I swear I'm not making this up.

Why the Democrats are in more trouble than the MSM is willing to admit.

Sometimes an obscure story will appear that gives you a window into why the culture wars tell us so much. This piece from the New York Sun is one of them. I’ll just give it to you straight.

The title is, “New Jersey Parents Left Dumbfounded After Hospital Forms Ask Whether Their Newborn Babies Are ‘Transgender’ or ‘Genderqueer’.”

The forms, attributed to the hospital group Inspira Health, include queries like, “What sex was your baby assigned at birth? Which of the following best describes your baby? Lesbian or gay; straight or heterosexual, bisexual, questioning/unsure, prefer not to answer.”

Let me repeat: I’m not making this up.

The form also asks: “Do you identify your baby as a transgender male/trans man, female-to-male, genderqueer, or an additional gender category?” according to NJ.com.

Naturally, just as Gavin Newsom has discovered that pushing for men to be able to compete in, and thus ruin, women’s sports isn’t such a hot idea if you want to be a successful national candidate, the folks in New Jersey who are behind this are making haste to get elsewhere.

The forms are being distributed across several hospitals in the state, allegedly to comply with a 2021 New Jersey law. Yet lawmakers are crying foul, saying the law never required such nonsense for babies.

Republican State Senator Holly Schepisi didn’t mince words, calling the form a waste of time and a total lack of common sense.

Question: Why is a Republican legislator pussyfooting around about this? That they’re “a waste of time” and “lack common sense” of course is not the problem. The problem is that they’re insane.

The senator said she plans to introduce legislation to limit such data collection to patients older than 16.

How ‘bout not having any such “data collection” at all? I don’t want the government in my wallet, and still less do I want it in my underwear or my kids’ underwear (or diapers), whether the kids are newborns or teenagers.

So now let the scampering away begin!

Democrat legislator Herbert Conaway, who worked on the bill inspiring the data collection, [said he] was baffled. Mr. Conaway stated that the law was never intended to require sexual orientation or gender identity data about newborns.

“Newborns aren’t subjected to this data collection because parents aren’t obligated to answer these questions,” Mr. Conaway said, adding that it was meant to help public health officials develop better measures.

Measures to do what, exactly? And note the non-sequitur: That the parents aren’t required to answer the questions has nothing to do with why they get asked to begin with.

Inspira Health, the creators of the form, insists they’re doing exactly what the law demands.

“Inspira Health, along with every other acute care hospital in New Jersey, is required by New Jersey law and the State of New Jersey Department of Health to request their patients provide their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity,” spokesman Paul Simon told NJ.com.

The company claims the questionnaire is its way of providing healthcare in a “culturally competent and sensitive manner” while complying with state legislation. Inspira also noted that the form permits parents to decline to answer the questions entirely and says it has requested a waiver on the data collection, adding one has yet to be granted.

Indeed. How could anything be more “culturally competent” — whatever that means, about which I have no clue — or “sensitive” than to poke at new parents about whether their two day-old bundle of joy is “genderqueer”?

Again, the main problem here is not sensitivity or the lack of it. The main problem is not that the state government is now so big and so wildly intrusive that it thinks it has the right to ask parents about their kid’s “race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity” — although that is one of the problems, for sure. The main problem is not allegedly misconstrued legislation.

The main problem is that a big swath of the culture has become “gender conscious” and “trans conscious” and more broadly identity conscious to the point of insanity.

And it has political implications. I frequently hear that there’s no very big difference between the parties, just tweedle dumb and tweedle dee. They’re all owned by “the establishment” and just wear slightly different masks. So ask yourself: Has a Republican politician, even a RINO, ever supported this kind of identity- and gender-obsessed legislation? Has it ever been adopted in a Republican-controlled jurisdiction? Will it ever be?

No, no and no.

The big issues in the last election were inflation, economic growth, and uncontrolled immigration, true. But I continue to think that culture war issues and race-obsession were an important undertow that helped Trump win, and that Trump thinks so too, given some of the focus in the early weeks of his administration.

Yes, the Democrats were on the wrong side of the big issues, but for as bad as that problem was and is for them, they have a more insidious one, one that’s going to be harder to solve: Even if they try to sound as if they’re coming more to the center, as Newsom is trying and Harris tried, the voters aren’t going to believe them because they too openly wallow in nutty Leftism.

As Commentary noted in its Newsletter a couple of days ago:

The race wasn’t determined by the likeability of a particular
candidate or abstract ideas such as fighting off the “threat to
democracy.” It was about concrete issues. Voters don’t trust Democrats
on the economy, taxes, government spending, the deficit, and foreign
policy because they’ve seen how Democrats approach these issues—with
ineffective, out-of-touch liberal policies. Shor noted of Joe Biden:
“Over the course of 2021, as his approval ratings dipped, the
perception that he was too liberal also went up.”

That’s because Biden, like the rest of his party, has become too
liberal. Not only did he fail on the issues that Americans care about,
but he also followed his left flank on tertiary social or
environmental causes that, at best, don’t matter to the average
American. Biden’s celebrating Transgender Visibility Day and phasing
out plastic straws might have pleased some activists but it did his
party no favors.

The Democrats show signs of learning this, which is why so many of their allies in the press are determined to talk only about Trump and Trump’s (unfortunately numerous) deficiencies. But, may God be praised, they haven’t learned it as well as they’re going to need to.