Gay Rights And The Limits Of Liberalism

This, in the end, is my response to all the slippery slope arguments about gay marriage now being raised again on the right. There is no slope in the case I made. There is a clear line: formal legal equality alongside cultural and social freedom on all sides. From my liberal conservative perspective, the gay rights movement should have shut down in 2015 after ObergefellBostock. Once gay men and lesbians and trans people achieved legal and constitutional equality, the fight was over.

But in the movement I was once a part of, many, of course, were not liberals, let alone liberal conservatives but radicals, who reluctantly went along with marriage equality, but itched to transform society far more comprehensively. And these radicals now control everything in the hollowed-out gay rights apparatus. Their main ticket item is a law that would replace biological sex with gender in the law, and remove protections for religious liberty: smashing the liberal settlement. Combine that with acute polarization in the Trump era, and information silos, so that many gays get their sense of reality from MSNBC and Elton John, and you can see how the spiral into illiberal madness began.

And this is what I mean by illiberal : the use of public education, corporate power, and government fiat to enforce the postmodern doctrines of queer and gender theory; the suppression of debate; the abuse of science; and the deployment of children as weapons in an ideological campaign. (The right, in turn, is retaliating with its own deployment of state power, most visibly in Florida under DeSantis.)

When majorities supported gay couples getting married, they did not thereby support having their daughters forced to shower next to biological males in locker rooms, or compete with them in competitive sports; they did not support teaching kindergartners that their bodies have nothing to do with whether they are boys or girls; they did not support using unapproved drugs on troubled children to arrest their puberty, and sterilize them for life; and they did not support schools transitioning their children into the opposite gender without their knowledge.

via andrewsullivan.substack.com

Andrew Sullivan. He seems right to me on the trans issue, except were I a SCOTUS justice, I would not have voted against sodomy laws in Obergefell, since that obviously is not the originalist position, but I would have voted as a legislator or a citizen not to retain them. (And this is remotely related to why I am none of these things.)

Those darn radicals, I tell you. They are a caution.