Our good friends over at National Review Online recently presented what they say is a conservative case for opening up public restrooms and locker rooms to either sex. Although written by an incredibly smart man—Josh Gelernter—the article seems to miss the nature of the issue itself, and by some margin.

His lead-off was not surprising: Conservatives should be cool with transgender folks doing what they want because “conservatism is the mind-your-own-business ideology.” He calls to the stand Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, who desires that their legislature not consider a trans-bathroom protection bill because “the last thing we need is more government rules.” Putting aside that this feels more like the desire to avoid a nuclear hot potato masquerading as a principled stand, let’s consider the veracity of this line of thought.

First, both rationales are faulty to a fault. Second, Gelernter ricochets quickly from these into endeavoring to show how inadequate the concerns over gender-free bathroom and locker room policies are. It’s easy when you reduce the whole thing down to “It will let predators in” as the primary concern. This is naïve.

De-Gendering Private Spaces Is a New Government Rule

Let’s address the “mind-your-own-business” part first. That is not conservatism. It’s a muscular libertarianism. Good conservatives are more than comfortable telling people they shouldn’t do certain things, and have been for quite some time.

The faithful conservative resists all kinds of behaviors: being a communist, sexual libertinism, creating broken families, not carrying one’s weight, not taking personal responsibility, etc. It’s not conservatives who sport “Don’t Like Abortion? Don’t Have One” bumper stickers on their cars. Conservatism is more like “Work Hard, Be Responsible, and the Newest Ideas Are Not Usually the Best Ideas.” Conservatives conserve. This means conserving the idea that male and female are not subjective feelings, and when opening and removing their clothes outside the doors of their own homes, the sexes should be segregated.

Next, the “we don’t need more government rules” line fails to understand the politics and genesis of this issue. It assumes gender-free restrooms and lockers have always been the rule, and some people now want to come along and put regulations on it. This is not the case, of course. Creating gender-free facilities requires new government rules. This is what the whole thing has been about: municipalities, retailers, and our president telling us we will accept their new regulations…and like it. We were minding our own business and would like for it to have stayed that way.

This Is about Men Seeing Naked Women Without Consent 

This brings us to the last point: Gelernter’s simplistic dismissal of those who have concerns about gender-free facilities. To him, the possibility of predators is anyone’s only concern here.

Women and fathers of daughters know this is not the case. It has to do with the inherent (and higher-order) modesty of women and their protection from the male gaze. He fails to appreciate that according to the rules of transgender politics, these policies mean any person could enter any bathroom, changing room, or locker room and freely do and observe what is done in such places. Anyone.

There is no criteria—medical, legal, physical, or psychological—anyone must meet to be accepted as officially transgender. It is solely up to the person making the claim, and no one can question him or her about it.

Well, many assume, don’t they have to look like the other sex, or at least be trying to do so? Gender orthodoxy demands that no one should have to live by someone else’s assumption of what a man, woman, or any of the other supposed genders looks like or does. They are merely restrictive social constructions enforced by male power that must be cast off.

Thus, the central concern here is that these new policies require that every woman and girl get used to having men invade their male-free sanctuary and violate their naturally strong sense of modesty by simply being present there.

Ask the typical male if he would mind a woman using the men’s locker room. Ask a woman if she would mind a man doing so. It is precisely here that the issue lies. No one has the liberty to violate the modesty of a woman. A good society conserves this important and fundamental human value at all costs. This is the work of the conservative.

This article was originally posted at TheFederalist.com

Written by Samuel Smith

While the legal case will continue to work its way through the courts, the bottom line is this: Kim Davis has won. The homofascists have lost.

Last Tuesday, Kentucky’s new governor, Matt Bevin, issued an executive order that eliminates the names of all county clerks from marriage licenses and protects the unalienable constitutional rights and religious freedoms of Kim Davis and all other clerks in Kentucky.

“This action is a fulfillment of a campaign promise by Gov. Bevin and is directly what our client Kim Davis has been requesting for months,” said Mat Staver, Davis’ attorney and founder of the Christian civil rights firm Liberty Counsel. “This promise will enable her and other clerks to do their jobs without compromising religious values and beliefs.”

The governor’s statement reads in part:

“To ensure that the sincerely held religious beliefs of all Kentuckians are honored, Executive Order 2015-048 directs the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives to issue a revised marriage license form to the offices of all Kentucky County Clerks. The name of the County Clerk is no longer required to appear on the form.”

While the First Amendment alone should be enough to ensure these safeguards, the unconstitutional actions of five “progressive” lawyers on the U.S. Supreme Court, who, back in June, presumed to capriciously redefine the immutable meaning of marriage, has created legal and moral chaos from coast-to-coast, making fixes such as that issued by Gov. Bevin necessary. Furthermore, these extremist lawyers’ subjective and unprecedented opinion will require additional fixes in all other states to reaffirm Christians’ objective and constitutionally guaranteed rights. Although the fight to repair the perversion of marriage committed by the high court will continue, this is an important step in the right direction.

You may recall that Davis was arbitrarily imprisoned for five days earlier this year by federal Judge David Bunning for exercising her religious liberties and refusing to violate her conscience by signing her name to, and, thereby, giving her official approval of, counterfeit “gay marriage” licenses. These licenses, of course, violate both natural law and the manifold biblical proscriptions against the sin of unnatural same-sex deviancy. Bunning’s tyrannical move backfired tremendously, earning Davis’ the support of tens-of-millions of Christians worldwide, as well as both a private audience with, and the express support of, Pope Francis.

“This is a wonderful Christmas gift for Kim Davis,” continued Staver. “This executive order is a clear, simple accommodation on behalf of Kim Davis and all Kentucky clerks. Kim can celebrate Christmas with her family knowing she does not have to choose between her public office and her deeply held religious convictions. What former Gov. Beshear could have done but refused to do, Gov. Bevin did with this executive order. We are pleased that Gov. Bevin kept his campaign promise to accommodate the religious rights of Kim Davis. We will notify the courts of the executive order, and this order proves our point that a reasonable accommodation should have been done to avoid Kim having to spend time in jail.”

“Bah humbug!” cried the ACLU.

“Governor Bevin’s executive action has added to the cloud of uncertainty that hangs over marriage licensing in Kentucky,” claimed ACLU of Kentucky Legal Director William Sharp.

“The requirement that the county clerk’s name appear on marriage licenses is prescribed by Kentucky law and is not subject to unilateral change by the governor,” he demanded, proving that the anti-Christian left’s goal was never about so-called “marriage equality” but, rather, was to force Christians to deny marriage reality and personally affirm, under penalty of law, mock “gay marriages.”

The ACLU will soon have little more to say on the subject as lawmakers are poised to further codify and build upon Bevin’s executive order. “Next month, the Kentucky legislature is expected to update the state’s marriage laws and will consider a provision exempting county clerks from having to issue them,” reports ABC News. “Davis said Kentucky’s marriage laws have been ‘completely eviscerated’ by the Supreme Court’s ruling and said she would be willing to come to the state Capitol to testify about any changes.”

Other state legislatures, as well as the U.S. Congress, must soon follow suit if any progress is to be made into the impasse between secularist change agents hostile to religious freedom, and the faithful Christians who enjoy it as a matter of law.

“In an interview with the Associated Press about her year at the center of one of the biggest social changes in decades, Davis described it as ‘a very emotional and a very real situation to all people.’ But she said simply telling others about her faith was not ‘going to make anybody believe anything.’ And so she put her faith in action by refusing to issue the licenses,” added ABC.

“‘No one would ever have remembered a county clerk that just said … ‘Even though I don’t agree with it, it’s OK. I’ll do it,’ Davis said. ‘If I could be remembered for one thing, it’s that I was not afraid to not compromise myself.’”

Kim Davis will certainly be remembered for her steadfast refusal to compromise herself. But she, along with Gov. Bevin, will also be remembered for helping, this Christmas season, to re-establish the gift of religious freedom for the people of Kentucky.

Even so, the war for our culture will continue into the New Year and well beyond.

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Media bias is less about slanted stories than about what’s covered – or not.

For example, when a Muslim extremist cut off a woman co-worker’s head in Oklahoma City in September 2014, there was minimal coverage. A year later, the media went crazy over a Muslim boy’s suspension in Texas for bringing a clock to school that authorities mistook for a bomb.

The first incident undermined the progressives’ theme of America’s evolution toward seamless “diversity.” The second reinforced the narrative of a racist, nativist America, so they went big. The same with shootings by police.

Or take November 3rd’s stunning, off-year conservative election victories. The media are spinning a tale of low turnout, vowing that 2016 will be different.

Missing is the subtext of many conservative wins, from Republican Matt Bevin’s upset victory in the Kentucky governor’s race to the GOP’s retention of the Virginia state Senate, to the defeat in Ohio of marijuana legalization and in Houston of a gay/transgender nondiscrimination ballot measure.

How about the ouster of the pro-sanctuary San Francisco sheriff? Pay no attention, folks. There’s nothing to see here.

The progressive media’s “super story” is always about how America is getting over its reactionary past and embracing redistributive economics, alternative lifestyles, multiculturalism, limitless immigration and gun control. Never mind that when citizens actually get a chance to vote, they tend to ignore the cultural elites’ instructions.

Events merit extensive coverage only if they go the progressive way. If you don’t hear much media chatter, that usually means the progressives lost. If you hear a lot, they’ve either won or are denouncing the outcome.

Any speed bumps on the way to the New Age of Equality are treated as outrageous anomalies, not rejections of leftist ideology. The New York Times, which is to progressives what Mao’s Little Red Book was to Chinese communists, was furious over the overwhelming, 2 to 1 vote of Houstonians against what opponents called the “bathroom bill.” The gender identity component, the critics said, would open women’s restrooms and locker rooms to males who think they are female.

Headlined, “In Houston, Hate Trumped Fairness,” the Times editorial began with this accusation: “Sometime in the near future, a transgender teenager in Texas will attempt suicide — and maybe succeed — because vilifying people for their gender identity remains politically acceptable in America.”

We need to pray that some poor, confused teen doesn’t take a cue from this reckless assertion. The Times editorialists seem positively eager for just such an incident so they can editorialize again about other people’s “hate.”

A subtext ignored by the media was that Houston Mayor Annise Parker had ordered a city attorney to subpoena the sermons, notes and e-mails of five pastors who had led opposition to the ordinance. The First Amendment? That’s for pornographers, not men of the cloth.

Speaking of totalitarianism, the Times editorial did find a bright spot in the U.S. Department of Education’s stunning order last week to an Illinois high school to allow a transgender boy, against parents’ wishes, to use the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms – or lose federal funding.

Other than the Times’ loony editorial board, does anyone think America’s founders had this kind of thing in mind when they wrote the Constitution as a limited set of powers shared by the national and state governments? Sexual politics aside, this speaks volumes about the Obama Administration’s voracious appetite for abusing power.

Getting back to election coverage, suffice to say the real “super story” of American pushback against societal decline was either ignored, downplayed or recast as the work of misguided hicks who could have starred in President Obama’s 2008 crack about rural Pennsylvanians who “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment ….”

In Ohio, where pro-marijuana legalization forces spent $20 million and created a mascot named Buddie (a cartoon character based on a pot plant bud), Buckeye State voters burned down the proposed constitutional amendment, 64 to 36 percent. Proponents complained that the wording had confused the voters.

In Kentucky, Tea Party favorite Matt Bevin, who trailed Democrat Jack Conway in election eve polls by five points in the governor’s race, confounded not only the pundits but Establishment Republicans who darkly warned GOP candidates to stay away from social issues.

Bevin ignored them, and even visited jailed county clerk Kim Davis, who had refused to ignore Kentucky law and issue same-sex marriage licenses. Mr. Bevin’s ad campaign hammered Obamacare and tied his opponent to President Obama, who is as popular in coal country as a cave-in. But the religious liberty issue, as in Houston, was a major concern the media suppressed.

In Virginia, an anti-gun group founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent $700,000 in a failed attempt to gain an open Richmond area Senate seat. Incumbent conservatives such as Dick Black and Bob Marshall also defeated Democrats, preserving GOP control of the Senate.

Finally, even in San Francisco, voters fired pro-sanctuary Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. The sheriff had a record of bungling, but he was best known as chief law enforcement officer in a city where an American woman, Kate Steinle, was gunned down by an illegal immigrant criminal who had been turned loose.

Across America, voters dealt the elites and the media some stinging losses.

But don’t expect them to alter the narrative. They’ll report some of the news, but only in a manner that advances the progressive “super story.”

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com.

For some time now I’ve been saying that gay activists will overplay their hand and that the bullying will backfire. I’ve also said that we can outlast the gay revolution and ultimately, by God’s grace, turn the moral tide in America.

Of course, to speak like that is to invite all kinds of scorn and ridicule, not to mention the ugliest death wishes you could imagine. How dare we not roll over and die!

But events from the last 10 days remind us that, even though the cultural battles promise to be long and difficult, many Americans are ready to push back.

To begin with, the significance of the election results from last Tuesday can hardly be overstated.

In Kentucky, while the liberal media mocked Kim Davis the people of her state stood with her, electing Matt Bevin as governor in a crushing and unexpected victory over Attorney General Jack Conway.

And make no mistake about it: This was a direct statement about religious freedoms and redefining marriage.

After all, it was Conway who rose to national fame last year when he refused to defend the state’s ban on same-sex ‘marriage,’ despite his oath of office, explaining to Time magazine that, “Once I reached the conclusion that the law was discriminatory, I could no longer defend it.”

I guess the people of Kentucky didn’t get the memo that the ship has sailed and the culture wars are over.

Then, in Houston, lesbian activist mayor Annise Parker suffered a stinging defeat when her “anti-discrimination” bill, which focused on LGBT “rights,” was crushed by the voters.

In the aftermath of the massive defeat – 62 to 38 percent – Parker was reduced to insulting those who voted against the bill, calling them “transphobes” and more.

So, the people of Houston, America’s fourth largest city, are a bunch of transphobes.

Or, perhaps the triumph of LGBT activism is not so inevitable and there are real issues that having nothing to do with “homophobia” and “transphobia”? And perhaps there’s something to the fact that some strongly conservative Republican presidential candidates are polling better than Hillary Clinton?

Perhaps this really is time for pushback?

And what should we make of the fact that the NFL has decided to bring the Super Bowl to Houston in 2017 despite the defeat of Parker’s bill, even though proponents of the bill had warned that Houston would lose the Super Bowl if the bill was defeated? Perhaps even the NFL, well-known for preaching LGBT “inclusion,” sees the bigger picture?

In the aftermath of the Houston defeat, there were also small signs of a breach between gay activism and transgender activism, as indicated by a petition launched on Change.org by “a group of gay/bisexual men and women who have come to the conclusion that the transgender community needs to be disassociated from the larger LGB community; in essence, we ask that organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, Lambda Legal and media outlets such as The Advocate, Out, Huff Post Gay Voices, etc., stop representing the transgender community as we feel their ideology is not only completely different from that promoted by the LGB community (LGB is about sexual orientation, trans is about gender identity), but is ultimately regressive and actually hostile to the goals of women and gay men.”

The petition was named “Drop the T,” and it’s a reminder of the fact that transgender activists have often felt left out by mainstream gay activism, as reflected in headlines like “Why The Transgender Community Hates HRC” (2007) and “Even After All These Years, HRC Still Doesn’t Get It” (2013).

This too is noteworthy, reminding us that there are cracks in the foundations of LGBT unity that could become wider in the coming years.

There’s one more story from Houston which is of interest, providing yet another example of LGBT overreach, this time in a case involving two Christians who were fired from the daycare center at which they worked when they refused to call a little girl a boy.

The girl in question, just 6-years-old, is being raised by two gay male parents, and we can only wonder if that has something to do with the child’s gender confusion.

As explained to Breitbart Texas by one of the fired workers, Madeline Kirksey, “the problem was not so much with the transgender issue as it was with telling young children that the little girl was a boy when she was not, and with calling her ‘John’ (not the name given) when that was not her name.”

Kirskey also noted that, “sometimes the little girl refers to herself as a little boy, and sometimes she tells the other children to not call her a boy or to refer to her by her masculine name.”

This child is clearly confused and needs professional help.

Instead, rather than getting help for the child, two Christians have lost their jobs, and I cite this example to say again that Americans will only put up with madness like this for so long, just as the selection of Bruce Jenner as Glamour’s woman of the year drew sharp criticism from a wide spectrum of women, including one well-known feminist.

The pushback continues, and the more that LGBT activists overplay their hand, the quicker the tide will turn against them. It’s only a matter of time.

And so, while as followers of Jesus we should seek to be peacemakers in our communities, loving our neighbors (including our LGBT neighbors) as ourselves, we should also stand tall against aggressive LGBT activism.

This too is part of our calling to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13-16).

This article was originally posted at TownHall.com