Social Conservatives Won’t Back Down
A piece for the National Review, as well as an appeal by the NR’s editor-in-chief, shows that culture war issues won’t give way easily, regardless of midterm election outcomes.
by Evan Urquhart
Two posts in the National Review (a right wing news and opinion site with delisions of grandeur), suggest that the god-botherers aren’t about to give up on their crusade against LGBTQ+ rights without a struggle. The first one we found was a very nasty screed against same-sex marriage by Joseph J. Rigney, a professor at a small Christian college. (His is a click at your own risk opinion piece, and our screenshots will be on the nasty side also, so protect yourself.) The second piece we saw was an appeal by Rich Lowry, the editor-in-chief there, which was posted on Friday.
Taking the latter first, Lowry is following a path we had predicted, blaming Trump and Trumpism for the midterm losses while defending the social conservative wedge strategy which resulted in transphobia being the primary issue many GOP candidates ran on. In Lowry’s view, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is the future of the party. His successes in Florida, in pushing a viciously cruel campaign against all LGBTQ+ people, proves (to Lowry) that the same strategy can work everywhere, and Trump is the real reason why it failed last Tuesday. Lowry does, however, seem to harbor some doubts about whether this will actually be popular outside of his extremist Christian bubble:
As alluded to above, the Rigney piece is far uglier in its homophobia, and its extreme transphobic hatred. The thesis of this article is that campaign against trans rights has not gone far enough; as terrible as accepting trans people is (to Rigley), it’s vital for conservatives not to allow themselves to start accepting gay people.
As you can see, the author sees the overturn of Roe v Wade, not as the wild conservative overreach resulting in a major backlash at the ballot box, but as a template that should be widely applied. He then moves to an argument about the need for heterosexual families and patriarchy (thought he doesn’t use the word) as the fundamental building block of a stable society. Along the way, he makes some of the nastier, more stigmatizing comments about trans people that I’ve come across, at least in a publication that purports to be mainstream conservative, rather than a forum for extremist hatred.
Rigney also makes a subtle attack on child welfare as a concept, positing that the primary right of children should be to have a mother and a father. This flies in the face of child welfare standards which prioritize the actual best interests of a child over ideological word games, which is in line with other far right messaging on child welfare.
In summary, social conservatives are not prepared to allow trans people to exist simply because opposing our human rights was a complete electoral disaster. It remains unclear if those in the GOP who like to win elections will prevail, or if the party will decide (as has been long feared) to dispense with the inconvenience of trying to win over public opinion entirely, and move further towards endorsing open vioence and the institution of a fascist Christian dictatorship.