The Skewering of DeSantis
It is a window on America’s cultural and political fracture.
by George Neumayr
March 30, 2022, 10:02 PM
It is a measure of America’s cultural crack-up that even modest defenses of parental rights and traditional morality generate enormous backlash from elites. What would have once been considered utterly uncontroversial — prohibiting the teaching of “sexual education” in public elementary schools — is now treated as politically outre and culturally offensive. Common sense has become uncommon. Consequently, the rare Republican who displays it becomes a lightning rod in the culture.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, we’re told, is an odious aggressor in the “culture war” for merely signing a bill that forbids the teaching of transgenderism to tots. If anything, the law is too meager. It only applies to the first few grades of elementary school. It should apply to all grades. That liberal elites would go berserk over such a moderate law confirms the scope of their ambitions for public education and the culture at large.
Much of what passes for “conservatism” today is not aggression in the culture war but a delayed and usually pretty timid response to the arrogant demands of radical liberals. On many issues of great moral import, the GOP has ceded ground to the left. We have seen fronts in the culture war fall, often without much of a fight from Republicans. The battle lines of the conflict seem to move ever leftward. Such is the one-sided character of the fight that nothing more than opposition to transgender propaganda in public schools makes a Republican like DeSantis a dangerous outlier in the eyes of liberals.
At the Oscars, he was the butt of jokes, as if he, not Hollywood, poses a threat to children. Like the pagans of antiquity who sentenced Socrates to death for “corrupting” youth by teaching them sound philosophy, modern pagans cast the defenders of children as menaces to them. Hollywood celebrates all things abnormal while skewering a prosaic Republican as the true oddball.
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https://spectator.org/the-skewering-of-desantis/
