Take a minute to read Live Action’s devastating account of the connections between abortion, sex trafficking, and Planned Parenthood, which begins thusly:
Attorney General Curtis Hill announced today that Planned Parenthood has conceded defeat in a lawsuit that challenged an Indiana law requiring ultrasounds at least 18 hours before women undergo abortions. The concession was the result of Planned Parenthood’s opening of a new clinic in Fort Wayne that will provide the ultrasounds required by the law. Planned Parenthood has agreed to drop its lawsuit against the ultrasound requirement provided that Indiana refrains from enforcing it until Jan. 1, 2021 — giving Planned Parenthood time to train staff at its Fort Wayne clinic to operate ultrasound equipment. The concession makes clear that if anything threatened women’s ability to obtain abortions, it was Planned Parenthood’s own business decisions, not the challenged law — an argument that the State made all along.
These laws save lives. An important victory.
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Sohrab Ahmari has a fascinating article over at The Spectator on the difference between what he refers to as “woke” and “unwoke” conservatives, and suggest that the Right needs to change tactics:
Partly owing to the shock electoral successes of populism, and partly to liberalism’s own inner logic, the left has now abandoned all the old procedural niceties: in the corridors of power, in the press, in the street, online. To be sure, some ‘moderate’ liberals still mouth the old rhetoric — ‘free speech’, ‘free inquiry’, etc — and get canceled for their trouble. But what their movement as a whole seeks is the brute enactment of substantive liberal commitments.
The left has a crystalline moral vision (moral by its own lights, at any rate). To the liberal mind, norms and procedures are worthwhile only insofar as they help advance this vision. If existing norms and procedures fail to do that, well, new ones will have to be found. The point isn’t to uphold some neutral ground that different groups might contest, with winners and losers periodically switching places. The point is to win. Decisively.
Unwoke conservatives still labor under the quaint impression that a golden age of procedural liberalism can be restored, provided the right is winsome enough. They have no vision of the good society to rival the left’s: how could they, if their foremost obsession is how laws get made, rather than what they contain, or whether they promote the common good? Nor do these conservatives love their natural constituency: the working classes of all races. The effects of this asymmetry have been especially glaring lately. In recent months, the left has used the coronavirus pandemic to enshrine what amounts to a new caste system, tightly regulating who may and who may not legitimately exercise historic American liberties like freedom of speech and assembly. The sheer unfairness of it all, not least the mainstream coverage, is a deep source of conservative heartache.
Unsurprisingly, Disney continues to follow the rest of the entertainment industry down the gutter. From the Christian Post:
I’m old enough to remember when “Disney” and “family” were synonymous. Walt Disney said, “Our greatest national resource is the minds of our children.” He also noted, “The most important thing is family. If you can keep the family together—and that’s the backbone of our whole business, catering to families—that’s what we hope to do.”
I wonder what he would think about the announcement by the Disney Channel that its animated series The Owl House will feature a bisexual teenager in a lead role. The character will explore her sexuality while dabbling in witchcraft as well. The series creator identifies as bisexual and says she was intrigued by the idea of creating “queer kids” in the story.
That trend is going to continue.
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And finally, another scientist has been driven from his post by trans activists accusing him of “violence” simply for disagreeing with their fresh new ideology. From the National Post:
The prickly politics around transgender issues have boiled over again, prompting a leading Canadian sex researcher to quit an international research organization after being pilloried for his views on the topic.
James Cantor resigned his 27-year-long membership in the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality recently following a heated exchange on the group’s listserv over the nature of gender-identity problems. Administrators had temporarily banned him from the online forum after the email argument, citing a “pattern” of allegedly bullying behaviour.
The dispute began when Cantor posted an essay on the listserv complaining that “extremists” were unfairly castigating people who questioned some tenets of the transgender movement, such as that children who identify with another gender can begin transitioning before puberty.
The essay referenced Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who herself drew the ire of many in the trans community when she wrote that sex is undeniably tied to biology. Some of those who commented on Cantor’s essay accused him of encouraging hatred or even violence toward trans people.
“The original piece in question was a difficult and frankly irresponsible read — especially in light of the fact that 21 trans people have been murdered in 2020 so far (the vast majority of whom are Black trans women),” wrote Jules Purnell, a trans person and associate director of sexual-violence prevention at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College.
Cantor charges that such attitudes are a form of “emotional blackmail” that essentially disqualifies people whose views lie between the extremes of anti-trans hatred and militant trans activism. “No compromise, no in-between is allowed,” he said in an interview. “They’re not even thought crimes. It’s ‘Oh, clearly you’re on the other team. If you don’t belong to my religion, your religion is not allowed to speak.’ ”
The former University of Toronto professor posted an open resignation letter earlier this month, accusing the society of choosing popular appeal over science in the “culture war” between the two. But the group’s president, Indiana University psychology professor Zoe Peterson, said the decision to eject Cantor from the forum was not based on his essay or views about transgender matters, but on what the directors considered a history of abusive comments.
“Many members of the board felt that Dr. Cantor had demonstrated a pattern of harassment against several other members— even after those other members had repeatedly asked him to stop,” she said in an email response to questions. “The board determined that Dr. Cantor’s unwillingness to be responsive to other members’ requests to cease his argumentative and harassing posts violated the guidelines of the listserv.”
