this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Gender affirming care bans haven’t had a great time standing up in federal court in the past decade or so.
Groups like the ACLU and Lambda Legal have gone to great lengths to establish precedent that gender doesn’t have to be defined at birth, gender dysphoria is a genuine medical condition, and that gender affirming care helps with dysphoria.
That, combined with the precedent in Bostock that sexuality and gender identity can be covered by bans on sex discrimination makes it look like these bans will continue to fail when challenged.
Granted, the Federalist Society ghouls and their friends know this too and are trying to push back. Also, the Supreme Court could rule on 303 Creative v. Elenis tomorrow and absolutely devastate LGBT protections in the name of religious freedom. That would make this comment irrelevant almost immediately. As for now, we’ll probably see a lot more bans fail in federal court though
People need to shift their perspective a bit to understand why conservatives keep fighting an obviously stupid war. It isn't about the specific group they're trying to demonize. It's about having something to fight, period. They lost on gay marriage - if they actually thought it was so terrible, they would still be fighting it. The same is true for Trans exclusionary laws. Anyone can do the math and realize that the societal harm caused if you assume even their wildest claims are true is dwarfed by the political money required to fight for and against these laws. And money, of course, is the root of the problem.
As long as they have an unlimited number of people to punch down at, they can keep riling up their bases. That means they have job security, and they can exploit these positions for "legal" bribes through cushy retirement jobs and conduct their real (economic) war on behalf of the rich.
I think this is a pretty good analysis, but I want to add onto it a little.
From where I'm standing, it seems like the reason they care so much about riling up their base is because their actual policies and interests hurt the working class rust belt people that are their main constituency. So they have to come up with some huge overriding cultural battle for their base to get really invested in fighting, to make them feel like they have to vote Republican and oppose the Democrats no matter what, and to distract them from the underlying social and economic issues that are the source of their undirected frustration in the first place, and deflect their anger onto a scapegoat that they can blame for all society's ills without actually changing the system.
Because if they didn't, their base would continue going down their populist route. They might start actually realizing how bad capitalism is for them and fighting against it in their own weird way. Some might see the benefit of Medicaid and Medicare and food stamps to working class people, or taxing rich more and the middle class less, and go over to the Democrats. And that could actually be pretty unprofitable for the elites and their donors and lobbyists.
Not to say that this would be exactly a good option either, though, because I think there is still a ton of genuine nationalism, traditionalism, anti-intellectualism, conservatism, and so on among today's right wing, it isn't all trumped up by their leaders, and that's going to tinge their social and economic understandings, so even if they went down this latter route, it would still end up being a conspirational populism that looks disturbingly like fascism.
Well said. They react with fear to anything they don't personally identify with, and only know how to use fear to accomplish their selfish goals. They aren't the sole source of the fear, but they are certainly happy to stoke the flames and counter any attempts to reason with dangerous rhetoric.