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 \u201creligious liberty\u201d\u009d protections. Only now that they\u2019ve lost the battle over LGBT rights, have they made those protections central \u201d\u201c seeing them, I suppose, as a new front in the culture wars. But, again, they\u2019ve already lost the war.). For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That\u2019s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (\u201cYou lost, live with it\u201d\u009d) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who \u201d\u201c remember \u201d\u201c defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn\u2019t 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\u2019s over, and we won.<\/p>\n