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My theory is that the modern culture war in the US stems from gay marriage. Basically, gay marriage did not win democratically in the US, it was imposed from above. Therefore blue tribe is deeply insecure in their victory. And they have responded by trying to crush any and all dissent.
It would have been healthier if blue tribe had to win gay marriage the old-fashioned way, through the formal constitutional amendment process. Win referendums state-by-state. It would have taken longer, but having your fellow citizens vote with you gives confidence in the result, that it's unlikely to be taken from you.
Perhaps the loss in the California referendum spooked blue tribe, and made them think the amendment path was impossible. Personally I do think Americans would have eventually voted for gay marriage. "The pursuit of happiness" is deeply entrenched in the American soul.
A couple analogous situations. Women's suffrage was rejected by the Supreme Court. So it had to be done via amendment. But doing so made it utterly accepted.
Canada passed gay marriage with two free votes in Parliament. One under a Liberal government and one under the subsequent Conservative government. Both votes passed, and thus gay marriage has iron-clad legitimacy in Canada. This is how the process is supposed to work, what Parliament is for.
You’re thinking about this the wrong way.
The battle over gay marriage was won so fast both legally and popularly that progressives think they can repeat that with say trans issues.
I don’t think conservatives think they have a chance of ever reversing gay marriage. Best they can do is fight to have the freedom to not bake cakes for it.
Moreover, they did so by just lying about what is known about reality, enforcing it through pure social power, then freely admitting that they totally lied. There have been, and there will be, zero consequences for this lying, so ISTM that they feel emboldened to repeat the same tactic on any issue of choice.
Leaving aside the whole issue of government involvement in the institution of marriage and the court deciding things, the popularity battle was not won by lying.
I can grant your claims of some lying, but the biggest factor is that what the gays wanted was not that much of an ask, overall. It was about social acceptance, without too much of a real burden. The exceptions, of course, revolve around the trade offs with religious rights, because freedom of association and freedom from association are murky unresolvable problems.
This is not the case with trans issues. There are significant health concerns, as well as the major biological differences between men and women being pretttty difficult to overcome. It’s asymmetric of course; almost all the Culture Warring is over MtF issues.
In comparison to what? There is a reason that the lies were focused on making it, "...compared to having to 'live a lie' and betray your very identity that is as core to your being as your DNA, and as a result, never ever have the chance to live a happy and satisfying life." If you lie enough to make the alternative YUGE, then you can make it sound like what you're wanting is not that much of an ask. It's baked in to your thinking that it's not that much of an ask, and you probably can't extricate it from your mind to look at it any other way.
It’s just literally not much of an ask in concrete terms, relative to say implementing the ADA, or the Civil Rights Act(s), or the various complexities of trans issues.
The gay people I know personally are quite gay, and disproportionately the type who risked/suffered a great deal personally to live as such. They weren’t lying about their reality. Some countries still execute gays. Hell of a preference to satisfy.
I’ve seen a number of instances where religious gay men tried to make a heterosexual marriage work and it didn’t pan out. The “genderqueer/fluid” crowd is a different beast, as is the whole thing with bisexuals, but most of that has emerged in more recent times and among the youths, after the popular perception tide had turned.
Graduating high school in 2006 is utterly different than in 2016 with respect to the gays. The people that can’t remember 9/11 also can’t really remember a lack of societal acceptance of gays. Even if the courts had not ruled in favor of gay marriage when they did, the cultural change was already a foregone conclusion.
I don't know that this happens without the lies, though. That NYT article said that it was "critical" to tell people these lies so that they could effect a cultural change. Again, I think you're so swimming in the result that you really just can't fathom how important it was for the culture to change. How many people felt just utterly bullied into changing their perspective, because they felt they couldn't say anything in response to, "The Science says!" They had to retreat to, "Well, I might not personally like it, but if that's who they are," or some people even said, "...if that's who god made them to be, then..."
Graduating in 2016 meant being most exposed to peak propaganda on precisely this issue. Literally 2015 was Obergefell, when the APA told SCOTUS that a bloody opinion poll settled the science on the issue. The lies were literally more like the water they were swimming through than at any other time.
Frankly, this is just reinforcing my original point. They were sooooo successful with pushing these lies to effect cultural and legal change that you can't even see how important it was. It's no wonder they think they can just boldly do it again on any issue they please. You might personally see through it the next time, but there will be a train of people who graduated in 2026 instead of 2016 or 2006 who will be right there to say, "But you just don't understand that there was a cultural change," and completely not grokking how that cultural change happened.
To put a finer point on it, you have the causation backwards.
Even if I grant you all the lies, the lies happened because there was already critical mass where it was important. The “science lies” were a prop, not a significant load-bearing element of the cultural change machine. Now the Hollywood propaganda was load-bearing I think, but the gays had already long conquered the arts so what can you do.
I was raised in a very religious environment and served under DADT. I personally made the transition to support gay rights, and witnessed that in many others, including the devout. “The science” was an afterthought compared to knowing gay people. (I think I made the shift before actuality personally knowing a real-life homosexual, due to reading a prominent gay intellectual for several years as a teenager.)
The biggest factor for most people was the personal relations bit. Back then, being gay was certainly not a fun preference to indulge if you were from a background like mine or wished to serve in the military.
The same playbook won’t work nearly so well on trans issues because of the complications I already described, as we are witnessing.
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I’m telling you that I lived through that transition and the lies you allege were just not a significant factor.
It’s not like the Red Tribe is convinced by “well if science says so”, and the Blue Tribe accepting it was a foregone conclusion, science or not. What gives this issue a strong majority is similar to the case of abortion: independents and a decent chunk of right-leaning people support the other side.
I mean, you can just think whatever you want to think, and I can think otherwise. I lived through it also. I saw all the propaganda. I watched The Daily Show, uh, on the daily. You think it was "knowing people" and "personal relations", but that is still downstream of the lies. It was, "I know this person, and now that they've told me that they were born gay, that that's just who they are, and that I just have to accept who they are, I will do it." The personal relations and knowing people simply goes differently if you don't have the foundational bedrock of a lie about the person that you know.
It's really hard to extricate this lie from your mind, but it really is like saying that if people just knew more folks who steal things, they'll become more accepting of theft. I doubt that's the case. However, if you had a constant cultural threat to simply recognize that they were actually just born a kleptomaniac, that that's just the way that god made them, that there's nothing that you can do about it, they're never possibly going to change, you either just have to accept it or else you're a bigot and will be completely socially shunned, made fun of on primetime television, fired from your job, and ejected from the sphere of respectable people, then yeah, I think some number of folks would accept it. They may even construct ego-preserving myths about how they were just convinced by the science or how the whole culture became more "enlightened". But the upstream reality is that it was pure social power being exerted on the hinge of a lie.
Moreover, that lie was "critical", especially to get the political and legal power to now persecute any stragglers who want to bake cakes or make websites. Of course people are going to bend under the pressure and retcon that they were totally rational about the whole thing all along.
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