Evangelism and Trump

[garbon]

And in 2018:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/transgender-debate-conservatives-cannot-compromise-truth/

While I'm utterly opposed to boorish behavior, the use of a pronoun isn't a matter of mere manners. It's a declaration of a fact. I won't call Chelsea Manning "she" for a very simple reason. He's a man. If a person legally changes his name, I'll use his legal name. But I will not use my words to endorse a falsehood. I simply won't. We're on a dangerous road if we imply that treating a person with "basic human dignity" requires acquiescing to claims we know to be false.

I don't know any serious social conservative who doesn't believe that a transgender man or woman is entitled to "basic human dignity." No one is claiming that they should be excluded from the blessings of American liberty or deprived of a single privilege or immunity of citizenship. Any effort to strip a transgender person of their constitutional liberty should be met with the utmost resistance. But that's not the contemporary legal controversy. Current legal battles revolve around the state's effort to force private and public entities to recognize and accommodate transgender identities. The justification for this coercive effort is often the state's alleged interest in preventing so-called "dignitary" harm. Thus, men are granted rights to enter a woman's restroom, even when gender-neutral options are available. Thus, private citizens are forced to use false pronouns. Girls are forced to allow a boy to stay in their room on an overnight school trip, or they're forced to compete against boys in athletic competition.

[garbon]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/07/trump-transgender-military-service-announcement-botching-good-policy/

Why Must Trump Do the Right Things the Wrong Way?

...

Take, for example, the first version of his so-called travel ban. While I agreed with the fundamental policy goals — a slight moderation on refugee admissions, general re-evaluation of security-screening procedures, and a pause on entries from specific jihadist nations — the actual implementation was so chaotic and incompetent that it not only triggered national hysteria, it undermined public support for even relatively modest immigration reforms. Trump's administration dropped a poorly written, poorly supported policy into the public square, interpreted it as cruelly and maliciously as possible, and has been on the defensive ever since.

...

I had travel-ban flashbacks this morning as I read Trump's series of tweets announcing that transgender Americans may not serve "in any capacity" in the military. As a general matter, I agree with the policy. The American military has a specific and violent purpose. It pushes human beings to the limits of their emotional, spiritual, and physical endurance to defeat our nation's enemies. Successful combat operations require not just physical and emotional fitness but also an extraordinary amount of unit cohesion.

Transgender Americans, though undoubtedly as patriotic as any other Americans, are disproportionately likely to suffer from mental illness, are more prone to attempt suicide, abuse alcohol and drugs at higher rates, and often require extensive medical care and comprehensive medical intervention during and after their "transitions." An infantry soldier, for example, could be sidelined for weeks as he purports to transition from male to female — taking hormones that could make him physically weaker and undergoing painful, debilitating surgery that would prevent him from serving in the field and training with his unit for long periods of time. This is not a formula for successful military service, and while there are certainly extraordinary individuals who are able to serve effectively, that is no argument for opening service to a group that would collectively degrade military readiness.

Opening the military to transgender service members would repeat the terrible, social-justice-driven mistake of putting women in ground combat. Despite copious evidence that mixed-gender units are less effective in basic military tasks than single-gender all-male combat units — including in vital tasks such as marksmanship and evacuating casualties — the Obama administration powered through anyway. It imposed new, social-justice-based requirements on a military that will face enemies who don't care about diversity but instead ruthlessly exploit weaknesses. Trump was right to step back from this new transgender brink.

Is this what deep commitment to equality and opposition to Trump's policies looks like?

[HVC]

Aside, does Cheslea still have a dingaling?

[Barrister]

See, here's the line I would take most offence to:

I don't know any serious social conservative who doesn't believe that a transgender man or woman is entitled to "basic human dignity."

Really David?  Because I don't hear very much about basic human dignity towards trans people from a lot of social conservatives.  Or otherwise the word "Serious" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

But otherwise - he lays out the social conservative argument.  Agree with it or not.

[garbon]

But otherwise - he lays out the social conservative argument.  Agree with it or not.

I don't have to as I'm not in argument with his musings. I'm raising issue with your description of him being thoughtful and committed to equality.

[Jacob]

Aside, does Cheslea still have a dingaling?

I believe that's nobody's business except Chelsea's... and possibly any potential intimate partners she may have.

[garbon]

Aside, does Cheslea still have a dingaling?

I believe that's nobody's business except Chelsea's... and possibly any potential intimate partners she may have.

Well it was pretty public that Manning had gender transition (or gender affirming) surgery as there had been a big thing about whether the prison would have to pay for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning#2016%E2%80%932018

[HVC]

Aside, does Cheslea still have a dingaling?

I believe that's nobody's business except Chelsea's... and possibly any potential intimate partners she may have.

My train of thought, as derailed as it might be, is that he'd be more willing to affirm her gender identity if she was anatomically "correct"

[Jacob]

Well it was pretty public that Manning had gender transition (or gender affirming) surgery as there had been a big thing about whether the prison would have to pay for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning#2016%E2%80%932018

I guess that's fair enough, and if Chelsea believes making that public is worthwhile for whatever reason (as opposed to feeling it was an unpleasant but necessary step she was forced into to have her needs met) then that's entirely her prerogative. So yeah, if it's public knowledge it's public knowledge. I still hold to the notion that the status of people's genitals is their private business by default.

[grumbler]

My complaint about religion is that it teaches faith; that is, it trains people to believe what they are told in the absence (at best) and in contradiction of (at worst) the actual evidence.  Now, that's pretty harmless when such faith is restricted to the realm of supernatural beings like gods and angels and saints and whatnot, because we all realize that there will never be, and can never be, actual evidence (else they wouldn't be supernatural any more).  But once trained to have faith in one kind of unevidenced phenomenon, a person becomes, IMO, more susceptible to being convinced to have faith in other unevidenced phenomena and even counter-evidenced phenomena. 

I think that that is what Berkut is seeing in his sister.  She's been trained to believe in unlikely religious ideas (here, I'm talking about the Bible literalists, not mainstream religious types) and so is much more easily persuaded to believe other highly unlikely ideas, like that Trump was on a mission from God and only fraud could possibly account for him having less votes in 2020.

I use several Russel Moore YouTube videos for my Comparative Religion course because I think that he is exactly the kind of preacher who stresses what Christianity is about as a religion and rejects the idea (with scriptural support) that religion has any place in the public sphere.  To him, Christianity is about salvation and a personal relationship with God/Jesus, not about Supreme Court seats.  I don't have to believe him to admire his clarity of thought.

[The Minsky Moment]

I don't think it is crazy to suggest that US legislatures could support gay marriage.  In fact gay marriage is supported by 70% of Americans.  https://news.gallup.com/poll/350486/record-high-support-same-sex-marriage.aspx

Some will, some won't, just like abortion.
Now one can argue that is democracy in action, hooray!  At least if we close our eyes to the effects on people's fundamental rights and their sense of personal integrity and dignity.

But there is another consideration here, one that definitely influenced institutionalists like O'Connor, Souter, Roberts.  That is what is the effect on national integrity when large numbers of marriages contracted in one state have no legal validity in others?

We have already seen the opening shots in an interstate war over abortion policy with states using bounty hunting and threats of criminal prosecution to impose their policies on other states.  As I suggested earlier, this is just the early stages of an interstate shitshow.  The Supreme Court may get its head out its ass to redress this (or it may not!) but some of the damage will be hard to contain.  Add gay marriage and other issues to the list and the scope of interstate conflict grows.

American federalism works best when different states are free to express their distinctive characters without causing a lot of spillover.  If Alabama wants to preserve some dry counties, OK - the growers in Napa can figure out how to live with that.  But problems arise when federalism manifests in a way that causes states to get at each other's throats on matters of principle.  That's a problem that poses a grave threat to the American system.  The last time interstate conflicts got out of control, America had its Civil War.  Most national political figures sense then took the lesson.  The current Supreme Court, with its precious optimism about the wonders of allowing free play to let states work things out, seems to have lost the script.