surprising defender of religious liberty and the pro-life position, to fracking and energy independence and deregulation, to making solid court picks, and more. Still, I saw from the outset, especially as a college professor, Trumps deleterious effect on young conservatives in particular. Of course, not all were repelled by him entire conservative youth groups like Turning Point USA became pro-Trump organizations. Overall, however, many young conservatives dropped out. They found nothing attractive about Trump.

Importantly, this is completely different from what happened in the 1980s, when droves of youth were attracted to conservativism because of the inspiring person and winsome message of Ronald Reagan. The likes of an Alex P. Keaton (played by Michael J. Fox) on Family Ties reflected a common kind of young conservative. I was one of them. As the conservative editorial page editor of The Pitt News in the late 1980s, I had a bunch of fellow writers who had been attracted to the movement.

I can speak to this keenly right now as Im writing the history of The American Spectator, which in the 1980s thrived among young conservatives. In the early 1980s, the notables who started their careers at Spectator were as diverse as bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell, prominent Never Trumpers John Podhoretz and Bill Kristol and George Will, and academic Mark Lilla, a Harvard Ph.D. and faculty member at Columbia University, who today writes for The New York Times and New York Review of Books, and has penned thoughtful works critiquing liberalism.

It was cool to be a conservative then. It was intellectually stimulating. It was fun.

I was a conservative back then in the 1980s because being a conservative was the most intellectually exciting option out there, Gladwell told me. It was where all the free thinking and the innovation was. The American Spectator was a key part of that. I think it attracted lots of young talent because it gave us all a chance to thumb our nose at the establishment.

What Im urging is to move the conservative movement beyond Donald Trump, with messengers like Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Kristi Noem, Dan Crenshaw and so many others (I could list pundits at length). This is a major moment of opportunity for a movement to regain its strength. Conservatism is about an enduring order that, well, endures. It transcends. It now must transcend Donald Trump.

But until then, you dont pursue a political spectacle of an impeachment trial intended to disqualify Trump from office simply for the purpose of getting there.

Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and chief academic fellow of the Institute for Faith & Freedom at Grove City College.

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Paul Kengor: Moving the movement beyond Trump - TribLIVE

The Republican Party is broken.

If Mitch McConnell were just another Republican senator, I'd say he was the eighth bravest. The seven bravest are the ones who voted to convict Donald Trump.

For weeks I've been saying that if you honestly believe the Constitution forbids the Senate from convicting a former president (who was impeached while in office), you're free to do so. I think it's a profoundly wrong and dangerous view, creating precisely the "January exception" that impeachment managers warned about. But if that's your sincere opinion, you should be the one denouncing Trump's actions more than anyone else. You should be full of anger, sorrow and frustration that this lamentable oversight by the founders -- which doesn't actually exist -- prevents you from doing what the facts and morality warrant: convicting Trump for his hideous behavior leading up to, and during, the events of Jan. 6.

That is precisely what McConnell did Saturday, delivering a blistering and accurate denunciation of Trump's moral, political and, possibly, criminal culpability. And while McConnell was wrong in his vote, he at least voiced the truth, something beyond the likes of those governed solely by political appetites -- Sens. Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio et al.

It's always better to acknowledge the right, even when doing wrong, than to deny that wrong even happened. Hypocrisy, after all, is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

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The problem is that McConnell, whom I have long defended from many of his more extreme critics, is not just another senator. He is the Republican leader in the Senate and the highest-ranking GOP official in the country. More importantly, he was the majority leader Jan. 7, and by all accounts his views of Trump's behavior were the same then as they are today.

If he wanted to, McConnell could have taken action to avoid the alleged problem of trying a former president by supporting a trial while Trump was still in office. Given the rules of the Senate, that effort may well have failed. But McConnell didn't want to try for partisan reasons.

As Yogi Berra might say, when McConnell came to a fork in the road, he took it.

McConnell's theory is that he can have it both ways: simultaneously denounce Trump and provide him cover in the hope of reconciling the divisions in the party that cannot be reconciled. McConnell, as shrewd as he is, will fail to satisfy both Republican and independent voters (and donors) horrified by Trump and the movement of those who want Trump and Trumpist populism to define the party.

McConnell's choice is emblematic of the GOP's rot. Republicans claim to fight for fidelity to the Constitution, traditional morality, law and order, economic liberty, fiscal responsibility, etc. As a conservative, I believe these are things worth fighting for. But most Republicans today don't see them as principles to stand for; they see them as slogans to campaign on.

That's the only way to reconcile their sloganeering with their slavish support for Donald Trump -- a thrice-married, admitted sexual predator who, as president, lavished praise on dictators, imposed tariffs with abandon, tried to steal an election so brazenly that he was impeached twice, and set in motion a multipronged anti-constitutional assault on Congress and democracy that left dead cops in its wake and the impeachment clause of the Constitution a dead letter.

"Courage," C.S. Lewis wrote, "is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality."

Again and again, at the moment of highest political reality, the bulk of the Republican Party has chosen Trump -- and the voters who dominate the primaries -- over all other considerations.

Graham, who spouts conservative campaign slogans so unctuously that he's left indelible grease stains in TV studios all around Washington, admitted on "Fox News Sunday" what his top priority actually is: "I'm into winning."

Recall that on Jan. 7, before he was intimidated by the MAGA movement he now once again champions, Graham blamed Trump for the Capitol attack. He now blames the police for not killing more Trump supporters, and he blames House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (whom some of those supporters wanted to kill) for not being better prepared for Trump's mob.

Graham personifies political cowardice. Whether cowardice can lead to "winning" remains to be seen. And whether such winning is worth the price the Republican Party is willing to pay, only history can answer.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

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