No one else besides ADF who could take on this suit, would take it on. They’re who stood up to defend women having a right to a level playing field in sports, with all the social outcome, scholarship, and mentorship benefits entailed. They have our appreciation and thanks for it. https://twitter.com/alliancedefends/status/1295492704013553664

We disagree on a lot. They’re not feminists, but most people in politics aren’t feminists, especially a lot of the men who say they are. And most people in politics today won’t stand up for the rights of women and girls in sports like Christiana Holcomb.
https://twitter.com/alliancedefends/status/1295743897801494530?s=21 https://twitter.com/alliancedefends/status/1295743897801494530

If you care about girls’ and women’s sports and you’re glad that there is at least a fight over this issue where the girls are mounting a strong legal defense, ADF is making that stand, along with the brave lawmakers in Idaho who passed the bill. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/18/us/idaho-transgender-athletes-ban-blocked/index.html

Our Chamber of Commerce is coming down on all of them, along with hundreds of individual businesses. The NCAA is coming down on them. They’re getting trashed in the media. The ACLU, an organization with hundreds of millions in the bank, is coming after them in court.

But ADF, and a number of Idaho lawmakers, are standing for women’s sports, anyway. They’re being led by conservative women who value the opportunities they had, and who want to preserve those opportunities for the next girl. This is some great solidarity with other women.

On the other side, ACLU staff, with far more money and political support, are working to destroy women’s sports, to put men in women’s prisons, to keep FGM and child marriage legal, and to decriminalize sex buying. We’re not feeling the empathy for women.

We’re told sometimes that we should decide who we’ll agree to work with only on the basis of our abortion politics. This conveniently sidesteps the political reality that gender critical women have been blacklisted from abortion rights activism. Those women can’t be seen with us.

Should we narrow our fight to the small question of whether we can get work with PPFA? Gender activists would probably like that fight, as they’ve already won it, and it would waste our time.

Something else emerged for us as we started doing this work though.

We thought, well, what do men do in politics, when they’re in a situation where they need more allies? The answer was ready to hand, because in every case they work with almost anyone they can find, sometimes including people they’ve fought fiercely with over other issues.

It’s completely normal and expected for people to work together in a pluralistic, liberal democratic system like ours, with people they don’t agree with about every other topic. That’s how you build a coalition outside your own tiny group that might get anything done.

We get asked why we work with people of faith, but a large majority of US residents are people of faith, as is common in most other countries. That’s not as odd to everyone as it is to US atheists with all secular friends, or to people from the UK where atheists are a majority.

And if someone’s objections to our talking with people at ADF, or having worked with them in the past, boil down to, “but conservative Christians support regressive stereotypes about women,” maybe they’re the ones who need to update their stereotyped expectations of others.

This just isn’t the same conversation that everyone was having 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.
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