Dear Religious Conservatives:

9 out of 10 Republicans in Congress won’t stand up for you because you’ll vote for them anyway:

I talked to a Capitol Hill aide familiar with the process behind what happened today. He spoke frankly on condition that I don’t identify him.

“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “For stuff like this, the initial knee-jerk response is ‘Mike Lee.’ Mike Lee is the the only one who can always be counted on to stand up to this stuff.”

The aide figures that Hawley’s speech Monday about the Bostock decision freed him to be able to join Lee. About Lankford, he’s uncertain.

The aide is frustrated with social and religious conservative lobbying groups, who, in his opinion, don’t fully appreciate the political dynamics at work.

This is not about principle,” he said. “It’s about politics. If you polled every Republican member of the US Senate, they would agree that this [SOGI] stuff is bad. But they’re not afraid of social conservatives, and there is no political upside to standing up to this [SOGI] stuff.

…

I asked the aide what message he would send as a political insider to his fellow religious and social conservatives among the electorate.

“They need to stop trusting that anyone with an R in front of their name is doing the right thing behind the scenes, because they aren’t,” he said. “These guys are not spending real political capital and putting their necks on the line to fight for these priorities. Name a law that’s been passed in the last twenty years that’s a social conservative priority. A single law. The Partial Birth Abortion Ban was a long time ago [2003, in fact — RD]. It’s all judges. Judges, judges, judges.”

Rod Dreher, The Thin Red Line