The mainstream moderate Republican reaction is, “Oh, come on, don’t react to this. It’s more of this social issue crap. Just let it go. We’re never gonna win if you keep focusing on these social issues. It doesn’t matter.” And it isn’t long before Republicans end up being blamed for never letting go of the social issues. And the Republicans being blamed as these social crusade warriors, anti-fun, anti-good time, when in fact all the Republicans are, and conservatives particularly, are people minding their own business.They wake up one day and find out that the way they want to live their lives and raise their kids is being challenged, and people want to come and turn it upside down and put everybody in it at risk. And so they react to it. And conservative reactionism is then portrayed as conservatives will not let go of the social issues. It’s the left that won’t let go of social issues. It’s the left that is trying to corrupt the American cultural and society. If it weren’t for the left trying to do these things, cultural and social issues would not be issues.
But the traditional Republican moderate stance is, “Stand aside. This is not a hill to fight on. This is not something to go to war on. Let it go. There are many important issues out there than the sign on the bathroom.” And so yet another vestige of what has seemed to be a safe and morality-based area of life, our culture, is debased once again with our moderates telling us it’s not worth the fight. Too damaging. We might lose some inroads we’re making with moderate voters if we make too big a deal out of this.
So my brother David has had his fill of this kind of thinking. “Resisting Obama’s Transgender Directive: A Hill to Die On,” he writes. To achieve its political ends, the left doesn’t just assault the Constitution through the appointment of liberal activist judges; there are a variety of other leftist abuses, such as politicizing the departments of Justice and Education. In its mission statement, the Justice Department states that one of its aims is ‘to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.’
“That goal underscores cherished principles of American jurisprudence and the Constitution, including the preamble’s commitment to ‘establish Justice,’ the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law and the rule of law itself.
“Justice is supposed to be blind, in the sense of impartiality and being free from political influences. The rule of law ensures that we have a government of laws, not men — meaning that no one is above the law and everyone should be treated equally. The law must be fairly applied and enforced, or it will cease to function as a safeguard of rights and a guarantor of justice.”
So now we move to transgender bathroom order that Obama mandated on American schools with the threat of withholding financial funding from schools.
“President Obama knows he doesn’t have the legal authority to issue such an order, but he is determined to create as much chaos as he can and to unilaterally impose his iron will to the fullest extent before his term expires.
“No one will convince me that this has anything to do with the rights of transgender people. Rather, Obama and his fellow leftist tyrants are seeing how far they can push the envelope — how much they can fundamentally transform America against the people’s will and against the protections guaranteed by the federal and state constitutions.”
I think, personally, that all of this is leading to the erosion of private property. That’s where I think the left is dreaming of all this ending up, under the thesis that if you leave it up to private property’s owners, everybody that we love is gonna be discriminated against. We can’t have that, so the federal government’s gonna have to come in and take over everything in order to guarantee civil rights. I think that’s where this is headed. Gay rights, transgender rights is just the latest vehicle for getting there. That’s me.
Back to my brother’s piece. “Folks, there has to be a tipping point — a point at which we’ll no longer tolerate this kind of tyranny. … The Obama administration obviously cares not a whit for the privacy of students who don’t want to be forced to share a restroom with students of the opposite sex.
“The rights of the many will be subordinated to the rights of the very, very few — not to protect the rights of those few but to manufacture rights that don’t exist to make an authoritarian statement on behalf of Big Brother. … This is a hill to die on,” my brother’s words, “and if the sane states don’t fight back on this one, we might as well just completely surrender the republic today. It’s either that or eventually seeing the people rise up in a way we haven’t witnessed for many years.”
His point is at what point are we gonna stand up and say, “Enough, stop, no more”? Well, I think they’re headed to private property rights ultimately down the road.