Conservatism (US Politics)

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares26 Views

    Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to Law Banning Conversion Therapy

    by

    Colorado, like more than 20 other states, bars licensed therapists from trying to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of minors in their care.The Supreme Court said on Monday that it will hear a First Amendment challenge to a Colorado law banning professional counseling services engaged in conversion therapy intended to change a minor’s gender identity or sexual orientation.More than 20 states have similar laws, which are supported by leading medical groups. Kaley Chiles, a licensed professional counselor, challenged the constitutionality of the Colorado law in federal court, saying it violated her rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion.The challenged law prohibits licensed therapists in Colorado from performing conversion therapy, which it defines to include efforts “to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” That includes trying “to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”The law, adopted in 2019, allow treatments that provide “acceptance, support and understanding.” It exempts therapists “engaged in the practice of religious ministry.”Ms. Chiles’s lawyers told the justices in her petition seeking review that as “a practicing Christian, Chiles believes that people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex.”In her lawsuit, Ms. Chiles said she wanted to help her clients achieve their goals, which can include “seeking to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors or grow in the experience of harmony with one’s physical body.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares62 Views

      in Elections

      Why Do Republicans Want to Dismantle the Education Department?

      by

      President Trump’s fixation reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, and created a powerful point of unity between the factions of his party.Two months after the Education Department officially opened its doors in 1980, Republicans approved a policy platform calling on Congress to shut it down.Now, more than four decades later, President Trump may come closer than any other Republican president to making that dream a reality.Though doing away with the agency would require an act of Congress, Mr. Trump has devoted himself to the goal, and is said to be preparing an executive order with the aim of dismantling it.Mr. Trump’s fixation has reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, creating a powerful point of unity between the ideological factions of his party: traditional establishment Republicans and die-hard adherents of his Make America Great Again movement.“This is a counterrevolution against a hostile and nihilistic bureaucracy,” said Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank and a trustee of New College of Florida.Here is how the party got to this moment.Conservatives make their argument.During his 1982 State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan called on Congress to eliminate both the Energy Department and the Education Department.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares102 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Marks Black History Month, Even as He Slams the Value of Diversity

      by

      The Black History Month reception held at the White House on Thursday had all of the pomp of celebrations past. Guests sipped champagne and snacked on lamb chops and collard greens. The crowd delighted in their invitations, snapping selfies. And when President Trump walked out alongside one of the greatest Black athletes in the world, Tiger Woods, the crowd roared with their phones in the air.But the dissonance in the East Room was jarring.Mr. Trump may have praised the contributions of Black Americans on Thursday, but he has spent the weeks since his inauguration eviscerating federal programs aimed at combating inequality in America. He has suggested that efforts spurred by the civil rights movement had made victims out of white people. He blamed a deadly plane crash over the Potomac River on diversity programs in the Federal Aviation Administration.On Thursday, Mr. Trump tried to show appreciation to the Black community by extolling those he sees as representative of Black American progress.“Let me ask you,” Mr. Trump said as he began his remarks, “is there anybody like our Tiger?”Mr. Trump and Mr. Woods are actively engaged in negotiations in search of a lucrative golf merger deal, and the president referred to Mr. Woods repeatedly during his roughly 20-minute address a crowd of several hundred guests. Mr. Woods wasn’t the only Black athlete to get a shout-out; Mr. Trump also heralded Muhammad Ali and Kobe Bryant.During his remarks, Mr. Trump made little reference to issues that have historically plagued the Black community, such as elevated poverty rates, the wage and wealth gap between Black and white Americans, and gun violence. He promised to put statues of Black Americans in a new “National Garden of American Heroes.”Among those to be honored was Prince Estabrook, an enslaved man and the first Black American to spill blood in the Revolutionary War, along with Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin — and maybe Mr. Woods one day, Mr. Trump said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares152 Views

      in Elections

      Right-Wing Media Praises U.S.-Russia Talks as ‘Breath of Fresh Air’

      by

      Many of President Trump’s media allies were quick to celebrate this week’s negotiations, a contrast to the deep unease expressed by the foreign policy establishment.News that the Trump administration had agreed with Russia to try to negotiate a peace settlement for Ukraine, without including Ukraine in the talks, was a revelation that many believed reversed years of efforts to isolate Moscow.But prominent voices in the right-wing media world interpreted the development this week as cause for celebration.“Every day has kind of felt like Christmas morning, hasn’t it?” Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor who is poised to run Voice of America, said during a podcast interview on Tuesday. “President Trump wants peace for every nation.”Charlie Kirk, the co-founder of Turning Point USA and podcast host who has more than 4.6 million followers on the social media platform X, praised the discussions as “a breath of fresh air.”And Jack Posobiec, a die-hard Trump loyalist perhaps best known for spreading the infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, invoked the title of Mr. Trump’s 1987 best-selling book. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said on his podcast, “it’s the art of the peace deal.”Secretary of State Marco Rubio, seated second from left on Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was once a champion of Ukraine.Pool photo by Evelyn HocksteinWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Picks Ed Martin, ‘Stop the Steal’ Promoter, for Management and Budget Staff Chief

      by

      Ed Martin, who has been chosen by President-elect Donald J. Trump to be the chief of staff for his Office of Management and Budget, is an anti-abortion activist who helped to organize the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn the 2020 election for Mr. Trump.Mr. Martin, a longtime Republican operative in Missouri, served as chief of staff to former Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri nearly two decades ago and ran the state party 10 years ago. But it was his alignment with the anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly in the last few years of her life that amplified his national profile as a conservative hard-liner.In saying on Tuesday that he had selected Mr. Martin to serve at the O.M.B., Mr. Trump noted that Mr. Martin had co-written a book with Ms. Schlafly — published a few days after she died in September 2016 — which urged conservatives to vote for Mr. Trump.Mr. Martin has continued to promote his alignment with Ms. Schlafly through an organization he runs bearing her name, Phyllis Schlafly Eagles.Mr. Martin will work under Russell Vought, a close ally of Mr. Trump’s who ran O.M.B. for part of his first administration. Mr. Trump also on Tuesday named Representative Dan Bishop, a Republican who recently lost the attorney general race in North Carolina, as deputy director of O.M.B.The office is expected to play a crucial role within the Trump administration in helping Mr. Trump to wield power across federal agencies. Mr. Vought was one of the influential figures behind Project 2025, the blueprint that the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have mapped for the Trump administration. Mr. Trump during the election distanced himself from the project but has since been plucking people affiliated with it to serve under him.Mr. Martin did not respond to immediate requests for comment.Mr. Martin worked with Mr. Vought on the Republican National Committee’s new policy platform, which pulled back some of the party’s hard-line language on abortion. Yet Mr. Martin has backed anti-abortion policies that include a national ban, and has expressed openness to the idea that women and doctors should be prosecuted for abortion.He also served as an organizer and financier in the “Stop the Steal” movement trying to promote efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to the Congressional Committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In a speech outside the building a day earlier, Mr. Martin spoke of “die-hard true Americans,” and said he would work until “we have a last breath and go home to the Lord because we will stop the steal.” After that he helped usher a small right-wing organization once associated with Ms. Schlafly, America’s Future, over to retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a major promoter of election conspiracy theories. Mr. Flynn and other family members who work at the organization have turned the group into a backer of far-right conspiratorial ideology. More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Scott Bessent, Trump’s Pick for Treasury Secretary, Doesn’t Fit the President-Elect’s Loyalist Mold

      by

      A hedge-fund titan who worked for George Soros. A deep-rooted Southerner with a fondness for high-end real estate. A gay man, married with children. Who is Scott Bessent?A capitalist with a soft spot for royalty. A deep-rooted Southerner with a fondness for stylish New York locales. A gay man, married with children, who has embraced a Republican Party that has sometimes vilified elements, and individuals, of the L.G.B.T.Q. movement.Such are the crosscurrents coursing through the biography of Scott Bessent, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary. The appointment would give him vast power over the nation’s economic plans — and place him fifth in line for the presidency, potentially the highest governmental position ever held by a gay person.A hedge-fund titan with a formidable professional pedigree, Mr. Bessent, 62, has been a quiet presence in New York’s social scene since the 1990s, when he worked for George Soros, the liberal megadonor and financier, eventually managing tens of billions of dollars in assets.He counts among his friends a group of elegant socialites and women of the world, Capote-ian swans of a different era, including the president-elect’s former sister-in-law Blaine Trump, Princess Firyal of Jordan and Queen Camilla, whom he once hosted at his Hamptons home — and forced to smoke her cigarettes outside. He is friends, too, with King Charles III, who has regularly hosted him at Buckingham Palace. Mr. Bessent no longer has a home in New York City, and is instead schooling his two children, Charlotte and Cole, ages 11 and 15, in London with his husband, John Freeman, a former assistant district attorney in the Bronx, whom he married in 2011. The family also has homes in Charleston, S.C. — the state where Mr. Bessent was raised — and in Lyford Cay, a gated community in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, which advertises itself as “one of the Caribbean’s most elegant and exclusive enclaves.”But Mr. Bessent’s family history is also pocked with hardships, including two bankruptcies for his father — a decade apart, in 1969 and 1979 — and the 2022 death of his younger sister, Wyn Nicole Bessent, who had worked as a public defender and seemingly lived a simpler life far removed from her brother’s glittering existence.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Picks Strident Supporter for Civil Rights Post at Justice Dept.

      by

      President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Monday that he would nominate Harmeet K. Dhillon, a California lawyer who has long championed Mr. Trump in public, in court cases and on social media, to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.In declaring his choice on social media, Mr. Trump said Ms. Dhillon “has stood up consistently to protect our cherished civil liberties.” He praised her legal work targeting social media companies, restrictions on religious gatherings during the pandemic and “corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.”Ms. Dhillon has been a conservative activist so devoted to Mr. Trump that she was willing to attack not only Democrats but also fellow Republicans, including her ultimately unsuccessful challenge last year to the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee at the time.She was also the co-chairwoman in 2020 of a group, Lawyers for Trump, that challenged the results of that year’s presidential election.It is not unusual for Republican administrations to significantly scale back the work in the Civil Rights Division. In Ms. Dhillon, however, Mr. Trump has chosen a lawyer active in the culture wars whose firm specializes in championing the right’s causes.“I’m extremely honored by President Trump’s nomination to assist with our nation’s civil rights agenda,” Ms. Dhillon posted on social media. “It has been my dream to be able to serve our great country, and I am so excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers led by” Pam Bondi, Mr. Trump’s choice for attorney general.The division, which enforces voting rights laws, investigates police departments and brings charges for violations of people’s civil rights, is spending the final days of the Biden administration finishing as much work as possible on cases involving patterns or practices of police misconduct.Earlier on Monday, the division announced findings highly critical of the police department in Worcester, Mass. Such findings, however, may not amount to much, given that those investigations will soon be handed over to the Trump administration.During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department walked away from several high-profile cases involving misconduct by major city police departments, and lawyers who specialize in such cases have said they expect the second Trump administration to do much the same. More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Bluesky Is Different From X. For Now.

      by

      Liberals moving away from X are giving up on the 20th-century ideal of a public sphere, best described by Hannah Arendt as a place that “gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other.”Bluesky, the destination of the moment, is experiencing a post-election surge of new users as millions of mostly liberal users of X (nee Twitter) have moved over to the Twitter-like platform, which opened to the public last year. The platform had 13 million users by early November; 10 million more joined over the next month.Now that social media is ubiquitous, growth in one platform often means lost users for another. The Bluesky migration suggests that the broader the “us” gathered together, the harder it is to prevent our falling on another. (Owners of giant social media platforms often imagine they can get good moderation for many users with little effort, when that is a distinctly “pick two” choice.)On social media, the political is personal; migrating Bluesky users are signaling political separation from an increasingly conservative X and giving up on the idea of a town square that holds all voices simultaneously.It’s obvious why liberal users might want to leave X. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 (and renamed it in 2023), he has reshaped the platform to be more welcoming to racism, misogyny and anti-immigrant and antitrans sentiment than even the old freewheeling Twitter. Abandoning early promises to not reinstate barred users without the judgment of a review board, Mr. Musk reversed previous suspensions and bans for Nick Fuentes, an admirer of Hitler; James Lindsay, an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. activist; and, of course, Donald Trump, who was barred after the Jan. 6 insurrection.Mr. Musk hasn’t just made X more conservative; he has also made it harder for users to ignore far-right and MAGA content, dismantling tools they had relied on to filter out those voices. X was originally a rebranding of Twitter, but over time, the service has become, in internet parlance, a Nazi bar.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Here’s What Led to Tennessee’s Ban on Gender-Affirming Care

      by

      Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s announcement of a new transgender clinic in 2018 did little to draw attention to its practice. The four-paragraph news release amounted to a location, hours and the names of two senior staff members.The spotlight came four years later, when Matt Walsh, a conservative political commentator at The Daily Wire in Nashville, published a series of posts and videos about the clinic. Those posts said that a staff member there had privately characterized gender-affirming medication and surgery as “moneymakers,” and used caustic terms to describe the center’s treatments.The medical center, which is separate from Vanderbilt University, pushed back. In a statement at the time, the center said that the clinic’s mission was to serve a “high-risk population for mental and physical health issues” who “have been consistently underserved by the U.S. health system.”The medical center said that it had not provided care to children younger than 18 without the consent of a parent, and that it would not force any employee who disagreed with the care because of personal or religious beliefs to provide it.Conservatives called for an investigation into the clinic, and Republican leaders spoke at a rally Mr. Walsh organized in Nashville in October 2022 in opposition to gender-affirming care for children. When Tennessee legislators convened in January 2023, lawmakers designated a proposed ban on gender-affirming care as Senate Bill 1. The bill passed over objections from transgender people and most Democrats. More