Don’t mess it up.
Don’t mess it up.
A t first blush, Indiana’s 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) seemed like an uncontroversial initiative. Nineteen other states had passed similar religious-freedom bills in previous years, largely without incident. But when the Hoosier State RFRA incurred the ire of LGBT activists and a left-leaning national media, powerful business interests began to threaten boycotts. In the face of that pressure, the Republican legislature and then-governor Mike Pence reversed course: Rather than protect the conscience rights of its religious population, Indiana went so far as to explicitly write sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) into state anti-discrimination law. The “fixed” RFRA sailed through the Republican-supermajority legislature and was signed into law by Pence.
For many social conservatives, the saga pointed to the decline of the religious Right. In First Things, Patrick Deneen argued that the Indiana RFRA’s defeat signaled the rise of a new “power elite” — a class of political and corporate leaders with a marked hostility to traditional cultural views: “The response to Indiana’s RFRA law shows very clearly that corporations have joined forces with Republicans on economic matters and Democrats on social ones,” he wrote. Since then, the culture war “has moved from a combat phase to a life-under-occupation period,” Rod Dreher wrote in a pessimistic 2019 retrospective. “Big business stayed out of the culture war for half a century, reckoning sensibly enough that political controversy is bad for sales. But in 2015, that changed radically.”
On the issue of same-sex marriage, given record-high American support, the debate is largely settled. Yet the Right’s standing in the contemporary culture war — which encompasses many other issues — is better than it has been in decades. The grassroots backlash to critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology has thrust the most corrosive and unpopular aspects of left-wing ideology into the forefront of the national conversation. Fourteen states have passed anti-CRT laws over the course of the last year or so, and 14 others have passed bills restricting biological males from competing in women’s sports. Arkansas passed a ban on gender-reassignment surgery for minors, overriding the Republican governor’s veto with an overwhelming majority in the state legislature. More states are expected to pass similar bills in both areas this year.
Here, too, big business is decisively on the side of the left-wing activist groups that have loudly opposed this new legislative push at every turn. Particularly on transgender issues, red states that have passed laws aimed at protecting sex-based distinctions have been threatened with boycotts, lawsuits, and other forms of censure.
But when it comes to the new progressive cultural ideology, corporate leaders are out of step with most Americans. In stark contrast to the fight against same-sex marriage, laws like Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education Bill — which bars instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools from kindergarten through third grade — is favored by a margin of 16 points among registered voters nationwide. As a result, today’s Republican Party is far more divided on its relationship to business interests than it was in 2015. Old-school business Republicans remain reluctant to buck the demands of corporate leaders on social issues: South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, for example, infamously caved to corporate lobbyists when she vetoed a ban on men in women’s sports in March 2020 (though she later changed her position, as noted below). But newly prominent figures like Ron DeSantis, sensing a shift in the culture-war landscape, have been more than willing to flout the business lobby in their states — and have been taken a hostile rhetorical stance that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: “In Florida, our policies have got to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of woke corporations,” the Florida governor declared during a rally in March.
A New Indiana GOP?
On March 21, the Hoosier State once again became a subject of social-conservative frustrations. When Indiana governor Eric Holcomb, a Republican, vetoed a ban on biological males in women’s sports, many were quick to draw parallels with the RFRA debacle. “There’s a hangover from RFRA on these issues,” Ryan McCann, the executive director of the social-conservative Indiana Family Institute, told National Review, saying that Holcomb has “been around, and he’s well aware of the RFRA era.” In McCann’s view, “he just gets ahead of it, and he doesn’t even need big corporations to come after him and push him in the liberal direction. He’s already there . . . He just doesn’t want the controversy.”
Holcomb’s justification for the veto — citing concerns about “the likelihood of litigation against our schools with the courts having to adjudicate the uncertainties” — seemed to confirm suspicions that the move was largely motivated by a desire to avoid high-profile fights on social issues.
The governor has traditionally aligned with the business-friendly wing of the GOP. And if this were 2015, Holcomb’s veto likely would have been the final word on the issue — and the threat of corporate backlash would have muted conservative objections.
But it’s 2022, and “RFRA and women’s sports are very different,” McCann said. “RFRA was very difficult to explain to the average person. This woman’s sports bill, it’s just so much more popular. It’s so much easier to explain.”
Those differences make it more difficult for Republicans like Holcomb to justify their aversion to culture-war legislation. “There’s a political price to pay for this — he was out of sync with the majority of Hoosiers and the great majority of legislators in the state,” Amanda Banks, a former Indiana state senator (she filled the seat left open when her husband, Jim Banks, now a member of the U.S. House, deployed to Afghanistan), told National Review. Banks, who voted against the RFRA “fix” and now serves as the vice president of the social-conservative Family Policy Alliance, continued: “With RFRA, the original bill passed easily, and then all the backroom backlash happened. But things are different. I think that the legislators now have a different reaction to the pressure than most of my colleagues did in 2015.”
Red States Fight Back
Unlike the RFRA battle, which saw both the Republican governor and the GOP-controlled state legislature capitulate to socially liberal interests, Holcomb’s veto has put him at odds with much of the state GOP. “Girls’ sports should be for girls, and allowing biological males to compete with them robs female athletes of a chance to compete and win,” Senator Mike Braun tweeted soon after the veto. “I’m disappointed Governor Holcomb vetoed a bill to make this law in Indiana, and I support a veto override to protect women’s athletics.” The Indiana attorney general tweeted that his office would “stand by the law and will vigorously defend it in court if and hopefully when the General Assembly overrides the veto.” In an interview with NR, Representative Jim Banks said that Holcomb’s veto “just doesn’t make sense,” adding, “I’ve heard directly from state legislators who supported the bill that the governor signaled that he would sign it, so this is as much of a shock to them as it is to the rest of us who see this as a commonsense step forward to protecting our kids and saving girls’ sports.”
Indiana Republican leaders have vowed to override Holcomb’s veto. Their first opportunity to do so won’t come until May 24, when the legislature is set to meet for a special session. But recent precedents in other red states indicate a broader change in red-state legislatures’ disposition toward cultural issues like transgenderism. When Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed a ban on gender transitions for minors in April 2020, the state’s GOP-led legislature overrode him by a resounding 72–25 in the House and 25–8 in the Senate. On March 25, the Utah legislature overrode Governor Spencer Cox’s veto of a ban on biological males in women’s sports by a margin of 56–18 in the House and 21–8 in the Senate — just four days after the governor had issued the veto in the first place.
The shift in momentum on culture-war issues like transgenderism has pushed the GOP away from many of its old allies in the business community. The Chamber of Commerce, for example, has begun to transition away from its traditional loyalty to the GOP, increasing its endorsements of Democrats and aligning itself with a number of left-wing cultural initiatives. Facing new conservative scrutiny, culture-war-averse Republicans have also been forced to recalibrate. Kristi Noem, for example, recently introduced new legislation aimed at restricting athletic participation based on biological sex, and touted the bill in an advertisement on prime-time news programs across the country.
The GOP’s overall approach to the culture war remains uncertain. While the momentum in the party seems to be trending in a more hawkish direction, prominent holdouts remain: Holcomb and Cox’s vetoes of women’s-sports legislation came within 24 hours of one another, dampening social-conservative optimism about the wave of similar bills sweeping state legislatures across the country. But the political backlash to Republican weakness on the issue signals a new appetite for a more aggressive culture-war strategy throughout the party. And if the polls surrounding new legislation like Florida’s Parental Rights Bill are anything to go by, that strategy enjoys the support of the American people, too.