Do you remember the old joke in which commentator Irving Kristol defined a "neoconservative" as a "liberal who has been mugged by reality"? It's been around a long time and, down here in the Bible Belt, there's a variation on that theme in which a "neoconservative" is defined as a "Democrat with a daughter."

Now that second quip has issues, of course, because neoconservatism is best known as a school of thought on foreign-policy concerns – not a brand of social and moral conservatism (as implied with the "with a daughter" statement).

Still, I wish I had a dollar or two for every time I heard these quips this weekend related to a story in the news at the moment. I must have heard one or the other of these one-liners four or five times yesterday and that was just in coffee hour after the Divine Liturgy here in Oak Ridge. Here is the top of the story, as reported at National Public Radio:

The Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is looking for a new director, after Maya Dillard Smith resigned the post last week. Smith had only been on the job for a year, after moving from California. She says ultimately, it wasn’t a good fit.

“It became clear that we were principally and philosophically different in opinion,” she says.

Smith says that difference became especially clear after the Obama administration issued guidance for public schools about bathrooms for transgender students. The administration said schools have to let transgender students use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, rather than the sex they were assigned at birth. Schools that don’t comply could lose federal funding. The ACLU has supported the measure.

Smith says she wasn’t well-versed in transgender issues and wanted to learn more. But, she says there was no room for dialogue at the ACLU.

Let me be clear here. Everyone keeps asking if GetReligion is going to write about the news coverage of this story. I have asked, in return, "What is the religion angle, the religion ghost, in this story?"