Arizona Republican lawmakers are finally pushing back on drag and trans stuff. Excerpt:

State Sen. Anthony Kern has filed one bill that would ban drag performances during certain hours — aimed primarily at quashing drag brunches — and another that would prohibit them on public property or any location where they could be viewed by a minor. Sen. John Kavanagh has chimed in with a bill to ban the use of state funds for drag shows targeting minors.

Kern’s Senate Bill 1030 would stipulate that a drag show could not take place between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m. Monday through Saturday or between 1 a.m. and noon Sundays. It would put drag shows in the same category as performances featuring nudity. Violation would be a misdemeanor. His bill dealing with locations, SB 1028, also would put drag shows in that category and would make the first violation a misdemeanor and subsequent ones a felony. Kavanagh’s SB 1026 would prevent state funds from being distributed to any violator for 36 months after the violation.

More:

Kavanagh has also introduced a bill, SB 1001, that would not let school employees refer to students by pronouns that differ from a student’s “biological sex” unless they get written parental permission — which would have the effect of outing students to the parents regarding their gender identity. He claimed that keeping this information from parents would prevent them from helping their children.

But Bridget Sharpe, Arizona state director for the Human Rights Campaign, said Kavanagh’s legislation would endanger young people. “A student has the right to express their gender identity,” she told KTVK/KPHO. “They have a right to express that to whoever they wish, and it’s up to them who they trust and who they feel safe around to be able to share that information.”

Well, drag brunches aren't to my taste, but I don't see that it's the state's business to regulate them. But stopping this crap directed at colonizing the minds of kids? Absolutely. No mercy, and no apology.

The gay conservative Chad Felix Greene speaks for me:

There is no limit to how insane these people and their many, many allies in the establishment will get. As Greene puts it, even the slightest pushback causes them to howl "BIGOTRY!" Don't think that electing Republicans will necessarily stop it. As Nate Hochman has reported in National Review, South Dakota is one of the most socially conservative states in the country, but the Republican legislature there keeps bending over and bracing itself to be rogered by Big Trans, in the guise of Sanford, the major health care system headquartered there. After I highlighted Hochman's great piece, a Republican state official e-mailed to say that it happens quite often that conservative legislators from rural areas are at the mercy of Woke Capitalists, who threaten to take jobs away from these places if the legislators don't bend to their woke will. Fixing this is going to require broad and aggressive legislative action -- and is going to require Republican lawmakers to once and for all put out of their fool heads the idea that Big Business is anything other than the enemy of social and cultural conservatives.

As most of you know, I've lived in Hungary for most of the past year, year and a half. You can scarcely imagine how radical the United States looks from here. The media and the Washington establishment (including ostensible conservative institutions and figures) love to portray Hungary as some kind of fascist state. In fact, the country feels like America circa 1998. Budapest is a liberal city, by Hungarian standards, and usually votes against the ruling party of PM Viktor Orban. Yet it's easy to see gay people out publicly, and though they cannot get married, gays can form legal partnerships under Hungarian law. An English expat living in Budapest told me that his friends back home in the UK ask him, in all seriousness, if he fears for his safety on the streets here. He laughs at that, because the question is absurd. Budapest doesn't even have a crime problem. It's a safe, orderly, civilized city. In fact, though many Central European elites are desperate to ape Western European and American progressives, the fact that Central European countries are so appealing has to do with the fact that most of the people there have not been awokened -- yet.

Hungary is not particularly religious, either, but there is a general social conservatism here that contrasts vividly with what America has become. For example, you just don't see Pride flags everywhere during the High Holy Queer Month of June. You see them in some places -- the liberal city government flew the Pride flag from City Hall last year -- but you aren't hit over the head with it constantly. Put another way, Hungary feels like a normal place -- "normal" in the sense every American would have considered it, before our country lost its mind. Hungary in 2023 is like America in the Before Times. To visit here is to see how truly crazy the United States has become. It is a difficult thing for patriotic Americans to talk to older people in Central European countries, folks who used to love America, and look up to it as a beacon of goodness and freedom when they were suffering under the Communist yoke, but who now see America as a culturally imperialist Babylon. They're right.

Anyway, did you see that a Maryland judge has held a Catholic hospital liable for refusing to remove the healthy uterus of a woman who wanted to transition to pretending to be a man? So much for religious liberty. Eight years ago, shortly after Obergefell, a family policy scholar addressing a private meeting at which I was present said that for conservatives, the loss of traditional marriage is certainly a big deal, but not even close to the biggest deal. The worst would be if transgender ideology became mainstream. Why? we asked. Because, he said, our civilization is built on the gender binary in ways we don't even think about, because the natural fact of male and female has never been seriously questioned. If we lose the stable gender binary, he said, we will have removed the struts upholding civilization, and everything will fall apart. This man was a well-established academic, but he knew well enough then to insist that we not mention his name. He saw what was coming.

Seven years ago, when I began reporting for the book that became The Benedict Option, I spoke to a prominent Catholic physician who worked at a major, and quite prestigious, US medical facility. He told me (this is quoted in the book) that he would never encourage his children to follow their father's footsteps into medicine, because he could see that very soon, Christian doctors were going to have to choose between their medical licenses, or their consciences. In fact, he told me how strange it is to go to work in his large hospital, and talk to fellow Christian physicians, point out the insanity coming quickly down the pike, and to see that they were oblivious to the implications for their Christian consciences. They had compartmentalized the coming crisis away, because, apparently, they couldn't bear to imagine that they might have to suffer as physicians to defend the gospel truth. Well, now look:

Get that? THIS IS FROM A CERTIFICATION EXAM! Get these answers wrong, and you won't get your license, doctor. This is happening in our country, and nobody seems to care. This depravity ought to be illegal. See, this is how the totalitarianism emerging now works: not strictly through government order, but through a totalitarian ideological mindset and practices implemented through professional associations and private regulatory bodies. Again: this depravity ought to be illegal. It will continue, however, until and unless lawmakers say no.

It will not stop until it IS STOPPED:

These experts are destroying our society. You know that, right? A society that will not defend itself and its children against these monsters doesn't deserve to survive. Remember when some people warned, "They're coming for our children!", and they were denounced as alarmist bigots? Well, here you go:

A healthy society would know how to handle creeps like this. But we don't have a healthy society anymore. Yesterday I posted about the lament from David Brooks and Bret Stephens that conservatives today don't trust institutions. I said, why should we? Look, for example, at what academia, and what medicine, have become under the influence of gender ideology? These institutions are not servants of the common good, but enemies of families, and even of sanity. If there ever is any sort of Napoleonic coup in this country, where a strongman takes control to stop the insanity, I hope that defenders of this corrupt establishment recognize that their endless tolerance for the corruption of our institutions helped bring about this ugly backlash. I've never been a Trump supporter (though definitely not Never Trump), in part because I think Trump is mostly empty gesturing (as opposed to Ron DeSantis, who so far, looks serious and substantive). But I prefer Trump's performative half-measures to the timid unwillingness of Respectable Conservatives to stand up against the kinds of things that would have disgusted them only a decade ago.

Interesting tweet about that dirty old man from Andrew Sullivan:

It is becoming crystal-clear that we are either going to have Viktor Orban (meaning his style of defending the family and common sense), or we are going to have C.A. Conrad blowing his "queer bubbles" in the faces of children forever. There is no middle ground.