Folks, you're not going to keep boys out of girls' sports until you're willing to jail doctors who perform "gender confirming surgery," terminate parental rights of those who embrace the trans-identities of their children, and jail people for public cross dressing.

The side that follows its presuppositions to their logical conclusions is the side that wins culture war battles. This is why liberals always win and we always lose.

If male and female is determined by biology, then gender confirming surgery is mutilation, parents who put their children on that path are unfit to parent, and cross dressing is destructive to society.

If you aren't willing to say these things, the people you need to convince won't take you seriously. But they will take the other side seriously because they actually sound like they mean what they say.

For a bagillion years, Republicans tried to convince those who were unconvinced on abortion to vote for them by saying "pro-life except in cases of rape and incest." Weird how "life begins at conception except if conception was consensual" didn't move the needle much.

But what they actually needed to do was convince people to be pro-life and then trust that they'd vote for them. And the way to do that is to say "life begins at conception and we always defend innocent life, regardless of how it began."

Because principles are what actually convince people. So as much as conservatives talked about family values and the importance of natural marriage, well...

Did they fight for reform in divorce law? No. Did they fight against allowing gay couples to adopt because they could not, by their very nature, provide children with a mother and father? Nope. That would have been mean and too zealous.

Same thing with sodomy laws. Conservatives were happy with Lawrence vs. Kansas. After all, what business does the government have telling people what they can do in the privacy of their own homes?

Well, much to the chagrin of the libertarians, it turns out that "we'll build a society where everybody gets to keep his philosophical presuppositions and where none of them influences our laws" was never actually going to happen.

It's not within the nature to remain neutral on the morality of an issue. Once the government stopped saying "sodomy is bad," it took about 15 seconds before it said "sodomy is good and anyone who opposes it must be punished."

So, in all of this, "here's the thing we believe but we don't think society should actually be ordered around this belief" has been the typical conservative approach to the culture wars. And, shock of all shocks, we keep losing.

So, if you want girls' sports to still be a thing, if you don't want your daughters to be groomed into cutting off their breasts, if you don't want people to lose their jobs for refusing use made up pronouns, you have two choices:

Either accept defeat and surrender control of your life, your children, and your country to those who are under the spell of demons

OR

Accept that you have to fight for more than your daughter's right to a track scholarship. Accept that you will be called mean names.

Accept that you will have to let the fantasy of moderate, modest social conservatism die and that you're going to have to advocate things that strike you as a little too zealous.

Those are your choices. There is no other path. You either get a world where taking your kids to drag queen story hour gets you thrown in jail or withholding your kids from drag queen story hour gets you thrown in jail.

Choose wisely.