Today Oregon Muse critiques conservatives.
The Right wants to do politics and be done with it so they can get on with life, while the Left wants to do politics all the time.
And then the Right will either win, or lose. If they lose, they will tend to give up. For example, I remember when we lost the Obergefell decision, somebody on our team, I think it was Marco Rubio, said 'Oh well, I guess we lost. We need to just move on now.' And for that, he should have been primaried the next time he was up for re-election. What a gutless coward. The Right does not have the stomach for a sustained fight. I've heard too many stories of conservatives, say, ousting 2 wacko progressive school board members only to have the progressives come out in force in the next election and take back the board seats that they lost.
The Right is questionably good at winning territory, but is unquestioningly bad at holding territory. Thus the Left's victories are always permanent, but the Right's are temporary at best. Every time we win at the SCOTUS level (i.e. Masterpiece Cakeshop), the ruling is decided on such narrow ground that there's little chance it's going to be able to be used as precedent in any other case.
It's very disheartening. Which is why, I think, the Right tends to give up easily, not willing to expend vast amounts of time and resources for goals that turn out to be fruitless.
Which is perhaps why, when state election officials unconstitutionally rewrote election laws for the 2020 election, we mostly just sat there and watched them do it. The Republicans in the various state legislatures should've screamed bloody murder about this, and perhaps some of them did, but not nearly enough.
Now, I admit that there are a couple of exceptions to this.
The first is the large body of firearms rights advocates and their skill at mobilizing They're always up for a fight, probably because every time there's a shooting with lots of media coverage, lots of idiot politicians suddenly get it into their heads that they way to stop criminals from shooting people is to take away firearms from law-abiding Americans. That'll show them. I hear the Left caterwauling about "the powerful gun lobby" and it makes me smile.
The second is the pro-life movement. They've been fighting for the rights of the unborn since the mid 1970s. They will never, ever give up. And I have to commend Roman Catholics for their steadfastness here. They pretty much jump-started the pro-life movement themselves and have always been rock solid on this issue. On the other hand, we Protestants have much to be embarrassed about. If you look at Protestants as a whole, a disappointingly small number of us are actively pro-life, many of us don't believe we should be involved in politics at all, and another large segment is actively fighting on the other side.
In other words, Protestants are very much like the Republican Party.
So, getting back to Virginia, the only glimmer of hope here is that the Left has chosen a very difficult position to defend. That is, that the state, not parents, has the sole authority to determine the content of their children's education. And I should emphasize that these are tax-paying parents. So the Loudoun County School Board's position (echoed by Terry 'Ratweasel' MacAuliffe) is that the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia need to pay up and shut up. That's it. That's their position. Which is pretty much the textbook definition of taxation without representation and didn't we fight a war over this very issue?
I can't think of a better way to get a continuous stream of parents pounding on your office door than to insist, out loud and in public for all to hear, that you have the right to mess with their kids.
Read more here: http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=396189
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