Just because we find Trump unfit doesn't mean that we can forget that the Left wants to eat us for lunch

I have not had much use for The Federalist of late, but there is an important piece up at that site right now. It raises the need for consideration of several levels of the present societal dynamics before us.

It's by Glenn T. Stanton, and is a response to a New York Times piece by Peter Wehner and Jonathan Rauch, two public intellectuals who are friends despite coming at many issues from decidedly different perspectives.

Wehner is one of those figures who has irritated me many times over the years, but not enough for me to write him off. He has some solid conservative credential. he served in the Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrations. He wrote a book with Arthur C. Brooks on why the free market makes us more moral. He's pro-life and advocates a resolute foreign policy He's currently with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He's concerned about seeing that Christian faith is able to thrive in our undoubtedly increasingly secular society, which is a good thing. He understands that Trump has been horrible for conservatism.

Still, he has exhibited more than a touch of what I call Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome - a condition similar to being a RINO, I suppose - over the years.

Rauch has characterized himself as an "unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual." He's an interesting mix of traits. Edmund Burke and James Madison are among his first-tier objects of admiration. He firmly believes that two people of the same gender can be married. On the other hand, he opposes hate-crimes laws, or at least did in a 1991 New Republic article.

Anyway, Stanton takes on the argument the two of them make in the NYT:

Rest easy, orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The New York Times wants you to know there is no reason to fear your conscience protections being steamrolled by the juggernaut that is the queer politics machine.

In a hopeful op-ed titled “We Can Find Common Ground on Gay Rights and Religious Liberty,” with the rest-assured subtitle “It does not have to be all or nothing,” Jonathan Rauch, whom I value as a long and deeply respected friend, and Peter Wehner say the Supreme Court’s recent Bostock decision provides a golden opportunity for religious conservatives and gay activists to “make a deal.” They speak hopefully of mutually beneficial compromise, with both sides attaining their desired freedoms and protections.

While I trust their talk of compromise is well-intentioned, it is profoundly naïve. Both men are intimately aware of the way the queer movement’s leadership has framed the issue and how dutifully their media and elite partisans have carried their water for decades. Their message? Gay rights are civil rights. Full stop.

This truth claim is not a statement of fact. It is one of faith, ideological conviction, and rhetorical strategy. It is aspirational. The mission is for all to adopt this belief and condemn anyone who doesn’t as a hateful bigot. There is no middle ground.

The call of the day used to be “live and let live,” but no more. Now the call is, “You will respect and affirm everything about my new understanding of sexuality and gender, or else.”

This script has been most effective. But if gay and trans rights really are civil rights, their proponents know the first rule of civil rights is that you don’t negotiate them. True justice dictates you demand them, and don’t quiet down until you’ve attained the fullness of every last one. 

About the enthusiasm that Wehner and Rauch share for the Fairness for All Act, Stanton says this:

When a bill’s rosy title signals that if it is passed, all will be right with the world, it’s a good sign someone’s putting rouge on a pig. First, when you negotiate carveouts for religious protections — a first freedom — you give up, not gain, ground.

The Fairness for All Act provides protections for religious schools, colleges, and charities, but these are tremendously narrow and few given the breadth of possible encroachments that will occur as sexual and gender options continue to expand. This will leave not only religious organizations seriously vulnerable, but also medical and social-service professionals whose work is informed by religious convictions. 

What is unsettling about the terrain that Rauch and Wehner share is that it provides fodder to the Trumpists who say, "You pointy-headed think tank dweebs really have no clue how rabid the Left is, do you? How late the hour is, the kind of fight we must mount in the culture war at this stage."

It's a little tricky, because, yes, a fight must be mounted, but Trump's juvenile insults are supremely ineffective weapons.

Two things must be kept in view at all times: the Left's ferocity, and Trumpism's inadequacy as a countervailing force.

Why the concept of public accommodation does not apply to the current situation regarding Christian wedding-service providers

I've had my disappointments with Bookworm of late - namely, her enthusiasm for Trump to the point of saying flat out that she doesn't care about his sybaritic dalliances, and that she's come to find a certain charm in his rough edges. Still, she has a sharp mind and occasionally makes truly valuable contributions to a current national conversation.

Such is the case with the way she demonstrates that  the concept of public accommodation does not apply to the current situation for Christian wedding-service providers.

The QueerBorg, to advance its demand that all surrender before it, is trying to frame its battle as a civil rights battle and to liken Phillips’ refusal to bake a cake to the closed doors a black man would face in the Jim Crow South when he tried to rent a room for the night or dine in a restaurant. The way in which Congress broke that monopoly of closed doors was through the notion of “public accommodation,” something it enshrined in Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The relevant language states as follows:

(a) Equal access All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

(b) Establishments affecting interstate commerce or supported in their activities by State action as places of public accommodation; lodgings; facilities principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises; gasoline stations; places of exhibition or entertainment; other covered establishments Each of the following establishments which serves the public is a place of public accommodation within the meaning of this subchapter if its operations affect commerce, or if discrimination or segregation by it is supported by State action:

(1) any inn, hotel, motel, or other establishment which provides lodging to transient guests, other than an establishment located within a building which contains not more than five rooms for rent or hire and which is actually occupied by the proprietor of such establishment as his residence;

(2) any restaurant, cafeteria, lunchroom, lunch counter, soda fountain, or other facility principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises, including, but not limited to, any such facility located on the premises of any retail establishment; or any gasoline station;

(3) any motion picture house, theater, concert hall, sports arena, stadium or other place of exhibition or entertainment; and

(4) any establishment (A)(i) which is physically located within the premises of any establishment otherwise covered by this subsection, or (ii) within the premises of which is physically located any such covered establishment, and (B) which holds itself out as serving patrons of such covered establishment. (42 U.S.C. § 2000a.)

The most obvious distinction between the LGBYOB+ and African-American situations, of course, is that the statute is directed at “race, color, religion, or national origin.” That’s why there’s such a big push on the Left to enact The Equality Act, which would raise sexual orientation and claims about gender to the same legal level of protection afforded race, color, religion, or national origin. The Equality Act, though, is another post entirely, and not a subject I wish to explore here. Instead, I’m interested in the monopoly of closed doors.

Keep in mind that, as I noted in passing above, the Civil Rights Act did not arise in a vacuum. It was a direct response to a very specific problem: The fact that Jim Crow laws in the South, backed by the personal preferences of bigoted people all over America, meant that places ostensibly held open for walk-in customers could arbitrarily refuse customers based upon the customers’ race (or color, or religion, or national origin). Under this all-encompassing regime, blacks theoretically could travel throughout the South without ever being able to obtain either food or lodging. (As the recent movie Green Book shows, blacks responded to this monopolistic denial of service by identifying hotels, restaurants, and other “open to the public” establishments that would serve them, but it was an imperfect solution and one that was both deeply offensive to human dignity and antithetical to the promise of our Declaration of Independence.) 

In other words, that portion of the Civil Rights Act relating to Public Accommodations was intended to break a monopoly that was driven by culture and backed by legislation. The legislation, of course, was the real kicker. As Milton Friedman famously noted, had Jim Crow not been legislated, it likely would have died away as hoteliers, restaurateurs, and the owners of entertainment establishments ended up competing for the only color that mattered: the lovely green of dollar bills. However, legislation, backed by societal prejudice, created an insupportable hurdle to free market sources, and created a monolithic wall that blacks could not breach.

Jack Phillips clearly does not fall into the category of a monolithic monopoly on all institutions open to the public. First, no one can deny that he held his doors open to all customers who walked into his store and sought to buy any of the products on display. He reserved only the right to withhold his services from specific ceremonies (not customers, but ceremonies) that offended his religious sensibilities. Second, Phillips was/is anything but a monopoly. The LGBTQLMAO+ community in Colorado has a lot of choices when it comes to custom baked goods prepared for QueerBorg ceremonies. 

Her mention of what Milton Friedman had to say on the subject is pretty much what I've said for some time. The free market and shifting zeitgeist were conspiring by 1965 - certainly by 1967 - to relegate boneheaded we-don't-serve-your-kind-here-ism to the dustbin of history. A few well-placed television commercials showing a black couple and a white couple enjoying a restaurant meal together would have finished it off. Alas, though, there were, as Bookworm says, bigoted laws on the books, so legislation was necessary.

And she understandably didn't want to muddy the waters with a digression into this Equality Act that is currently on the nation's plate, but that is as poisonous an idea as has come down the pike in some time and must be resolutely extinguished.