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1990's colorblind liberalism is dead and it wasn't the right wingers who killed it. Since we now live in some kind of post-liberal racial spoils hellscape, I'll be voting for my own team, thanks.
I ask again: how do you justify this morally? Some might say that unpleasant circumstances when doing the right thing will give you a material disadvantage is when it is most important (and indeed admirable) to behave ethically.
Why should I need to justify it morally at all? Whose team should I be on if not my own? I didn't create this system, I just refuse to play along with progressives who seem to think I'm obligated to accept the bottom rung in it.
You shouldn't be on a "team", not to the extent that it directs all your actions. You should be trying to do the right thing, whatever this appears to be to your conscience.
I'd care about this more if it made any difference. Staff at a perfectly ordinary suburban high school tried to talk a vulnerable young member of my family down a path that very well could have led to her permanent sterilization and disfigurement. As far as I'm concerned it's moral to eradicate gender ideology even at significant cost to the rest of society.
This is a non sequitur. No one's saying you can't oppose gender ideology. I am saying that you can oppose multiple evil things in multiple direction; that opposing gender ideology needn't entail that you never criticize other, unrelated evils, some of which might be to your right rather than to your left.
No you can't. I get that you are really enamored with this high minded centrist/independent shtick. But electorally it fails 100% of the time, and most people have woken up that. People have a list of priorities, and if their top priority is "Make sure school doesn't start teaching my 6 year old they can choose their gender", and a combination ticket of Hitler/Genghis Khan is anti "Have schools teach kids to sterilize themselves" and they are running against Jesus and Santa Claus who for baffling reasons are pro "Elementary Teachers keep a castration kit in their desk drawer"... well I hate to tell you this but Hitler/Genghis Khan get my vote. And I'll stand by that vote in the concentration camps because they got my 23&me results and saw I had 0.7% Jewish ancestry.
I don't get to pick policies ala cart. Sadly I have to prioritize and pick the candidate that I think has the best chance of achieving success in my top priorities. And these days they are "Keep Democrats from making my life worse like they have the last 30 years".
I feel like I'm not getting through here. I am not talking about what wins elections. I am talking about what is ethical. What is right. We do not live in a perfectly convenient world where doing the right thing will always leave you better off. A Christian will tell you that this is because you must wait until after death for your Reward, an atheist will tell you that this is because the world wasn't actually designed by a benevolent intelligence, but the point remains the same. I never asked you to imagine that President Hitler an VP Khan send you to a concentration camp: that is, again, smuggling your own personal welfare back into it. What 'm saying is: if you have moral principles at all, then surely, surely you recognize that there is some amount or degree of harm inflicted to random strangers that would outweigh the welfare of your child? That, no matter how much you want your child not to be transed, it would be evil of you to put material pursuit of that goal over the lives of ten million people you've never met and never will?
But I'm not even talking about elections, here. I'm talking about criticizing and denouncing evil in your Tribe. Under sufficiently gerrymandered assumptions you might still end up voting for the very people at issue as the lesser evil - but I would like to see some acknowledgement that there is evil here, and that this is a relevant consideration, separate from your personal welfare or even that of your kids.
Why do you seemingly struggle to accept that is a moral principle, just one you disagree with?
Not everyone is a universalist. Not everyone is a utilitarian. I would find it evil to put any number of people above your own children- maybe, if it were truly existential, I would crack (and indeed I've heard Southern Baptist preachers use that example to describe the Father sacrificing the Son, as the singular unique time such a thing was justifiable).
You're doing a fine job highlighting innate familial conservatism and Scott's "don't want to play the philosophical game" rebuttal to WWOTF, though.
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