The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney published a column on Tuesday that challenged the common perception in mainstream discourse that America is in the midst of a regressive backlash against LGBT rights.

Carney argues that cultural progressives are actually the ones on the offense.

Carney describes an all-too-familiar situation in Montgomery County, Maryland, in which the school district now requires fifth graders to read the book Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope. In response, a group of Muslim parents issued a statement and joined forces with social conservatives to request an opt-out policy.

It is common for the left to successfully frame situations like these in a way that makes the Muslim parents and their allies the aggressors, not the other way around. No less an LGBT luminary than Elton John recently attempted this feat in an interview with the Radio Times, in which he contends that there is a "growing well of anger and homophobia that’s around America," and that, "we seem to be going backwards."

This posturing is so pervasive that it almost goes without saying in mainstream discourse. But it couldn't be less accurate. Consider how far the progressive cultural movement has taken the country in a short period of time. Only a decade ago, for instance, the Democratic Party platform didn’t even mention the word "trans." And yet today, trans rights are perhaps the party's defining cause.

Pride Month, which many hadn't heard of a decade ago, is now so mainstream that it rivals Christmas as the nation’s preferred holiday season (especially in terms of corporate advertising). This alone makes it patently ludicrous to suggest that we’ve somehow "gone backwards" in regard to LGBT acceptance. The left has won the culture war so convincingly as to make 2012 feel like a century ago in the collective memory.

It is a truly remarkable fact, given that former President Barack Obama only came out in support of gay marriage months before the 2012 election. Here is President Obama expressing his disapproval for gay marriage at the White House in 2010. Only a decade later, the LGBT movement is so culturally powerful that failure to unequivocally accept its orthodoxy often amounts to social and professional suicide.

LGBT issues, however, are not the only chronically misrepresented front in the culture war.

Recent reports out of the Netherlands reveal that thanks to the stunning success of cultural progressives in implementing their moral vision, the nation has been euthanizing people with autism and loneliness out of their abundant "empathy." One wonders: Would the American left dare characterize this situation in a way that identifies the opponents to this policy as "anti-progress?"

Fortunately, in opposition to this nightmarish new reality, organizations like Patient’s Rights Action Fund , a non-partisan organization that protects the rights of people with disabilities, have sprung up to protect the vulnerable from ever falling victim to this kind of "progress."

Human rights lawyer Haben Girma , who is the first deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School and a past recipient of the Helen Keller Achievement Award, is part of a legal team that is waging a battle to protect disabled persons from a California law called the End of Life Options Act (EOLOA). The act, signed into law by former Gov. Jerry Brown in 2016, resembles what we now see in the Netherlands.

"The reports of medical ableism in the Netherlands are horrifying," Girma told me on Thursday. "I hope human rights lawyers will fight for disability justice."

As with the situation in Montgomery County schools, only the most willful and stubborn blindness could lead one to characterize backlash to the situations in the Netherlands and California as "reactionary" or somehow indicative of societal regression.

Too often, conservatives allow progressives to choose where the goalposts are located in a given debate. In football, it’s called giving your opponent "a short field," meaning that the other side begins closer to your goal than you do to theirs. Debates are won and lost depending on the point at which they begin. It’s time for conservatives to win the battle for field position for a change.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and the founder of Crush the College Essay. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, the National Catholic Register, and the American Spectator.