Why Conservatives Keep Bending the Knee to Gay Rights

Buoyed by the successful Bud Light boycott and Target’s removal of Pride-themed merchandise due to customer backlash, many conservatives are feeling more hopeful than they have in a while. Folks are finally waking up to all this transgender insanity. Ordinary Americans aren’t going to stand for this nonsense any longer. Or so we tell ourselves over a hearty can of Coors Light. But without a return to God-centered, family-first conservatism, the moral and spiritual health of our culture will continue to decline, even if we pull off the occasional victory.

In this light, Sen. Ted Cruz’s recent intervention in the controversy over Uganda’s new laws against sodomy—aimed at curbing homosexual rape and the spread of STDs—is emblematic of a much wider crisis. Instead of using this occasion to call out the West’s ideological colonization of the developing world, the Texan senator tweeted that he condemned the African nation’s laws: “This Uganda law is horrific & wrong. . . . ALL civilized nations should join together in condemning this human rights abuse. #LGBTQ.”

To be sure, the main problem is not that Cruz deems the Ugandan laws too strict. That is a reasonable stance for conservatives to take. The issue here is Cruz’s full-throated embrace of an outdated conservatism that idolizes individual autonomy at the expense of the culture’s moral and spiritual health. By paying lip service to the powerful gay lobby, which seeks to annihilate traditional values, Cruz is just another symptom of the moral compromise that pervades today’s conservatism.

It means recognizing, too, that the law occupies a profoundly pedagogical role in our lives, and for this reason should discriminate between those unions that are essential for the formation of the next generation and those that are not. The truth includes the acknowledging that introducing no-fault divorce was a travesty, and in many ways redefined marriage more drastically than Obergefell vs. Hodges.

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