How not to build a majority for justice
Andrew Sullivan properly calls out clueless LGBTQ+ activists
If it weren't for Andrew Sullivan, the platform on which you're reading these words might not exist.
He is, as much as anyone, the inventor of the political blog. The Daily Dish, the independent blog he began in 2000, revealed the possibilities of the form, including the revolutionary idea that a journalist could make a living as a solo act.
By the early aughts, the traits that make Sullivan an addictive read - unpredictable views that evade the usual labels, a combative spirit, unsparing candor and the gleeful wielding of words as rapiers - had cost him several lofty jobs at elite media outlets. That may have helped spur him to invent the political blog as a paying proposition.
In his long career, Sullivan has leaned in fully to the pundit's creed: Always certain, often wrong. What distinguishes him, to his credit, is his willingness to admit candidly when one of his fierce takes proves misguided - e.g., his early, full-throated support for W.'s war in Iraq.
In the aughts, I was asked to interview Sullivan at an event in Philadelphia. We had dinner together before. The man I met in the restaurant coincided with the public persona - he was utterly charming and relentlessly provocative. I suppose Andrew might have just been performing his persona for a fellow journalist out of habit, but at least he gave it his all.
I've read Sullivan for a long time - scowling, applauding or furrowing my brow in turn at his incandescent takes on all manner of issues. He would have it no other way. Unlike too many opinion-mongers today, he doesn't expect or require you to endorse his takes. He just wants, fiercely, for you to read them with an open mind.
All this is preamble to the sincere plea I want to make to you now:
Please, please, read this piece (gift link) that Sullivan published in the New York Times this week. It is an analysis of how the LGBTQ+ community wandered into the legal shoals and the PR whirlpool where it now finds itself. To me, it reads as a powerful, fair-minded, civil account of how a movement lost its way, an essay bolstered by the author's honesty about his personal stake in the controversy. (Sullivan is gay.)
As you read Sullivan's skewering of the woke conventions of the moment, your spirit may soar or your mind may rebel. Either is possible. That's why, for those who may not be familiar with the writer, I wanted you to know a bit first about his weighty resume and swashbuckling style.
But please read the piece to the end; sit with his argument for a moment. Ask yourself whether there's anything about your views on these issues you might want to reconsider.
And when I say read it now, I do mean just that. Don't skip over this link to skim the rest of my little post. Dive into Sullivan's piece first; it is worth your time. I'll wait happily until you return.
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Oh, you're back. Welcome.
Now, let me tell you about one small but telling anecdote from my experience. One pebble added to Sullivan's pile of examples.
As this decade dawned, I was lucky to get a gig teaching civil dialogue at Penn and launching a program promoting viewpoint diversity on its campus. One big part of the job was organizing moderated dialogue events on current issues, held on Penn's campus but open via Zoom to students from all over.
While I was doing this, an issue arose at Penn that was making national headlines. Lia Thomas, a trans woman who'd formerly been on the men's swim team, was breaking records as a swimmer on the women's team. A dispute bubbled up as to whether she should be allowed to compete in the NCAA national championships.
My program existed to help students learn how to have productive conversations about just this kind of difficult, emotional issue. It seemed a no-brainer to include a neutral prompt about the Lia Thomas controversy in an upcoming multi-campus dialogue. As I usually did, I previewed the draft prompt with the students in the seminar I co-taught, to get their feedback and suggestions.
One of those students identified as an ACE, i.e. an asexual person, part of the "plus" in LGBTQ+. She strongly objected to the idea that there was anything to discuss. "Everyone on campus supports Lia's right to compete,“ she said. In other words, no difference of opinion could exist among right-thinking, non-bigoted people.
"Are you absolutely sure about that?" I replied. Time was up for that class session and we left it there.
Between then and the next class, the news broke: A double-digit number of Lia's own Penn teammates had signed a letter stating it would be unfair to let her compete in the NCAA's.
When the student strolled in for the next class, she laid down her backpack and came up to me at the front of the class.
"Obviously, I was wrong," she said. "You should use the prompt."
I was so proud of her. It's one of the fondest memories of my short teaching career.
Unfortunately, at the same time, I'd been doing another part of my job. I was reaching out to the various campus stakeholders in the Lia Thomas controversy, explaining the goals of our program and alerting them that we planned to give students a chance to discuss the situation in a structured, moderated environment. Most never replied to my emails; a few signaled they were fine with it.
But one academic on campus was not. Her reply to me was civil in tone, but guns-blazing in content. She insistently misunderstood the event's format - a dialogue, not the "debate" she decried, with Thomas's predicament as one topic among many, not the abusive spotlight she took it to be. She indignantly denied that anyone on campus had any reason to discuss a situation involving a Penn student that was making headlines in the New York Times.
In my role, I reported up to a Penn dean who was a major figure on campus, and a true scholar and gentleman to boot. I alerted him to this prof's objections and he agreed to add his response to my attempt to calm her concerns that we planned to hold a vicious public debate over "whether a particular trans woman was a woman."
That launched a long series of emails in which the unhappy prof suggested that offering students a chance to talk about the trans athlete controversy would be, among other things, "transphobic," "cruel beyond belief," "damaging to your own reputation" and impossible to do without recklessly indulging rank bigotry.
As the digital skein lengthened, the dean's responses exemplified grace and precision but made no dent in the returning rhetoric. He was perplexed; out of respect for him, I told him this wasn't a hill I needed to die on. We excised all mention of Penn swimming from the next forum. (If you judge that to have been the wrong call, I wouldn't insist you were wrong.)
The next year, while based at Drexel University on the other side of Philly's Market Street, I resurrected the prompt. Students from multiple colleges had a rousing, civil dialogue about trans athletes, with varying and sometimes surprising views. The students understood that one could affirm Thomas' identity as a woman and uphold her basic civil rights, without conflating that with the subtler question of whether it was fair to let her compete in the NCAA's.
(If you asked today for my personal view on that question, I'd say, "I'm not sure.")
Looking back, we all understood and appreciated that some of the professor's fervor stemmed from knowing Thomas well and caring about her well-being. That part was praiseworthy.
But the readiness to announce "Nothing to see here!" and to equate any position not identical to her own with the worst kind of bigotry would be all too familiar to Sullivan.
Insisting that the sky is purple when anyone can look up and see that it's kinda blue - plus, when people point out that simple fact, denouncing them as ignorant bigots - that's not a winning strategy for any movement.
In this case, as Sullivan suggests, this set of illiberal blinders may threaten hard-won gains in LGBTQ+ rights. And it most certainly helped elect a corrupt, ignorant megalomaniac as president of the United States.
There is another way. The great news is: It's proven to work.
As Sullivan says in his conclusion:
But in America, on this anniversary of the Obergefell decision, we also need to remember a critical thing: We [LGBTQ+ advocates} won. We won because we defended free speech, reached out to right and left and center, left others and children alone — and trusted liberal democracy. That trust was rewarded with one of the swiftest successes in civil rights history. Let’s not throw it away.
A mildly happy update on last Monday’s post: The poison pill against universal injunctions that Senate Republicans tucked into their “Big, Beautiful Bill” was stripped from the legislation this week by Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough. She was ruling on a challenge posed by Senate Democrats. According to Senate rules, every element of a budget bill being considered via the “reconciliation” process - which the GOP is using to avoid a filibuster here - must be clearly related to the federal budget. This bit of GOP water-carrying for Donald Trump clearly was not. MacDonough also ruled out one maneuver Republicans wanted to try to cut Medicaid funding - but other cuts in funding for health coverage remain in this monstrosity. File all this under “Thankful for Small Favors.”