The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. Remember, they were the ones who characterized constitutional disputes as culture wars (see Justice Scalia in Romer v. Evans, and the Wikipedia entry for culture wars, which describes conservative activists, not liberals, using the term.) And they had opportunities to reach a cease fire, but rejected them in favor of a scorched earth policy. The earth that was scorched, though, was their own. (No conservatives demonstrated any interest in trading off recognition of LGBT rights for “religious liberty” protections. Only now that they’ve lost the battle over LGBT rights, have they made those protections central ”“ seeing them, I suppose, as a new front in the culture wars. But, again, they’ve already lost the war.). For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who ”“ remember ”“ defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.
Similar approaches are known from history and they do not end well. But don’t take my word for it, check out Russia, Italy and Germany in the 1917 – 1939 era for countries that experienced such aggrandizement of power.
Do note the last intention well. Those who have been useful idiots to the elites now-in-power via the judiciary will be rewarded for their efforts as their efforts deserve in the eyes of their new masters: “6 [i]Finally [/i] (trigger/crudeness alert), [i]f*** Anthony Kennedy[/i]. … only trying to figure out arguments that would get Kennedy’s apparently crucial vote ([b]not so crucial any more [/b])…”. Emphases added.