It's a tough time for social conservatives. In one week we have seen one of their elder statesmen outed as a molester of teenaged boys in his care when he was a wrestling coach while television's favorite patriarchal throwback family has been outed as one which covers up pedophilia and basically doesn't think it's a big deal if 14 year old boys fondle 5 year olds. Hastert doesn't seem to be getting a ton of support from the right although I'm not seeing much condemnation either. The Duggars are about to be anointed as martyrs for the cause. Witness none other than Sarah Palin defending them by screeching incoherently that liberals are always doing this stuff and nobody cares --- as if that's supposed to be a defense.
But that's actually old hat, if you can believe it. Right wingers being exposed as sexual hypocrites is hardly a new. They ask for forgiveness and then everyone just goes back to condemning liberals who don't lie about sex the way they do.
In the four days since Bruce Jenner came out as a woman named Caitlyn, many Americans have celebrated her transformation as a courageous and even heroic act.
But among the social conservatives who are a powerful force within the Republican Party, there is a far darker view. To them, the widespread acceptance of Jenner’s evolution from an Olympic gold medalist whose masculinity was enshrined on a Wheaties box to a shapely woman posing suggestively on the cover of Vanity Fair was a reminder that they are losing the culture wars.
Across social media, blogs and talk radio this week, conservatives painted an apocalyptic view of America. They said they felt frustrated and increasingly isolated by the country’s sudden recognition and even embrace of transgender people. They see it as immoral and foreign. They drew comparisons to two grimly futuristic novels, George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
“People feel like they’re under siege and that the terms of the debate are now you either applaud it or you’re a bigot,” said William J. Bennett, education secretary in the Reagan administration. “It’s like American culture is being dragged kicking and screaming not only toward acceptance but approval.”
Jenner’s watershed moment — which coincides with the Supreme Court preparing to rule on whether to allow same-sex marriage nationwide — leaves the GOP and its stable of presidential candidates grappling with how to represent conservatives who don’t wish to accept Jenner and more moderate voters who have already done so.
I think this is going to be a big deal for them and I don't think they have a clue about how to handle it. The level of discomfort with this whole thing is extreme.
[A]lthough President Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats uniformly praised Jenner’s bravery — no top-tier Republican candidate had anything to say about her this week. Even Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has made a point of reaching out to people who are normally resistant to his party, declined to comment.
There is no middle ground with this one:
“When did this get legs? When did this start being taken seriously?” talk radio host Rush Limbaugh asked his millions of listeners on Tuesday’s program. “We should not be lionizing this. We should not be encouraging this.”
If Republicans don’t speak out against Jenner, “you might as well just forfeit the 2016 election now,” Steve Deace, a syndicated talk radio host based in Iowa, said in an interview.
“If we’re not going to defend as a party basic principles of male and female, that life is sacred because it comes from God, then you’re going to lose the vast majority of people who’ve joined that party,” Deace said.
As Limbaugh put it, the public acclaim of Jenner’s gender identity makes those who believe in traditional values and gender roles seem like the outcasts. “Conservatives and Republicans are the new weirdos, the new kooks, and that is part of the political objective here in normalizing all of this really marginal behavior,” he said.
ESPN’s announcement Monday that it would honor Jenner at this year’s ESPYS with the Arthur Ashe Courage Award further enraged conservatives. Online, there was fury that Jenner beat out Noah Galloway, a former soldier who lost limbs in Iraq and now competes as a distance runner. In Twitter posts and on message boards, conservatives railed against the cable sports network for seeming to value a transgender celebrity over a military veteran.
A Facebook post by Terry Coffey of Salem, Ore., which went viral and was shared by more than 750,000 people, captured the sentiment: “Just thought I’d remind all of us what real American courage, heroism, and bravery looks like!” It included a black-and-white photo depicting two servicemen in combat.
I wonder what they would have done if ESPN had chosen this ex-Navy SEAL. I suspect their heads would have exploded:
I don't know what kind of backlash this is going to cause but it's going to cause a backlash. It will be a big test of our progress as a culture to see how we deal with it.
I can't imagine why these people care so much about this. "Live and let live" used to be an All-American value. But then there were always busy-bodies who had to tell other people how to live too. It's part of our ongoing culture war. But maybe we've come to a point at which we are ready to say that nobody should be required to live a lie in order to please those people. Wouldn't that be something?