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It's becoming a rout.

The culture wars are drawing to a close and the liberals are winning. The latest ruling (well non-ruling, really) from the U.S. Supreme Court underscores what's happening.

It's still a very conservative court led by a very conservative Chief Justice. And yet even the justices could see the writing on the wall. Same-sex marriage is here to stay.

Chief Justice John Roberts was not going to be on the wrong side of history. He was not going to be the Roger Taney of his age. Taney was Chief Justice of the court that issued the Dred Scott decision, in which he wrote that African Americans "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect," and that therefore a fugitive slave could be returned to his owner.

Those were maybe the most disgusting words to come out of any official action of any branch or agency of the federal government. Roberts, who found a way not to overturn Obamacare, was not about to see himself assume a Taney-like infamy in history by upholding same sex marriage bans. He has found a way to escape that trap.

But the bigger picture is even more encouraging. The court only did what the public was demanding. And it was only a few years ago that this would have been unthinkable. It was pretty much only yesterday when no serious mainstream politician found it safe to come out for same-sex marriage. Now it's pretty much required of Democratic candidates, and most Republicans would just rather not talk about it.

And same-sex marriage is only the start. It comes out of a growing liberal majority rooted in demographics and geography. Cities are home to liberals and they are growing. An interesting op-ed in yesterday's New York Times argues that even Texas is becoming a state that is in play for Democratic candidates in part because of a rapidly growing Hispanic population, but also due to its growing cities.

But here's the problem we need to work on. Liberals concentrate themselves while conservatives spread out. That's why the Wisconsin Legislature and Congress remains so far to the right while the public as a whole is moving to the left. Part of it is redistricting, but a lot of it is also attributable to how we spread ourselves out on the physical landscape.

So what may be coming is increasing frustration as a liberal majority in the population as a whole finds itself stymied by entrenched conservatives in legislatures and in Congress. The culture wars may continue with a stubborn resistance holding on to heavily barricaded institutions while the masses gather around them.

The trick will be to ride this out until the next census when another round of redistricting might deliver more fair representation that reflects where the country is really at. Patience, more than ever, is going to be a virtue.

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Citizen Dave: Same-sex marriage and the culture wars

We are in the midst of a seemingly endless number of art world controversies, from the National Portrait Gallery's removal of David Wojnarowicz's video, A Fire in My Belly, and MoCA Los Angeles's whitewashing of a mural by the artist Blu, to the United States House of Representative's Spending Reduction Act of 2011. That bill proposed to end the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities (fortunately the crisis was averted, though both agencies experienced budget cuts of 7.5% each). These days, it seems like art has not been under such incisive fire since the 1980s. At that time, the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley, and others gave name to an incipient polemical debate that exploded into what we now know as the Culture Wars in the United States.

These instances, however, are just a few among many. After all, not only have artists raised eyebrows and stirred emotions since the days of Manet's Olympia, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and well before, but they also continue to grapple with hot-button topics even without the ire of political figures or institutional administrations. Even Art21 is not immune. In 2008, an effort to include our videos and educational resources in the official curriculum of the Dallas Independent School District was met with resistance by both teachers and parents, given the provocative nature of images by featured artists such as Sally Mann and Kara Walker.

In April 2011, Ai Weiwei was detained by Chinese authorities and held for 81 days before international outcry prompted his release. Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987), one of the poster children for the Sensation-era Culture Wars of the 1990s, was smashed in April 2011 by Catholic fundamentalists while on display at the Collection Lambert in Avignon, France. Previous attacks on the painting took place in 1997 and 2007. And two weeks prior to the Serrano incident, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., a visitor struck out at Paul Gaugin's Two Tahitian Women (1899) painting with her bare fists, decrying it as "evil."

How could an artist disappear? Or artworks find themselves besieged? Whether understood as blasphemous, outspoken activism, or simply provocation, art clearly does something to people. For better or worse, it affects them, moving them to act on their convictions. Art leads some to inflict violence, commit acts of censorship, withdraw funding, and even arrest artists. But it also encourages others to protest such behavior, insisting on a discursive sphere that protects artists' freedom of expression and the viewing public's ability to come to its own conclusions about the art with which it comes into contact.

This is an issue Art21 has addressed before. In fact, our very first Flash Points topic on the Art21 Blog in 2008 was titled "What's so shocking about contemporary art?" We spent three months exploring the question. But in light of recent events, we think it is important to revisit more of these seminal debates and the images that inflamed them. To this end, we've assembled a survey of texts, artworks, and related Art21 videos to further the discussion. Flash Points will continue the conversation as well, responding to the texts published here back on the Art21 Blog.

We are particularly pleased to share five newly commissioned essays on The Culture Wars, Redux.

In his essay, "The 1913 Armory Show: America's First Art War," Tom McCormack travels back to a controversial exhibition that long preceded Sensation. The 1913 Armory Show, with its legendary exhibition of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), polarized audiences over its instantiation of a new (now historical) avant-garde. But as McCormack argues, what really riled viewers was the question of whether the painting could even be called art at all.

Nettrice Gaskins's essay, "Polyculturalist Visions, New Frameworks of Representation: Multiculturalism and the American Culture Wars," connects the battles of the early Culture Wars to those of multiculturalism in the 1980s. Examining the ongoing crisis of representation in cultural institutions, Gaskins ultimately arrives at what she sees as a "polyculturalist" future for art in which it moves away from dialectical identity politics to a sphere of fluid identities. "In our age of accelerated technology," she writes, "artists can move culture, capital, and ideas between worlds."

Taking a close look at the controversy surrounding Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in "The 'Black Gash of Shame,'" Elizabeth Wolfson considers what it is that makes public memorials such charged sites for viewers and visitors of all stripes. Drawing parallels to the debates regarding recent memorials in our current moment, Wolfson examines the constellation of subject positions battling over a desire for socially useful and representational art.

Heading across the Atlantic to Poland, Russia, and Egypt in her extensive three-part essay, "Art and Morality under Neoliberalism: Reflections on 'Blasphemous' Art from the East," Ania Szremski finds myriad connections between the controversial practices of Eastern European artists in the 1990s and Egyptian artists in the early 2000s. Cataloguing the problematic receptions of their artwork, Szremski locates the crux of the conflict in the powerful conservatism engendered by national economies undergoing deregulation and privatization. Under late capitalism, she opines, the possibility of a truly open discursive space is all too often an illusory one.

Continue reading here:
The Culture Wars, Redux | ART21

Egypt #39;s Culture Wars: Politics And Practice - Samia Mehrez - bluecoffeeandbooks.com
Book Summary: Egypt #39;s Culture Wars: Politics And Practice - Samia Mehrez ISBN: 9780415666879 Share the book of your favorite author. See more http://www.blue...

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Egypt's Culture Wars: Politics And Practice - Samia Mehrez - bluecoffeeandbooks.com - Video

Frank Salter Radicalization of Social Sciences Culture Wars Low
Radicalization of Social Sciences Culture Wars Frank Salter feminism has destroy men and the family well done women for supporting your own demise, you have thrown men under the bus...

By: Paul Wilson

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Frank Salter Radicalization of Social Sciences & Culture Wars Low - Video

Sept. 29, 2014 12:20 p.m.

Several times in recent years, Ive argued here that the political left or at least the center was gradually gaining ground in Americas so-called culture wars and inevitably would have the upper hand.

One of my arguments challenged an article of faith among conservatives that political and cultural liberalism is a phase of youth and that people tend to move to the right as they grow older. As a senior citizen myself, Im living evidence against that notion.

And now, THIS EDITORIAL in The New York Times notes that a growing number of Democratic candidates for public office are no longer reluctant to raise certain issues in their battles with the Republican Partys militant culture warriors:

Not long ago, it would have been unusual for a Democratic senatorial candidate in Iowa to run a powerful abortion-rights television ad like the one recently broadcast by Representative Bruce Braley.

The ad lists in detail the anti-abortion positions taken by Mr. Braleys Republican opponent, Joni Ernst. In the State Senate, the ad says, she sponsored a personhood amendment (declaring a fertilized egg to be a person) that would have the effect of outlawing abortion even in cases of rape or incest, and would also ban many common forms of birth control. Ms. Ernst is even shown saying at a debate that she favors criminal punishment for doctors who perform abortions; the ad describes her position as radical.

(Snip)

In Colorado, Senator Mark Udall, a Democrat, has sharply criticized the views of his challenger, Representative Cory Gardner, about womens reproductive rights, running an ad that points out the dangers in the Life at Conception Act that Mr. Gardner has helped sponsor in the House. Senator Kay Hagan, Democrat of North Carolina, continually reminds voters that her opponent, Thom Tillis, has worked to make contraception less accessible.

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The tide has turned in Americas culture wars