Now take a look at the recent Senate hearings on sex changes for children. Again, the Dems were unanimous, and their position utterly unchanged: the “safety” and “effectiveness” of transing children is beyond any dispute; no one but Republican bigots oppose it; and any problems can be dealt with retroactively by malpractice suits. (The only slight concession to reality was an end to the lie that transing children was the only way to stop them killing themselves. But no apology for the lie, of course. Or for the human wreckage the lie caused.) The Cass Review never happened. Affirmation-only guidelines never existed.

Gays and lesbians and feminists and liberals who oppose transing children and defend the fact of the sex binary? Senators Sanders, Markey, and Baldwin don’t seem to know we even exist. Unsurprising. MS NOW, to take one example, has never had a single guest who’s been critical of child sex changes. The Cass Review, when it has even been mentioned, has been instantly dismissed. The gay and lesbian press, such as it is, reports on all this as a trans genocide in full swing.

That’s where we are in gay and lesbian world this Pride month. Queer as fuck. About a year ago, I wrote an op-ed for the NYT warning that the queer takeover of what’s left of the gay and lesbian rights movement was hurting support for gay causes. I expected a huge backlash, but received a huge private thank you from gays and lesbians on the street in Provincetown and throughout the reader comments. I asked for a debate among gays and Democrats. But a year later, no debate has happened outside social media tweet-storms, no gay or lesbian institution or public official has said a word, and the policies — profoundly unpopular, rooted in critical gender and queer theory — are hegemonic.

Which is why it is only appropriate that Zohran Mamdani put out a Pride statement referring solely to “queer and trans people”, excising LGBs from the movement we built. Mamdani described all gays and lesbians with a word, “queer”, chosen by only 6% of us in a recent survey. (Check Google Trends to see how rarely the word was even a search item until the 2020s.) They even took Stonewall from us. Rachel Maddow called it “a riot by trans people”. Try to find a single trans person in the photos of that night in 1969. Now ask any gay under 40 who Frank Kameny was. No clue.

The rigid refusal to compromise on this radicalization — they also changed the Pride flag to insert mandatory references to TQ+, the discredited BLM themes, and “brown people” — is merely a part of re-writing the narrative back to the Seventies, before AIDS and gay integration. There is little attempt to engage the straight majority with reason anymore — or even gays and lesbians queasy at these new mandates — just an impulse to provoke, condemn, or cancel them.

I suspect the queers are so insulated they don’t even realize that this is what they have been effectively saying to Joe Public for a decade now. Remember when they told you that gay and lesbian people were just like everyone else, and just wanted to be left alone? Scrap that. We’re actually queers who believe marriage is a “fundamentally violent institution” and that the sex binary is a white supremacist fiction. Now we’ve gotten marriage, we will indoctrinate your kids in queer and gender theory, fire you if you don’t repeat our pronouns, force girls to shower next to boys in locker rooms, give irreversible sex changes to minors, and insist that “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

And, after a few years of this kind of messaging, and no pushback from regular gays and lesbians … guess what? Support for marriage equality from the center and center-right is nosediving. Gallup shows a decline from 71% to 65% support for gay marriage among all Americans in just three years. Among Independents, support has dropped by six points in four years, from 73% to 67%; and among Republicans by 18 points, from 55% in 2022 to just 37% today — setting us back 20 years. On the morality of same-sex relations, the drops are more acute: down 10 points among Indies and 21 points among Republicans. As someone who played a part in bringing those Republicans and moderates around to gay marriage, it’s distressing to see what the queer overreach has done — especially in red states.

We’re told that this is all about “hate”. Really? The same polls that show growing opposition to men in women’s sports, and against the transing/sterilization/mutilation of children with gender dysphoria, also show huge support for civil rights protections for trans adults. But the distinction between adults and children, like the one between men and women, doesn’t exist for the Democrats. The only mention of “transgender” in the 2024 Dem autopsy was to note how Trump’s ad on the issue was “very effective” … no shit. But the response is to keep giving Trump ever more ammunition!

Perceived morality of gay or lesbian relations, by party ID

Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, please tell me whether you   personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong. Gay or   lesbian relations Figures are the percentage “morally acceptable”

Within the gay and lesbian world, the policing of even mild dissent is oppressive. Express skepticism and you’ll be instantly accused of “pulling up the ladder” after you; or “throwing trans people under the bus”; or of being a “pick-me” gay who wants his rights but denies them to trans people. But when you ask them what civil right we are saying should be given gay people but denied trans people, they come up empty. Because there isn’t one.

I want every trans person to have every civil right a gay person has — and they do! What I disagree with is a new, hard-Left, genderqueer political agenda — which has nothing to do with gays and lesbians at all, except that it actually endangers LG children with gender dysphoria, and threatens women’s rights as well. I don’t have the slightest problem with people calling themselves queer and innovating whatever lifestyles they want. God bless them. I simply have a problem saying that 6% should define and brand the other 94% of relative normies.

Yes, some truly ugly forces have seized on this own-goal by the queers to ramp up real hatred of gays and trans people. That’s vile. But the Right didn’t invent men-in-women’s-sports or sex changes for children. They just responded to these things being imposed on them by fiat. They were growing more tolerant before the queer onslaught. The last GOP convention dropped opposition to marriage equality; Trump himself has said he’s “fine” with gay marriage; he appointed an openly gay married man with children as treasury secretary; his first Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, wrote the majority opinion for Bostock that secured employment rights for both gays and trans people. What more do you want? YMCA at every rally? Homoerotic AI images of Trump? An army of gays working for Trump? You got ‘em! And the Gallup nosedive began under Biden and Levine, not Trump. What the queers are doing, in other words, is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Which, one suspects, is what they really yearn for. Marriage equality was a huge blow to the queer Left. They hated the idea that gay men and women could just be normies, primarily interested in getting on with their lives, marriages, jobs, and children once their civil rights were settled. Where’s the edgy radicalism in that? What are activists gonna do if that happens? Get a life? A truly terrifying prospect for those clinging to adolescent revolt in their 40s.

And so, for the first time since 2015, I genuinely fear for the future of marriage equality. Our rights are vulnerable without broad public support. And that support was based on a moderate approach and universal language, with conservative as well as liberal variations. Replace that moderation, persuasion, and live-and-let-live ethos with a hectoring, radical, genderqueer revolution? We could lose everything. And we are beginning to.

Dismiss my arguments if you want. The queers and Dems certainly do. But I did the actual work of persuading and engaging people for a couple of lonely, exhausting decades. I learned something from it. And what I learned suggests we are making a terrible mistake; and if we don’t correct soon, and drastically, the Fifties will beckon once more. They’ll be calling us queers again. Because we just gave them permission.

***

This article was first published on Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish. 

Over the past few years, violent crime in DC has been rising fast. Last year, the murder rate was the highest since 2003, and this year the death toll is slightly higher so far. Carjackings are up 36% and robberies are up 57%. Almost all this hideous violence is inflicted on African-Americans, including many children. It permeates outward, creating a deeper public sense of insecurity and out-of-control crime. Tent cities are now all over the city. People suffering from mental illness patrol the streets. You feel the decline in law and order, the slow fraying of the city, every day.

And yet, the Council has decided that now is the time to make it harder to prosecute and easier to defend violent criminals, partly in the name of “equity.”. Yes, it’s part of a longstanding “modernization” of the criminal code, but they had to include these provisions and now? And this isn’t new. Just before the crime explosion took off, the DC mayor had “Black Lives Matter” painted on the street in letters so large you could read them from a plane, and allowed “Defund the Police” to remain next to it. That summer, woke mobs were allowed to harass anyone in their vicinity, yelling slogans that vilified all police — and the MSM took the side of the bullies. After the summer of 2020, the DC police force dropped to its lowest level in two decades.

So guess what? I’m going to vote for the Republican and the most conservative Independent I can find tomorrow. And I can’t be the only Biden and Clinton and Obama voter who’s feeling something like this, after the past two years.

There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. And, more than most, I am aware of the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents. But that’s precisely why we need to send the Dems a message this week, before it really is too late.

By “we”, I mean anyone not committed to the hard-Left agenda Biden has relentlessly pursued since taking office. In my view, he and his media mouthpieces have tragically enabled the far Right over the past two years far more than they’ve hurt them. I hoped in 2020 that after a clear but modest win, with simultaneous gains for the GOP in the House and a fluke tie in the Senate, Biden would grasp a chance to capture the sane middle, isolating the far Right. After the horror of January 6, the opportunity beckoned ever more directly.

And yet Biden instantly threw it away. In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-Left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went. Even the policy most popular with the centre — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state. What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the centre?

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Sex strikes won't win the midterms

By Kat Rosenfield

It therefore doesn’t surprise me that in his final pitch to voters this week, Biden barely mentioned his record. He didn’t talk about inflation, the looming recession, crime, immigration, Covid. He mentioned nothing that would motivate anyone beyond his own base.

He returned instead to his previous 2020 electoral blackmail: you have no choice but to vote for Democrats because the far Right is so hostile to democracy. To which my answer would be: well, I did that already. And I was treated like an easy mark by the Dems — who pocketed my vote and ignored all of my concerns. Voting for an actual election denier would remain a dealbreaker for me. But otherwise, when Trump is not on the ballot, why would I be suckered by the woke Left again?

Worse than this bait-and-switch is the condescension that came with it. Think of the absolute assertions by the Biden administration and their media flunkies: The border is secure. Covid vaccines prevent infection. There is no CRT in high schools. The lab-leak theory and Hunter Biden’s corruption were disinformation. There is no medical debate about fast-track, affirmation-only, sex changes for minors. Inflation is caused by corporate greed. Women in college always tell the truth; and men always lie. A president can forgive student loans by fiat. Debt doesn’t matter. A woman can have a penis. The people who attack Asian-Americans are all white supremacists. The idea of individual merit is racist. Can you think of any social issue where the Biden administration hasn’t taken the position of the illiberal “social justice” Left?

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How Turbo-Wokism broke America

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And culture matters. David Brooks wrote last week: “Over the past few years, the Democrats have made heroic efforts to win back working-class voters and white as well as Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted rightward.”

What planet is he living on? He points to infrastructure spending and the child tax credit. The first was coupled, as I’ve noted, with a big increase in the welfare state, blunting its impact; the second is now gone. Brooks doesn’t mention inflation, crime, immigration, the border, abortion, race and affirmative action. In these areas, which will define the election, the Dems have, in fact, made heroic efforts to affront and insult working-class voters. On abortion post-Roe, they have adopted the most extreme position possible, making even Republicans look like moderates.

And look, we can debate all these questions. There are many nuances. But Biden precisely denies those nuances. He never even gives a hint that he respects his critics at all. He sees his moderate supporters not as people to be persuaded or engaged, let alone listened to, but as bigots or victims of disinformation he can simply dismiss. “C’mon, man!” used to be a verbal tic he deployed to engage with critics; now it’s deployed simply to dismiss them.

It doesn’t seem to occur to Biden, for example, that violent crime and uncontrolled immigration affect poor minorities more than wealthy whites, jeopardising their lives and wages, and making a mockery of those who have made the effort to immigrate legally. He repeats absurd jargon such as “Latinx” to please his nutty, MSNBC-addicted donor base. He tells blacks they have to vote Democrat because of their race. He invites the most hardcore trans extremists to the White House; and takes no responsibility for making inflation worse.

All of this — the Left policies and the veiled contempt for the average voter’s fears and criticisms — has been building since his election. The shameless deceptions and false narratives of the MSM have pissed a lot of people off as well. No one appreciates being called a bigot or a hysteric for wanting to have a say in their own child’s education; or a “white supremacist” for opposing “equity-based” race discrimination. Yet it happens every day, with CRT-based indoctrination mandatory in many workplaces, teachers openly indoctrinating kids in queer theory, and corporations adopting bald race discrimination to appease the woke. Biden is down with all of it, and is in such a bubble that I don’t think he even knows there is a real debate.

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America can't understand monarchy

By Andrew Sullivan

Obama sees why this dynamic is so toxic. He sees why it alienates so many people unnecessarily. But the Democrats are not the party of Obama anymore, are they? Many of us who supported Obama are now deemed “white supremacists” for agreeing with him.

Midterms are always a verdict on incumbents — and if the result next week is a close finish, we can duly see it as a routine, even banal, response to a tough economy, especially inflation. But if it is a real wave, as I suspect it may be, if the Democrats lose even more Latinos and Asians and working-class whites, and if suburban white women — freaked by the cost of living and the education system — flee to the GOP, it will be a clarion call to Democrats to move back to being the party of Obama.

I fear they cannot. And their media lackeys and propagandists will reinforce their worst instincts.

The Weimar dynamic is a simple one. The Left and Right polarise; the middle collapses; inflation takes off, unnerving everyone and discrediting government; and at some point, as liberal democracy breaks down, voters are asked to choose between the extreme Left or the extreme Right.

What Biden has done, by showing that even an alleged moderate like him is just a vehicle for the extreme Left, is accelerate the moment when we are faced with that horrible choice. And if that is the choice, I have little doubt that Americans will pick the far Right. We’ll have a premonition of this tomorrow.

The key for the survival of democracy is not another speech about democracy telling citizens they have no choice but to vote for one party. It is preventing the Weimar nightmare scenario ever happening. It is rebuilding the political centre. It is about taking action on inflation and immigration and crime. Biden has failed catastrophically so far — and with his current policies, he will continue to fail.

His party has two years to rescue itself. And the rest of us.

A version of this piece first appeared on Andrew Sullivan’s Substack.

At the same time, I found myself watching the life of an entirely different head of state: a young, somewhat shy woman suddenly elevated to immense responsibilities and duties in her twenties, hemmed in by protocol, rigidified by discipline. The new president could barely get through the day without some provocation, insult, threat or lie. Elizabeth Windsor was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human — for the rest of her life.

The immense difficulty of this is proven by the failure of almost every other member of her family — including her husband — to pull it off. We know her son, King Charles III’s, views on a host of different subjects, many admirable, some cringe-inducing. We know so much of the psychological struggles of Diana; the reactionary outbursts of Philip; the trauma of Harry; the depravity of Andrew; the agonies of Margaret. We still know nothing like that about the Queen. Because whatever else her life was about, it was not about her.

Part of the hard-to-explain grief I feel is related to how staggeringly rare that level of self-restraint is today. Narcissism is everywhere. Every feeling we have is bound to be expressed. Self-revelation, transparency, authenticity — these are our values. The idea that we are firstly humans with duties to others that will require and demand the suppression of our own needs and feelings seems archaic. Elizabeth kept it alive simply by example.

With her death, it’s hard not to fear that so much she exemplified — restraint, duty, grace, reticence, persistence — are disappearing from the world. As long as she was there, they were at the centre of an idea of Britishness that helped define the culture at its best. Perhaps the most famous woman in the world, she remained a sphinx, hard to decipher, impossible to label. She was not particularly beautiful or dashing or inspiring. She said nothing surprising. She was simply the Queen. She showed up. She got on with it. She was there. She was always there.

Whatever else happened to the other royals, she stayed the same. And whatever else happened in Britain — from the end of Empire to Brexit — she stayed the same. This is an achievement of nearly inhuman proportions, requiring discipline beyond most mortals. Think of a year, 1992: one son, Andrew, divorced; a daughter-in-law, Sarah Ferguson, was seen cavorting nude in the tabloids; her daughter, Anne, separated; another son’s famously failed marriage, Charles’, dominated the headlines, and her house burned down. Here is how Her Majesty “vented”:

“1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis’.”

Dry, understated, with the only vivid phrase ascribed to a correspondent. Flawless.

She was an icon, but not an idol. An idol requires the vivid expression of virtues, personality, style. Diana was an idol — fusing a compelling and vulnerable temperament with Hollywood glamour. And Diana, of course, was in her time loved far more intensely than her mother-in-law; connected emotionally with ordinary people like a rockstar; only eventually to face the longterm consequences of that exposure and crumble under the murderous spotlight of it all.

Elizabeth never rode those tides of acclaim or celebrity. She never pressed the easy buttons of conventional popularity. She didn’t even become known for her caustic wit like the Queen Mother, or her compulsively social sorties like Margaret. The gays of Britain could turn both of these queens into camp divas. But not her. In private, as in public, she had the kind of integrity no one can mock successfully.

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Our Queen's sacrifice

By Helen Thompson

You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy — but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery — two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.

The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay. None has expressed this better than CS Lewis:

“Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honour millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. However shitty the economy, or awful the prime minister, or ugly the discourse, the monarch is able to represent the nation all the time. In a living, breathing, mortal person.

The importance of this in a deeply polarised and ideological world, where fellow citizens have come to despise their opponents as enemies, is hard to measure. But it matters that divisive figures such as Boris Johnson or Margaret Thatcher were never required or expected to represent the entire nation. It matters that in times of profound acrimony, something unites. It matters that in a pandemic when the country was shut down, the Queen, too, followed the rules, even at her husband’s funeral, and was able to refer to a phrase — “we’ll meet again” — that instantly conjured the days of the Blitz, when she and the Royal Family stayed in London, even as Hitler’s bombs fell from the sky.

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Who can rule Britain now?

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Every Brit has a memory like this. She was part of every family’s consciousness, woven into the stories of our lives, representing a continuity and stability over decades of massive change and dislocation. No American will ever experience that kind of comfort, that very human form of patriotism across the decades in one’s own life and then the centuries before. When I grew up studying the Normans and the Plantagenets and the Tudors, they were not just artifacts of the distant past, but deeply linked to the present by the monarchy’s persistence and the nation’s thousand-year survival as a sovereign state — something no other European country can claim.

The Queen was crowned in the cathedral where kings and queens have been crowned for centuries, in the same ceremony, with the same liturgy. To have that kind of symbolic, sacred, mystical thread through time and space is something that is simply a gift from the past that the British people, in their collective wisdom, have refused to return.

A version of this piece first appeared on Andrew Sullivan’s Substack.