National Review Online Demagogue Taunts Conservatives

Here is Laurie Higgins writing at the Illinois Family Institute about another “conservative” demagogue:

There’s a troubling piece titled “Time for a Compromise on Transgenderism” posted on National Review online and written by purportedly conservative, “gay vegetarian” J. J. McCullough. In condescending language, McCullough argues that it’s time for Americans to hop on the fast train to the Shangri-La of polymorphous perversity. In McCullough’s view, now that Americans have ceased “judging” homosexuality, they should cease “judging” the science-denying “trans” ideology.

He engages in the worst kind of demagoguery in his unholy effort to normalize the “trans” ideology by insulting those who find the ideology destructive and the demands of its advocates tyrannical.

McCullough makes this myopic statement about the cultural transformation of America on the issue of homosexuality:

Disinterest in judging homosexuality is not an attitude government has coerced Americans into, it is the product of a free people’s informed knowledge.

In McCullough’s presumptuous worldview, “informed knowledge” leads inevitably to “disinterest in judging homosexuality.” For clarity—something in which McCullough seems little interested—let’s establish from the outset that judging homosexuality is distinct from judging homosexuals. Judging homosexuality means to make a judgment about the moral status of homosexual activity. Informed, knowledgeable, wise, and loving people can, do, and should make the judgment that homosexual activity is not moral and jeopardizes the temporal and eternal lives of those who engage in and affirm it.

McCullough goes on:

To the extent that America is still having any political debate about homosexuality, it has evolved into a more substantial conversation about religious liberty…. These are difficult debates but are also far more useful than those of earlier eras, which mostly centered on demagogic judgment of the gay ‘lifestyle’ untethered to any tangible constitutional principle or policy objective.

His description of the debates of earlier eras makes me wonder how much he knows about those debates. Countless debates of earlier eras were both useful and substantive.

Surely McCullough is aware that there are non-demagogic bases other than “tangible constitutional principles or policy objectives” on which to debate or to which to tether debates on homosexuality. In fact, debates tethered to ontology, epistemology, theology, and philosophy are far more substantive and essential than those tethered to tangible constitutional principles and policy objectives. And these are the bases on which a free and informed people should be debating.

But “progressives” aren’t interested in debates so-tethered when epithet-hurling, bad analogies, and false claims work effectively to change public views and silence dissent. You know the epithets commonly hurled, like “hater” and “bigot.” McCullough raised epithet-hurling to an art form, calling those who still make moral judgments about sexual behavior immature, unfair, dishonest, ostentatious, insensible, boorish, petty, cruel, and regressive.

Read more at IFI: National Review Online Demagogue

Image credit: www.jjmccullough.com.