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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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I am just a legal layman, so I defer to you on some of the more technical minutiae. Many of these might be weaker because I personally agree with the red side of them. Trying to be fair forces me to argue for positions that I don't really agree with. But I do believe that this one-sided victimizing of Red-tribe belief is missing the forest for the trees.

DOMA only applied at the federal government level, and specifically didn't stop states from recognizing gay marriages locally

But it refused to recognize state marriages as marriages, creating a double tier scheme where you were married in NY but not federally. I think explicitly refusing to recognize an official state sanctioned marriage and conferring those benefits would be an imposition. I think my scaffolding around this is that if Texas doesn't want to recognize a NY gay marriage, that's fine, its their prerogative. But if the federal government want to say the NY marriage is invalid federally they are denying the state's ability to officiate legal marriages according to the state's-populations desire. That's a legal imposition of values from 1 tribe to another.

I think Masterpiece is a weak example.

303 Creative still functions as a federal constitutional carveout from Colorado’s LGBTQ anti-discrimination law. Even if it applies a formally neutral First Amendment rule. Colorado is requiring a business that sells wedding websites to sell the same product to same-sex couples that it sells to opposite-sex couples.

Espinoza was about the state is trying to keep public money from flowing to religious institutions, consistent with its own church-state separation rule. That is a neutral rule being violated by another neural rule: the Free Exercise Clause. But the outcome was that the Red-tribe favored rule over-rode the Blue-tribe favored rule.

Carson is essentially similar in that Maine wanted to provide the rough equivalent of a secular public education for students who lack a local public school via a tuition reimbursement. And the court ruled that that was discriminatory towards religious students and institutions. This essentially hits the feeling of "We are being forced to subsidize something we morally oppose." This is probably pretty neutral if there are equivalent examples of conservative states being forced to subsidize things they reject. But off the top of my head, no conservative state has been forced to fund Planned Parenthood with its own money. (Medicaid does not count as it is a joint federal-state program) I think this one is a pretty strong example.

I think SFFA gets more into the weeds on what constitutes "Blue Tribe", as its a liberal vs progressive ideological fault line. It's not as clean but progressives are not really the anti-discrimination party, they are a racial/minority-spoils party. So idk if you can argue that they champion the anti-discrimination laws unless you autistically adhere to the definitions. SFFA is more like “a conservative/colorblind theory" of equality imposed over a "progressive/anti-subordination" theory of equality. It's a good comparison to the Voting Rights Act imposition.

I think my scaffolding around this is that if Texas doesn't want to recognize a NY gay marriage, that's fine, its their prerogative. But if the federal government want to say the NY marriage is invalid federally they are denying the state's ability to officiate legal marriages according to the state's-populations desire.

This... gets messy, then. The underlying motivation for DOMA was Baehr v. Mike, the perception that the Full Faith and Credit Clause would require every state to instantly recognize the potential one-state gay marriages, and was signed into law by Bill Clinton with large bipartisan support. That makes it a very awkward fit into "Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe". Even assuming that frame, the federal benefits of marriage are limited and primarily focused to domains (tax deducations, military benefits) that don't match the normal personal/government-provided divide. State-married people under DOMA would still get state-specific benefits. It's not clear that there was any other equilibrium short of a) some consistent agreement that no one attempt those cases, cfe Windsor, or b) Red Tribe getting squished by Blue Tribe Three Gay Couples From Hawaii Specifically.

303 Creative still functions as a federal constitutional carveout from Colorado’s LGBTQ anti-discrimination law. Even if it applies a formally neutral First Amendment rule. Colorado is requiring a business that sells wedding websites to sell the same product to same-sex couples that it sells to opposite-sex couples.

If you put it like that, it sounds like SCOTUS stopped a Blue Tribe state squishing a Red Tribe person. I get what you're trying to motion toward, but there's not really a level of specificity where this was some new first step -- either there's a long series of First Amendment association cases that overturned Red Tribe laws predating this matter by decades and using this exact avenue, or there's a lot of anti-discrimination laws that required exactly this sort of active behavior targeting Red Tribers.

Espinoza... Carson... This is probably pretty neutral if there are equivalent examples of conservative states being forced to subsidize things they reject. But off the top of my head, no conservative state has been forced to fund Planned Parenthood with its own money.

You're not going to find lawsuits, but the ACA required all states accepting funds to support gender therapy and any state accepting medicaid expansion plans to cover preventive contraceptive services. There was actually a big mess just last year about trying to throw (some) Planned Parenthood programs out. And before that there was the thing with the nuns? The biggest case was Pennsylvania, so purple state, but there were a bunch of follow-ons in deep red states. I'd normally put that in the marginal 'well, it is federal funding' bin, but there's a bunch of complex rules with matching state funds and punitive efforts for those states that didn't join, so it's still a pretty good if imperfect match.

But more generally yes, there were and are quite a lot of things like that.

I think SFFA gets more into the weeds on what constitutes "Blue Tribe", as its a liberal vs progressive ideological fault line. It's not as clean but progressives are not really the anti-discrimination party, they are a racial/minority-spoils party.

But the rule in SFFA -- don't discriminate in education by race -- was used and is used very aggressively against Red Tribers first. It's famous for it! A President literally sent the national guard in over it. Even if you want to salami-slice the liberals, the progressives still use the very precise rule here to do everything from review college admissions programs to demand that Red Tribe elementary schools spend enormous amounts of money on ESL training. There was over fifty years of this before SFFA. There's a fair argument that it's not popular among the Blue Tribe normies (there was famously a California constitutional amendment prohibiting it... which immediately was ignored), but it's still a Blue Tribe rule that was used to smash Red Tribers long before the Red Tribe picked it up.