Earlier we drew attention to James Howard Kunstler’s uncharacteristically optimistic view that we’re “careening toward grace.” Today Don Surber, in an unusually long and passionate post, calls us to Culture War:
As I said, it’s long and passionate and Don covers a lot of ground, but here’s a brief sample:
Ours is a Christian nation. Satan has exploited its secularism and is replacing American values with sin. The Constitution protects our God-given rights. The devil tries to replace them with phony rights such as the right to abortions, gay marriage and the like. That is the Great Replacement. The devil seeks to replace God.
Conservatives need to push back against that. Hard.
It seems like there were a lot of Culture War articles today. Steven Hayward at Power Line has a very interesting post in which he argues that we may be past Peak Woke:
The post is full of interesting social science research, in charts and graphs, but Hayward starts off with this observation:
The first bit of evidence is a long and surprisingly balanced New York Times feature article this weekend about the controversy over transgender athletes in women’s competition. Understand that for the identity politics crusade, there can be no controversy about transwomen competing in women’s leagues. For the Times to acknowledge that there is a genuine “debate” about the matter is not just bigotry; it’s the equivalent of climate denialism.
Did I say there are charts and graphs in the post? There are fourteen charts and graphs—I counted them. I take it that Hayward found them here:
… over the weekend Eric Kaufman of the University of London and the Center for the Study of Political Ideology released a new study, “Born This Way? The Rise of LGBT as a Social and Political Identity” that notes the survey data suggesting the trend may have peaked and might even be receding.
Tucked in the middle are a couple of bullet points that pretty much some up those charts and graphs:
Here are some of the other findings that are sure to drive the identitarians into a rage:
Very liberal ideology and LGBT identification are associated with anxiety and depression in young people. Very liberal young Americans are twice as likely as others to experience these problems. 27% of young Americans with anxiety or depression were LGBT in 2021. This relationship appears to have strengthened since 2010.
Among young people, mental health problems, liberal ideology, and LGBT identity are strongly correlated. Using factor analysis in two different studies shows that assuming one common variable between all three traits explains 40-50% of the variation.
Who’da thunk it, right?
And maybe a major legal development in the UK supports the hopeful view:
UK Attorney General: Schools Don't Have To Accommodate Gender ID Change
Authored by Simon Veazey via The Epoch Times,
The British attorney general says schools do not have to accommodate students who want to change gender identification, and are under no legal obligation to use certain pronouns or allow children to wear uniform of another sex.
Attorney General Suella Braverman - the top government adviser on law in England and Wales - has become the latest of a number of senior government figures to challenge the ethos of some public institutions which affirm children’s adoption of another gender identity.
Her comments to the Times of London, published on Saturday, come as the government draws up formal guidance for schools on transgenderism.
“Under-18s cannot get a gender recognition certificate, under-18s cannot legally change sex,” she told the newspaper on May 28.
“So again in the context of schools I think it’s even clearer actually. A male child who says in a school that they are a trans girl, that they want to be female, is legally still a boy or a male.”
Braverman said that schools have a right to treat them as such under the law.
“They don’t have to say ‘OK, we’re going to let you change your pronoun or let you wear a skirt or call yourself a girl’s name,'” she said.
All is not light, however:
Colorado Teacher Disciplined for Not Affirming Transgender Student’s Identity
and
Homosexuals appear to be replacing Christians in the conservative movement
The question then becomes: are Christian conservatives welcome in these institutions, or has there been a great replacement?
Highly recommend Declan Leary's essay at AmCon, No Allies Who Buy Babies:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/no-allies-who-buy-babies/