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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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The whole point is that babtists and bootleggers are manifestly opposed to each other.

I would assume that the baptists in my metaphor would be horrified were they to learn why the bootleggers were so gung-ho on normalizing medical transition for children, or were they to learn about the mixed evidence on the efficacy of same, or the rate of desistance without medical intervention etc. I've personally met several advocates for trans children, and while I don't agree with all of their policy proposals or arguments, they seemed like earnest and well-intentioned people: I never suspected they were Big Pharma stooges or closet paedophiles.

Perhaps a more illuminating metaphor would be that the "baptists" are useful idiots carrying water for the bootleggers.

The more appropriate historical metaphor is probably racist Union soldiers, many of whom went Copperhead after the Emancipation proclamation. "We didn't fight for this." Or maybe German traditionalists who picked Hitler to defend against communism, only to lose it all.