Thinking about the vindication of Abigail Shrier

That big question, again: What do the terms "liberal" and "conservative" mean these days?

More than a decade ago, I started asking three questions on the old GetReligion.org blog — which remains online, as a 20-year archive of commentary about issues in religion news coverage in the mainstream press.

Here is an example of that trilogy from 2015, but it was already several years old at that time. In this example, I was asking journalists:

* What should journalists call someone who is weak when it comes to defending freedom of speech?

* What should journalists call someone who is weak when it comes to defending freedom of association?

* What should journalists call someone who is weak when it comes to defending freedom of religion?

My answer? I'm not sure what the correct answer is, these days, but anyone familiar with the history of political thought in the West will know that the correct answer is not "liberal."

I’m asking these questions once again because, well, I have started thinking about American politics (and journalism) after Donald Trump 2.0.

No, I am not saying that the next four years are meaningless (far from it). But I am saying that — even if Trump helps shape the politics in 2017-2018 — he isn’t going to be the candidate. That reality may (repeat “may”) make it possible for some elite journalists to pay attention to interesting things that have started happening in American life and culture.

For example, people who were old-school “liberals” on the issues I mentioned in that trilogy of “labeling” questions are now frequently called “conservatives,” even though their legal views have not changed a bit. Meanwhile, many modern “progressives” no longer seem to want certain types of Americans to enjoy robust First Amendment rights (primarily in religious-liberty cases).

For example, remember that interesting First Amendment adjacent situation when Chase Strangio — an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — made a blunt (at one time, it would have been shocking) remark about Abigail Shrier’s white-hot 2021 bestseller “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.”

Strangio tweeted that “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on."

Oh my. Remember back in the mid-1970s when the ACLU defended the rights of Nazis to hold a march through Skokie, a Chicago suburb that was home for hundreds of Holocaust survivors?