As the movement to restore common-sense moral principles to society continues, the Left is realizing that their vision of utopia isn’t as inevitable as they’d believed.
This turning of the tide in the culture war can be seen in Indiana, where the state Senate this week advanced a bill that, if signed into law, would ban all trans procedures on minors.
Under the proposal, everything from puberty blockers to hormone therapy to social transition policies at schools would be banned for persons under 18.
As the Associated Press reported, the bill passed a Senate Public Health Committee on Wednesday 8-3, meaning it will move on to a full Senate vote.
“Since these procedures have irreversible and life-altering effects, it is appropriate and necessary for our state to make sure these procedures are performed only on adults who can make the decision on their own behalf,” said Republican Senator Tyler Johnson, an emergency physician who wrote the bill.
Opponents of the bill claim that hormone therapies and puberty blockers are not irreversible. And representatives for Indiana University Health Riley Children’s Hospital, which houses the only transition program in the state, said doctors do not perform genital surgeries or minors or give referrals for them.
The advancement of the Senate bill came after the Indiana House of Representatives on Monday advanced a bill that would require teachers to notify parents about their children’s preferred pronouns or gender-identity transitions.
One opponent organization of that bill, Human Rights Campaign, compared it to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.
In a press release, the organization’s legislative counsel, Courtnay Avant, stated:
By passing this discriminatory bill, Indiana House legislators have effectively censored what young students can say, learn, and read in the classroom. Although school should be a place where every child deserves to feel safe and welcome, extremist politicians in Indiana are alienating students and threatening their freedom to live and learn as they choose. These kids have done nothing wrong — instead it’s the members of the Indiana House who choose to stigmatize how they are allowed to express themselves. We urge the Indiana State Senate to reject this discriminatory bill and end their involvement in this coordinated, national effort against the LGBTQ+ community.
In the same press release, Human Rights Campaign lamented that “less than two months into 2023, HRC is already tracking 340 anti-LGBTQ+ bills that have been introduced in statehouses across the country. 150 of those would specifically restrict the rights of transgender people, the highest number of bills targeting transgender people in a single year to date.”
The organization noted that it is following 90 bills that would ban minors from receiving trans procedures, as well as “28 anti-LGBTQ+ bills which have passed at least one chamber, 10 of which are specifically anti-trans.”
Among the legislation across the country that have the trans lobby worried is a ban on trans treatment recently signed by the governor of Utah and similar laws being challenged in the courts in Arkansas and Alabama.
A bill recently introduced in the Texas Senate would prohibit “public funding for gender modifications and treatments,” as well as ban some health plans from offering “coverage for a gender modification procedure” and raise legal liability through malpractice lawsuits for health care professionals that perform trans procedures, which the legislation defines as any treatment done “for the purpose of transitioning a patient’s biological sex … or affirming the patient’s perception of the patient’s sex.”
Similarly, the abortion fight is also heating up since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which has promoted states to take the abortion question into their own hands.
Now that many Republican-dominated states have passed or are in the process of passing legislation to restrict abortion, the Democrat-run executive branch is stepping in to preserve the practice at the federal level any way it can.
For example, the Pentagon this month published its plans to cover the travel costs of service members who are either getting an abortion themselves or accompanying their partners who are.
Under the plan, troops will be given up to 20 weeks into the pregnancy to provide their departments with notification and request abortion-related travel.
In the memorandum that was released, the Pentagon wrote that “the DOD health care provider will place the Service member considering pregnancy termination in a medical temporary nondeployable status without reference to the Service member’s pregnancy status, until appropriate medical care and the necessary recovery period are complete.”
By contrast, in South Carolina, the abortion lobby gained a momentary victory when the state’s Supreme Court in January struck down a six-week abortion ban, which was already on the books at the time the Supreme Court killed Roe and thus went into effect upon that decision.
The Left is panicking at the realization that, for seemingly the first time in decades, the side of traditional, pro-family moral principles has reversed the tide and is gaining ground on major cultural issues.
Part of this has been driven by the Left going too far with things such as drag queen story hours and forced cake-baking, thus going beyond the tolerance point of average Americans.
