ANDREW SULLIVAN: The Gay Rights Movement Is Undoing Its Best Work.

For a couple of decades, many non-leftists, in the wake of the plague, took more control of the messaging of gay rights. We emphasized those things that united gays and straights, and we celebrated institutions of integration — such as marriage rights and open military service. We portrayed ourselves as average citizens seeking merely the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else — Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. We were largely gender-conforming, which is not in any way better than non-gender-conforming, but this helped get the conversation started and sustained. We adopted a much less leftist stance — and few can really dispute that it was one of the most swiftly successful civil-rights movements in history.

But since Obergefell? As many of us saw our goals largely completed and moved on, the far left filled the void. The movement is now rhetorically as much about race and gender as it is about sexual orientation (“intersectionality”), prefers alternatives to marriage to marriage equality, sees white men as “problematic,” masculinity as toxic, gender as fluid, and race as fundamental. They have no desire to seem “virtually normal”; they are contemptuous of “respectability politics” — which means most politics outside the left. Above all, they have advocated transgenderism, an ideology that goes far beyond recognizing the dignity and humanity and civil equality of trans people into a critique of gender, masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality. “Live and let live” became: “If you don’t believe gender is nonbinary, you’re a bigot.” I would be shocked if this sudden lurch in the message didn’t in some way negatively affect some straight people’s views of gays.

The left’s indifference to religious freedom — see the question of Masterpiece Cakeshop — has also taken a toll.

Yes, when you act like tyrannical jerks, people don’t like you as much. Go figure.