Why conservatives keep losing (and other stories)

A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.

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Over at The American Mind, Jennifer Roback Morse has a must-read column titled “Why conservatives keep losing.” An excerpt:

We have no right to whine and complain about the “Left’s Long March Through the Institutions.” They marched largely unopposed! We lost a game we never even showed up to play. We weren’t even watching from the bleachers.

Having correct, logical, empirically sound ideas is necessary, but not sufficient. If it were sufficient, we would not be where we are today, when grown men and women pretend they can’t tell the difference between and a real woman and a man who says he is a woman. I learned from painful experience in the marriage debates that pointing out the inconsistencies and incoherencies of my opponents was not enough to win. I won lots of arguments. But my side still lost the war.

There are any number of things I could say about the failure of the strategies which the conservative “legal establishment” has used to argue for any number of social policies in the courts. But this is a message for another time. Today, my message is simply that conservatives must stop simply intoning the “ideas have consequences” mantra over and over again, as if getting the ideas right automatically assures victory.

We must moreover abandon the idea that “the truth will win in the end,” just as we must forego our blind allegiance to the economists’ own version of the same notion—that “an invisible hand will automatically course-correct everything.” A lot of people will suffer while we are waiting around for “the invisible hand” or “the end.” The close-cousin concept, that “something so crazy will collapse of its own weight,” is no better. The Soviet Union did not just “collapse.” Pope St. John Paul, Ronald Reagan, and Mrs. Thatcher gave it a good shove. Finally, the religious version—“oh well, we know Who wins in the end”—subtly suggests that waiting for the Apocalypse is an honorable option.

Read the whole thing. It’s worth your time.

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Things are getting downright poisonous in some Australian schools:

During a “Diversity and inclusion” lesson, a youth worker ordered a group of Year 11 students at Parkdale Secondary College to stand up if they were white, male and Christian, and then labelled them “oppressors.” The male students reported feeling shocked, ashamed and targeted.

Critical race theory is utterly destructive.

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Church membership in the U.S. continues to decline. From Christianity Today:

For the first time since the late 1930s, fewer than half of Americans say they belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque, according to a new report from Gallup.

Forty-seven percent of Americans now say they belong to a house of worship, down from 70 percent in the mid-1990s and 50 percent in 2019. The decline is part of a continued drop in membership over the past 20 years, according to Gallup data.

Read the whole thing.

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Over at The Christian Post, a young woman who once struggled with gender dysphoria before “de-transitioning” explains why transgenderism should be treated as a mental disorder. A compelling story.

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The Montreal mansion of the owner of Pornhub was destroyed in an arson fire.

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The Sexual Revolution is continuing apace, and there is no indication of a logical stopping point. From the Coast Reporter:

A woman in a polyamorous “triad” with two other people has won her legal bid to become a third “full parent.” The BC Supreme Court decision, handed down April 23, but released on Monday, describes three adults, Olivia, Eliza and Bill — whose names were anonymized by the court — living together in a committed polyamorous relationship since 2017.

When, a year later, Eliza and Bill conceived a child, it was agreed that Olivia would be involved in the child’s life as a “full parent.” In naming themselves a “triad,” the three adults described themselves as having an equal relationship with one another and the child.

“Olivia went as far as inducing lactation so she would also be able to feed Clarke when he was born,” wrote Madam Justice Sandra Wilkinson, referring to the anonymized child. “In fact, Olivia was the first parent to feed Clarke after he was born.”

Read the whole thing, if you’ve got the stomach for it.

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More soon.

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