Conservatives live in a culture today that increasingly requires them not simply to tolerate what they do not like, but to embrace what their conscience tells them is wrong and affirm what ordinary people know to be false.
Worse is on the way. Near the top of the Democratic priority list is passage of the Equality Act, which would deploy federal government power to impose false and extreme — frankly, mad — orthodoxies about sex and gender throughout the land.
The Pelosi crowd presents this legislation as an innocuous tidying-up operation to give substance to the 2020 Supreme Court decision extending employment protections to gay and transgender people. But it would actually replace biological sex entirely with gender identity as the criterion for legal decisions.
Mandates from Washington will give biological men the right to compete in all women’s sports, use facilities intended for women, and apply for jobs, scholarships, and other opportunities reserved for women. In the name of sexual equality, women will be displaced. The message to young women striving for college sports scholarships is to give up. To girls who simply want to get changed in a locker room without a naked guy watching them, it’s “Too bad for you, sister — get used to it.”
The Equality Act allows no exceptions for traditional faith and doctrine; indeed, it explicitly rejects them. Freedom of religion, of conscience, and of association are to be null and void. In the name of tolerance, you will obey.
This cultural revolution may soon be enforced by an army of juvenile Blue Guards. Stanley Kurtz writes a superb expose of Democratic efforts to turn high school children into left-wing community organizers through “action civics,” another radical travesty hiding behind an innocuous name. Students will be indoctrinated by their teachers and earn academic credits not for learning how government works but for taking part in protests and demonstrations intended to bend government to their will. The same people pushing this monstrous idea are campaigning in parallel to lower the voting age to 17 or even 16. Chairman Pelosi thinks this is just swell.
This week’s cover story by Tiana Lowe focuses on California, ground zero of left-wing lunacy, where Gavin Newsom, the smug and hapless governor, faces recall for presiding over the Venezuelarization of that lovely state.
In our Life & Arts section, Peter Tonguette reviews Hermione Lee’s splendid new biography of Tom Stoppard, the brilliant playwright and constantly-in-demand-by-Hollywood screenwriter; I marvel at the extraordinary and extraordinarily fast boats that now compete for the increasingly misnamed America’s Cup; Stefan Beck enjoys a wild ride through Willy’s Wonderland, a tribute to the weird career of the talented Nicolas Cage; Rob Long explains the importance of being shameless and why, therefore, he won’t give even orphans a discount; and Eric Felten stumbles across a few typed pages that can’t possibly be from Hillary Clinton’s new novel but read of a heroine in a white pantsuit with biceps buff enough to put Michelle Obama to shame.
