Common Good Conservatism In Action (Advancing noirmal sexual identity --- male and female ---as part of the public, secular, "common good")

Over the past year, conservatism has changed. At least, the way conservative intellectuals and some politicians talk has changed. Many now speak of orienting our society toward the common good, and about using government power to pursue that good. But has anything really changed within the Republican party? Politics and policy often run a course independent of philosophical debate. Are policymakers ready to go on offense and commit to a different strategy for combatting transgender ideology and the gay agenda? The answer seems to be yes.

Last month, NBC News announced: “Dozens of anti-LGBTQ state bills already proposed in 2020, advocates warn.” The story highlighted an interesting development. As the new year begins, conservative lawmakers in numerous states have started a fresh attempt to push back against the LGBT agenda. Unlike most of the legislative priorities of the recent past—Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRAs), conscience protections, and parental rights bills—the proposals being put forward in 2020 go beyond merely carving out a space for Christians to freely practice their faith.

Up against a movement set on not only erasing biological sex in law and culture but also subjecting children to this gender ideology at increasingly younger ages, conservative legislators are responding in a new way. Rather than asserting a classically liberal right to be left alone by government, they are instead defending biological reality as important for the common good. And drawing a lesson from recent efforts to pass “bathroom bills” in some states, they have honed in on the area most likely to galvanize popular support: protecting children. As one state policy leader told me, “We need to be bold and try to protect as many children as possible.”

Consider some recent proposed legislation. In South Dakota, the House passed a bill which would prohibit doctors from performing certain transgender “transition” procedures on children under 16. The NBC News story notes that similar bills aiming to discourage such practices have already been put forward in a handful of other states, including Illinois, Oklahoma, Missouri, and New Hampshire. Some state legislators have also introduced bills to clarify school athletic policy, ensuring that participation is based on biological sex and not on subjective gender identity. Legislation addressing this issue is currently being considered in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Washington. Arizona and Kentucky have also recently joined the list.

That these bills have garnered approval from conservatives—and panicked denunciations from the left—has perhaps concealed the shift in strategy taking place. Since at least Obergefell, the primary social conservative response to the LGBT movement has been to beg for a continued spot at the pluralistic table. By choosing to fight on religious liberty grounds, the cultural right inherently (if not intentionally) adopted the framework of classical liberalism. We were willing to respect the left’s views on sexuality and gender—if only we could have our own views respected as well.

However, as many predicted following Obergefell, progressives have for the most part shown little willingness to accept this détente. Instead, adopting the premise that the LGBT movement is the heir of the civil rights movement, they have sought to cast all who oppose its demands as equivalent to racists who deserve no place in the public square. Thus, progressives have sued faith-based hospitals and adoption agencies, challenged individual conscience protections, and even questioned the tax-exempt status of traditional churches.

These moves are logically consistent. If progressives are correct that LGBT and racial discrimination are the same, then social conservatives are no better than racists, and religious liberty merely permits bigotry. LGBT activists uphold a positive vision of good and evil, one which has proven far more captivating to the American imagination than conservatives’ classical liberal response.

Now that the left has turned to assaulting the biological reality of maleness and femaleness, it appears social conservatives have realized a more robust response is needed. On an issue as fundamental as this, there can be no détente. This is the essence of “common good conservatism.” If conservatives do not present an argument making the case for our vision of the common good, the left’s vision will triumph by default. People recognize that the absence of a counter-argument usually means the argument has already been won.

This is why what is happening in the states is so important. Instead of arguing for religious exemptions from the new status quo, conservative lawmakers nationwide, as well as the pro-family groups supporting them, are going on offense. This new legislation implicitly argues that the traditional vision of the human person as man and woman is not merely one legitimate view among many, but ought to be normative, especially for the sake of our society’s most vulnerable: children.

And as usual, those at the grassroots level are leading the way. The conservative establishment in Washington would be wise to follow suit—because if conservatism is to survive as a movement, embracing the “common good” is the only path forward.

Until now, most of the conservative strategy in LGBT has been defensive ("Please don't make it illegal for us to think the way we think the way we think, and speak the way we speak, on sex and gender issues.") But now states are considering legislation directly advocating natural sex identity --- male and female --- as positive goods which should be taught and treated as socially normative and central to the functioning of a healthy "common good."

In other words, not just carving out little enclaves for ourselves ("Please let our church school insist on Biblical standards for identity and behavior") but advancing the sexual binary (male/female) as objectively better for individuals, for societies and therefore for the "common good."

It's about re-centering on the normal and natural as contrasted to the deviant. Anyhow, that's how I'm reading it. What do you think?

Note: I'm posting this in issues and activism rather than Religion Forum because it is a matter of public policy, not a matter of particular religious doctrines.

GOOD.

We have to take back the compass!

I know home schooling is great and so are private schools.

But neither are realistic for the VAST, VAST majority of people and I see here people folding the cards all the time.

Since when is that the answer?

We treat dems like gods that can get things done that we can’t and so we must run from them and hide in private schools or our homes.

We need to fight and win the fight for making pubic schools sane again.

Heck, we’re paying for them either way.

I think this is good and necessary. The left should not be allowed to act like it has the civil rights high ground when it is actually enforcing authoritarianism. The left wants all values to be subjective - but only in the way they find useful. If the left can get people to say there is no difference between male and female, they can condition people to believe any lie. This will serve the purposes of any future “progressive” dictatorship.

We treat dems like gods that can get things done that we can’t

Well the problem has been not that "we" can't, but that RINOs wouldn't. What did Ryan ever do except cave to democratic demands while sitting on his conservative principles?

What a FRAUD!!

You’re right.

Some of our guys are starting to fight back and I don’t know if that’s because Trump has given them some b.lls

I hope so.

I hope they figured out that we were ready to vote them into oblivion and then Trump came along. If Jeb had been the candidate the Republican party would be history.

Hopefully they are starting to fight back because we have a gun to their heads and they don't like the thought of political extinction. Even Mittens seems to have been sobered up a bit.

Many now speak of orienting our society toward the common good, and about using government power to pursue that good.

When the Constitution was written, there was no need to use Federal coercive power to define "the good", since the basic JudeoChristian value system permeated society, and each state had an official church. Some of the individual colonies/states even levied taxes to support the official church, or compelled attendance.

Since the 1960s SCOTUS elevated atheism to the same status under law as belief in Nature's God, and the passage of the Kennedy's naively liberal Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, our doom as a "multicultural" society has been sealed. To have a common value system again, the unorganized free people of the "Land of the Free" would have to resort to Federal laws to coerce it, fight the ACLU and rogue judges, and vanquish well-funded groups like CAIR, ACLU, Open Society and other atheist organizations at the Supreme Court.

Short of a widespread Christian revival, we are toast. Trump can restore the economy, but the rot remains without God as the head of our nation.

LGBT activists uphold a positive vision of good and evil, one which has proven far more captivating to the American imagination than conservatives’ classical liberal response.

I would say they hold a materialist vision, a transactionalist vision, or a secular absolutist vision, but not a positive vision.

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