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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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I can avow that when I was a crabby internet atheist in my teens/20s, I was not exposed to whichever Christians were disavowing the WBC. 'Why won't Christians denounce the WBC' was a big Atheist talking point for years on end.

If you want to have a standard of 'the denouncements have to be big and publicized enough that their opponents hear them and are convinced', then no, Christians didn't meet that standard back then.

I was in that trench, too. I don't share your view of that period. Plenty of Christians condemned WBC, and this was casually disregarded as inauthentic or meaningless because we perceived very little daylight between WBC's stance on homosexuality versus Christianity on the whole. "WBC is disgusting, but at least they're honest" was the kind of thing you'd read (or write yourself) in a lot of those spaces.

Worth remembering that WBC was paid attention to primarily for its protesting of soldiers' funerals - an act that I'm sure you can easily imagine pisses off people of with all sorts of different politics and faiths, including Christians who were against gay marriage! The image of some Jesus-loving Good Ol' Boy passively accepting Phelps and co picketing his dead son's funeral is a bit hard to swallow.

And since we're comparing notes on history - I don't know why anybody should go hunting for the unicorns of consensus-bucking trans spaces when a lot of us here have spent the last 10 years watching their political movement steamroll nearly every forum and platform we used to be part of, and got to see first-hand how these spaces got captured, converted, and degraded. I am not lacking examples of what I see as the default MO of trans and trans-supportive spaces. If somebody wants to show me a trans space that goes against a lot of the current progressive orthodoxies, I'll happily peek at it. But then we will be clear that the thing making their lives harder isn't right-wing bigotry, but a prog-aligned media that doesn't consider them worthy of attention. I think you have a good point that perhaps they are reluctant to criticize their messengers out of fear that it may result in wave of Red Traditionalism crashing over them after tampering with the barricades. But I think if you're already subscribing to that dynamic on anything, it's too late. You're practically a foot soldier, whether you're enthusiastic about it or not.

I can avow that when I was a crabby internet atheist in my teens/20s, I was not exposed to whichever Christians were disavowing the WBC. 'Why won't Christians denounce the WBC' was a big Atheist talking point for years on end.

Gosh if only someone had come along back then and posted a vague "trust me bro" anecdote about Christians ambiguously denouncing the WBC behind closed doors. That totally would have been a cogent and meaningful response to that particular atheist talking point... right?

If you want to have a standard of 'the denouncements have to be big and publicized enough that their opponents hear them and are convinced', then no, Christians didn't meet that standard back then.

I like how you try to make this standard sound unreasonable. Like if everyone were reasonable they'd just ignore the entire public face of the trans activist movement and instead base their perception on your little post about how you totally saw them denounce their crazies in private once.