Behind the drive to impose the extremist LBGTQ agenda

In this post, I argued that the yearning to be associated with a big civil rights cause helps explain the obsession of young activists with transgender rights. Old-timers like me got to participate in the equal rights for blacks movement. Women of a certain age fought to break down barriers to gender equality. Decades later, the gay rights movement won its key victories.

What’s left is the battle for biological boys and men to compete with girls and women in sports and to use restrooms and showers with females, and the quest to teach eight-year-olds that their bodies have nothing to do with whether they are boys or girls. These fights bear no resemblance to integrating public schools, breaking down barriers to female entry into various professions, or ending housing discrimination against gays and lesbians. But they will have to do.

However, “big cause envy,” while helpful in explaining why many young activists support extremist transgender causes, is less useful in explaining why the radical vanguard is pushing LGBTQ extremism. How did the issues associated with that extremism get pushed to the forefront where young young people with big cause envy can latch onto them?

To explain how this happened, I turn to Andrew Sullivan, who helped lead the charge for gay equality (including gay marriage) years ago. He attributes LBGTQ extremism, logically enough, to the desire of the vanguard to radically transform America:

In the movement I was once a part of, many, of course, were not liberals, let alone liberal conservatives — but radicals, who reluctantly went along with marriage equality, but itched to transform society far more comprehensively. And these radicals now control everything in the hollowed-out gay rights apparatus. Their main ticket item is a law that would replace biological sex with gender in the law, and remove protections for religious liberty. . . .

And this is what I mean by “illiberal”: the use of public education, corporate power, and government fiat to enforce the postmodern doctrines of queer and gender theory; the suppression of debate; the abuse of science; and the deployment of children as weapons in an ideological campaign.

In Sullivan’s telling, which I find persuasive if we’re talking about the LGBTQ extremist vanguard, the driving force isn’t big cause envy. Instead, it’s the same kind of will to power and control that drives the far left in all contexts:

In the gay rights movement, we examined every single possible argument that could be used against us, and answered them. We debated anyone anywhere. And, in the broader context, we left you, gays and straights, alone. Nothing in your life had to change to accept gay equality.

Compare that with the transqueer movement. They will never leave you alone, they will police the words you use, they will deny you access to any same-sex space, they will force your daughter to compete against males, they will tell your child they may be the opposite sex inside and keep it from you, and they will use blackmail — and a farrago of falsehood — to put your kid on a lifetime of medication.

They refuse to debate opponents; they cancel and demonize even the most liberal of people (see JK Rowling); they censor words or destroy their meaning and defend violence. In all of this, they are as hostile to a free society as the worst fanatics on the far right.

I always thought the best argument for LGBTQ rights is “live and let live.” This saying cuts through whatever views one might have about sexual preferences and practices that differ from one’s own. It counsels that we accommodate our fellow citizens as long as their behavior does no demonstrable harm to the rest of us.

And, as Sullivan notes, this is how the gay rights movement marketed itself. But, as he also observes, the radical vanguard was never sincere about “live and let live.” It wants to rub our noses in their sexual preferences and to control how we say it smells.

That’s why The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, that group that the Los Angeles Dodgers welcomed on Pride Night, mocks Christians in sickening ways. It’s why gay activists in Colorado demand that Jack Phillips design cakes that depict male sex organs, even though there are other bakers who, unlike Phillips, have no religious objections to accommodating them.

It’s why they want radically to transform sports and deny privacy to girls — and why, indeed, they want to deny biological reality. As Sullivan says:

It would be perfectly possible to find a pragmatic way to include the tiny minority of actual trans students in school sports without unfairness. Instead, all male and female biological differences have to be denied, and those who object are slandered or fired.

Women are “menstruators”; lesbians are “non-men”; gays are all “queers”; and homosexuality is a bigoted form of “genital preference.” This ideology, by denying there is such a thing as a male sex, has even taken aim at homosexuality itself. . . .

That this ideology is so ludicrous that it must be imposed through state and corporate power, is a feature, not a bug for those who insist on it. The joy of imposing it is a major part of the appeal — as is the case with all radically illiberal movements I know of.