Let Independence Day mean independent thought, not groupthink
Hugo Gurdon
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Those who support the indoctrination of small children on gender and those who oppose it are noticing that women wearing hijabs are becoming prominent among protesters.
This should be no surprise. Mothers tend not to want their sons and daughters meddled with by adults apparently obsessed with sexual matters. Islam, like traditional Christianity and Judaism, teaches modesty, sexual restraint, and clear divisions between male and female, all of which are under assault by the meddlers.
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The new gender orthodoxies naturally repel parents bringing up children with traditional values and sane ideas about sex and gender. Most members of the great monotheistic religions are, to borrow President Joe Biden’s recent phrasing, “not big on” subjecting minors to drag queen primping and other such obscenities.
Gender is now an area of controversy as important and divisive as any other battleground of political ideas. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is campaigning for the presidency not just as an effective leader but also as a staunch conservative culture warrior. He wouldn’t do this if voters were not engaged in the subject. He touts his parental rights law, which shields children below fourth grade from gender controversies. Shared standards of decency used to make such laws unnecessary, but now election results hinge on them.
The votes of Muslims, who account for less than 2% of the U.S. population, are worth fighting for. They make a difference. Hamtramck, an enclave of Detroit where half the population and the mayor are Muslim, recently decided that LGBT “pride” flags should not fly from public buildings. Like many other ordinary people across our country, these Michigan Muslims are sick of having the gender agenda foisted upon them.
This is a problem for Biden and the Democrats. They want to keep their voters just as much as Republicans want to win them over. But the blue party risks losing traditional adherents as it drifts left and becomes more and more out of touch with sensible majority opinion. This is part of its wider alienation from traditional blue-collar voters, including blacks and Hispanics, who are joining the GOP because Democrats’ actions, if not their rhetoric, disdain the concerns of ordinary working people.
To fix their growing problem with defecting Muslims, Democrats try to turn gender politics into a racial issue. It’s their standard M.O. They depict Republicans as racist and therefore inimical to the Muslim ethnic minority.
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who flacks for left-wing causes on MSNBC, ran a segment recently about Republicans hoping to win over Muslims on gender politics. The headline was telling: “Behind the right-wing strategy to divide minority groups.” She compared Republican appeals to socially conservative Muslims with President Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” which lured white Democrats by stoking fear of blacks.
Psaki wants people to think it ironic that Republicans hope to pick up Muslim votes now despite recently expressing concern about Islamism. She characterizes this as turning one “tiny group of marginalized Americans” against another. How patronizing can she get? These are thoughtful people making serious political judgments, not a lumpen minority being manipulated by calculating right-wingers.
Psaki would like Muslim voters to believe they’re really on the same side as trans militants because both are vulnerable groups. Kinship is created, she suggests, simply by being a minority; this should overcome the fact that the trans agenda militates against everything traditional Muslims believe and teach their children.
Yet again, the modern Left is determined to judge people by superficial appearance rather than by what they believe and what they understand to be in their interests. The blue party expects minorities, no matter how antithetical to each other in principles and goals, to unite against some vague and inchoate threat from manipulative and cynical Republicans.
But look about you. Are trans people and their agenda marginalized or are they lionized and mainstreamed by the party in power in Washington, by the news and entertainment media, and by much of corporate America? Isn’t it traditional Christians, Muslims, and Jews being marginalized and denigrated? That’s the meaning of the Los Angeles Dodgers’s decision to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an anti-Catholic hate group. It is also the import of Anheuser-Busch turning Bud Light into repellent gender fluid when it used to be just beer.
Democrats and the Left are uninterested in diversity of ideas. To them, it is unimportant that the aims of trans activists diametrically oppose those of traditional religious parents. They want voters with actual mainstream ideas to see themselves as part of one subgroup or another and join together to resist the tyranny of the normal.