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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Probably will be harder to go after than JD vance.

You sure about that?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/05/minnesotas-lurch-to-the-hard-left/

2023, Kamala Harris' running mate Tim Walz supported and the Minnesota legislature passed the following legislation:

— All limits on abortion at any stage of pregnancy were repealed, as were laws requiring doctors to treat infants born alive after an abortion. References to "women" in the new laws were replaced with "pregnant people".

— Minnesota declared itself a “refuge” for transgender surgeries and therapies for minors. Gender surgery will now to be publicly funded.

— Public and charter schools are mandated to teach “ethnic studies,” and school boards are instructed to adopt "antiracist" curricula and teach “the history of the genocide of Indigenous Peoples."

— Drivers’ licenses and state-funded health care are now available for illegal immigrants.

— Private religious colleges are forbidden to “require a faith statement” from enrolling students.

— Convicted felons now have the right to vote before completing parole or probation.

as were laws requiring doctors to treat infants born alive after an abortion

Is there more information about that? Not treating the infants would be highly unethical and even without specific laws illegal, wouldn’t it?

Alas, no. In Ralph Northam's words, "The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Basically the standard practice is you get care if the people who just tried to kill you decide to give you care.

EDIT: Apparently, there were 8 aborted babies born alive in Minnesota during Walz's tenure until he repealed the requirement to report these survived abortions.

Basically the standard practice is you get care if the people who just tried to kill you decide to give you care.

Wow, that's some real bullshit, if I were on Trump's campaign I'd make it a talking point about dems being baby killers or something. That's so beyond the pale it's unfunny, they tried to kill the baby? Fine, but if it still survived after being born it should be treated like any human with dignity.

Trump has brought it up, and it puts the red tribe in a frenzy to be reminded that it sometimes happens- even red tribe leftists- but blues don’t care.

I think if anyone brings it up, it would have to be Vance, citing specifics. If Trump brings it up, no one takes him seriously.

As @Felagund says, Trump has brought it up. This is what he's referring to when he talks about "post-birth abortion". Unfortunately he lacks the clarity and credibility for people to understand and believe him.

Of course the left and the media (but I repeat myself) insists that this never happens, even when we have abortion doctors on video openly saying it sometimes happens and they just allow the baby to die when it does.

Trump's brought it up several times. But no one believes him. You're right that this could probably be pressed in a more serious manner, but merely having Trump repeat it does not work.

See also Montana's failed referendum to protect those children.

I wish so, but it happens to about 500 neonates a year and goes largely unnoticed and unprosecuted.

Like Kamala he is pretty far to the left. But the question is can the Republicans make it stick? The media will be 100% onsides to defend the narrative, and they only have to keep it up for 3 months. Early voting starts even sooner.

Private religious colleges are forbidden to “require a faith statement” from enrolling students.

This is a particularly bizarre law. Was it really necessary? I mean, really?

The reality is that private religious colleges generally provide a lower-tier and more expensive education in exchange for providing students an environment where they're surrounded by their co-religionists. The faith statement requirement is the actual selling point of religious colleges.

And with the exception of a few institutions like Notre Dame, I can't imagine a scenario where a person applies to various institutions and the least expensive or most prestigious option, or even the option with the best cost-to-benefit ratio, is a religious college. (Insert jokes about Notre Dame being as religious nowadays as the owners of the similarly-named cathedral in Paris.) Attending a religious institution is always a sacrifice on the basis of explicitly wanting a college environment that requires tests of faith.

I guess maybe it's oriented towards closeted atheists, kids whose parents don't know their religious beliefs and who push them into attending a private religious college, and who fear for their future should they openly resist. But while I'm more sympathetic to the clash of conscience-vs-convenience such a scenario invokes than you might think, the idea that we're going to prohibit a practice that provides benefits to people of diverse religious backgrounds on the off chance a closeted deconvert has to have a confrontation with their parents just doesn't pass the "compelling state interest" test.

More realistically, it's just an attack on the existence of religious colleges at all. Which is shameful. Though it's probably tied to funding requirements, which make such things more thorny. I believe in the freedom of association to create religious colleges and require a faith-based test for admission, but I do have skepticism that such institutions should receive state funding except for strictly secular safety-and-utility matters a la Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, and my feeling is that Espinoza v. Montana DOR was wrongly decided precisely because state payments to religious institutions creates government leverage that can be wielded against the conscientiously-held doctrines of the religious. The separation of church and state is not about protecting the state from religion, but about protecting religion from the state.

A lot of students attend small, private religious colleges because they want to play a sport in college and aren’t good enough to make it on the team in a large school. Religious affiliation is a complete afterthought.

I, an atheist, went to a Christian college (as it seemed like a safer/saner choice than the local state school), and I wasn't required to make a faith statement (that I remember), though I was instead required to take a "Christian Worldview" class.

More realistically, it's just an attack on the existence of religious colleges at all. Which is shameful.

Specifically, religious colleges can (and do) use faith statements to effectively exclude homosexuals from professorships. Their position is essentially "There's nothing wrong with being homosexual, it's just that you have to sign a statement saying that you won't do sinful things, like have homosexual sex." This is why organizations like the American Philosophical Association changed their anti-discrimination language to something like:

This includes both discrimination on the basis of status and discrimination on the basis of conduct integrally connected to that status, where "integrally connected” means (a) the conduct is a normal and predictable expression of the status (e.g., sexual conduct expressive of a sexual orientation, conduct expressive of a disability status), or (b) the conduct is something that only a person with that status could engage in (e.g., pregnancy), or (c) the proscription of that conduct is historically and routinely connected with invidious discrimination against the status (e.g., interracial marriage).

In other words, it's not enough to say "we accept everyone as long as they live up to our religious standards"--you have to accept everyone, and their "integrally connected" behaviors, too, even though the failure modes of such a requirement are probably easy to imagine. Anyway, as a consequence, some religious colleges lost the ability to advertise jobs in APA publications.

Progressives dominate academia, by a wide margin. It's pretty important to them to keep the door slammed very firmly in the face of possible competitors to that monopoly on propagandizing America's young adults (and is probably also why they tend to be in favor of pushing "college for everyone" even when the economics of such a thing make no sense).

It would be... interesting... to see how all this might interact with a Muslim-sponsored university, but there aren't many of those in the US. (Yet?)

And with the exception of a few institutions like Notre Dame, I can't imagine a scenario where a person applies to various institutions and the least expensive or most prestigious option, or even the option with the best cost-to-benefit ratio, is a religious college.

BYU is both highly ranked and quite affordable

I assume you meant to reply to @urquan, since that is who you're quoting. But you're right:

Notre Dame and BYU are far from the only well-respected religious university in the U.S. Notre Dame is far from the only well-respected Catholic university in the U.S. Georgetown is technically Catholic, Marquette and Gonzaga and Loyola as well. They don't seem to care much about homosexual conduct though, as far as I can tell.

Southern Methodist... it's in the name. Pepperdine is affiliated with the Church of Christ. Pepperdine as well as Baylor (Baptist) have codes of conduct that exclude homosexual sex, though they otherwise seem happy to use progressive-approved language in discussing sexual identitarianism. I have no idea how serious they are about enforcement, though.

But most of the schools I just named are "top 100 national universities" in the US News rankings.

That's a fair summary.

And BYU is another university like Notre Dame that strikes me as quite willing to compromise on values for tuition money, though I understand they do have a large student population that is practicing LDS. My mind skips BYU sometimes because I'm not from that part of the country and have no connections to the Mormon community; but my understanding is it's right on the edge between being a relatively prestigious university and being a finishing school for the children of elite LDS members. And I didn't even realize Georgetown was historically Catholic -- and, I mean, Yale and Harvard were historically religous, but no one would confuse them for Bible College.

But to be clear, my point isn't that religious universities are bad — far from it, I have friends and family embedded in religious colleges. My parents met each other at one. But my position is that they're typically worse in comparative terms especially when accounting for the other institutions that are likely to have accepted a particular applicant for admission, when the explicitly religious nature of the college is excluded, and particularly if we're being practical and evaluating public universities in the calculus. I don't include colleges that are willing to sell out their faith for prestige in the definition of a religious institution, especially since they won't be willing to enforce faith standards that are the topic of this discussion. I suppose time will tell whether BYU, Pepperdine, Baylor, and Notre Dame end up sliding more or less in that direction.

as quite willing to compromise on values for tuition money,

Do they? I would have thought they were heavily subsidized.

BYU is absolutely not willing to compromise on values for tuition money and requires a pastor’s letter of recommendation regardless of denomination.

I have no idea how serious they are about enforcement, though.

Given that I can't remember any media frenzies about students being disciplined for having gay sex, I can conclude that the level of enforcement is somewhere between zero and zero.

BYU is affordable if you are mormon. If you are not, it is not actually a good deal.

It looks like it's 13000 per year for non-Mormons. That's not bad, though there exist other options for similar prices.

Ah, that’s an angle on it I hadn’t considered: it’s an attempt to aid PhD’s in finding a job.

I’m definitely of the opinion that we have way too many people with postgraduate degrees and at least half the people we graduate from those programs, let alone initially admit, don’t belong there. Not always because they’re not bright enough or capable, but because education is an occupational credential and we need to get some of the bright young people pursuing doctorates to instead work towards more socially-beneficial pursuits.

But then again I’m someone whose preferred model of the university involves more teaching than research, and believes that popular historians spreading relatively-accurate knowledge of history to a wide audience serve a much more important social function than historians writing boring monographs called “Catchy Title: Socially-Preferred Groups and the Function of Particular Economic Force in Time Period Place, Oddly Specific Year to Round Number Year.”

I think this is primarily about controlling the culture of education. There are a lot of religious schools in MN and there is a lot of tension between them and the DFL. See also the ban on banning books that doesn't actually ban banning books.