Today marks the start of the left’s Holy Season – Pride month.
While you can expect the usual rainbow virtue signaling from America’s leading corporations, this year feels different than years past. As the backlash against LGBT propaganda in ad campaigns, department stores and pro sports comes to a head, the left is feeling cornered.
A cornered activist is the most vicious. They will throw everything they’ve got at forcing corporations to genuflect on the altar of Pride in new and creative ways. A look at the L.A. Dodgers recent capitulation to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is a bad sign for what’s to come. (RELATED: Conservatives Must Learn One Simple Lesson After MLB Team Panders To Left-Wing LGBT Group)
News coverage invariably frames resistance as an “anti-LGBTQ” backlash. The implication is that any disapproval of Pride month celebrations — no matter how obscene, blasphemous, or age inappropriate they are — is a manifestation of bigotry rather than any legitimate or reasonable critique. Democrats and their media allies clearly see Pride as a weapon to clobber conservatives with in the run-up to the 2024 election.
The question then becomes how should conservatives react? A recent Twitter beef between two prominent conservative thinkers shows contrasting visions for how to handle Pride pressure in the run up to next year’s election.
James Lindsay is known as a leading voice against the left’s manipulation of language. His site, New Discourses aims to expose how leftist buzzwords “have been defined and redefined and then to explain what they mean and how they’re being put to use.”
He put up a controversial thread warning that conservatives are going to play into the left’s hands this Pride month.
Conservative Christianity will be largely politically nullified in the process. Conservatives will be identified as homophobic or “homo.” The damage this is going to do to the conservative movement and Christians is astronomical, but it can be mitigated if it doesn’t blindside.
— James Lindsay, cowardly saboteur (@ConceptualJames) May 20, 2023
He argued that the left is not just expecting a Christian conservative backlash this June — they’re counting on it. When conservatives react, the left will frame the backlash as “homophobia and anti-LGBTQ hate.”
While this has already been happening in the headlines, Lindsay expects an unprecedented frontal assault from the media that centralizes this narrative in every storyline over the summer. It will be like the 2020 “Summer of Love,” except this time the left will pit hateful traditionalists against trans people rather than violent cops against racial minorities. (RELATED: ‘A Slap In The Face’: LA Dodgers Reinvite ‘Anti-Catholic Hate Group’ That Dresses Up As Jesus In Drag)
As it did in 2020, this will frame conservatives as extremists and bully “centrists, normies, and moderates” into submission to the left in the 2024 election. Re-aligning the parties this way will virtually ensure that traditionally minded voters will lose all political influence and that Republicans will never win another election, Lindsay believes.
If Lindsay is right, this puts conservatives between a rock and a hard place, as conservative author and biblical scholar Yoram Hazony noted in his response to Lindsay’s thread.
He called Lindsay out for effectively siding with the left. If conservatives agree it is futile to resist, their silence will effectively endorse the left’s LGBTQ agenda. Conservatives will lose if they resist, and they will lose by default if they do not resist. He believes that conservatives should hold the line on transgender issues and embrace traditional values.
What “measures” is James talking about? I think he’s presenting us with two options:
Conservatives will either (1) go quiet and cease all political organizing against the Left. Or (2) they’ll join the Left in helping destroy conservative Christian influence in America.
/27
— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) May 24, 2023
However, this beef, like many online spats, is utterly pointless. Opposing transgenderism in electoral politics is not pointless, nor does it require an outright embrace of traditional, conservative morality.
Absurd transgender propaganda that targets children is wildly unpopular with the American public. It is not only unpopular with traditional, Christian, conservatives but across broad swathes of the public.
However, American approval hinges on how the question is phrased.
When framed in terms of anti-discrimination, Americans strongly support transgender issues. A Washington Post poll found that 73 percent of Americans support “laws prohibiting discrimination against trans people” at colleges and universities. A similar 69 percent supported them in K-12 schools.
Yet the same poll found that 57 percent of all Americans believe that gender and sex are the same. A whopping 68 percent opposed access to puberty blocking medication for children aged 10-14. Additionally, 70 percent say elementary schools should not talk about gender identity, and 60 percent said that biological men should not be allowed to compete with women in college sports.
These are no small numbers.
Americans do not want to appear discriminatory, but at the same time they oppose the very real harm transgender policies cause to young people. Transgender ideology is a winning issue for conservatives and offers common ground with moderates. (RELATED: Americans Overwhelmingly Reject Transgender Ideology: POLL)
Rather than heckle each other, conservative thought leaders should seek to highlight opposing this harm as a common-sense position. Unnecessary spats can only create the divisions they mean to prevent this election cycle.
Prominent intellectuals should instead focus their energy on reclaiming the language around transgender issues so that Americans better understand that euphemisms like “gender-affirming care” really equate to the barbaric mutilation of minors. This will help sustain the organic, grassroots opposition needed to resist the leftist assault this pride month and in the election to come.
A politically engaged and informed populace is the greatest threat to tyranny.