Rod Dreher's Blog, page 185

View From Your Table

Our tireless pelegrinarian James C. is in Edinburgh today. He writes:

Mulled wine at the Antiquary pub on a chilly but calm and moonlit Sunday night in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

If this doesn’t put you in the Christmas spirit, I don’t know what will. Here’s a look at the outside of The Antiquary, from its website. 

I want to go to there!

UPDATE: James writes to add:

The food at the Christmas market is unbelievable. Venison burgers with raclette? Check. Scottish oysters, cullen skink seafood chowder and lobster rolls? Check. French comté cheese stir-fried with sausage, cream and chopped potatoes in giant pans? Check.

More photos from James. Here’s the Christmas market:

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J.K. Rowling & Havel’s Greengrocer

A transgender writer takes to the pages of The New York Times to grieve over J.K. Rowling’s unwokeness. Excerpt:

I wonder now if I’ll be able to separate the author from the text, if and when I decide to read the books again — a decision I’ve yet to come to a conclusion on. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve had to consider this: It was disappointing to see the appropriation of Navajo culture in Ms. Rowling’s digital story collection, “History of Magic in North America” and the original books have been rightly criticized for promoting fatphobia, racial stereotyping and more.

Rightly criticized for promoting fatphobia! Well, my goodness, what a monster J.K. Rowling must be.

Let me remind you all that Rowling is a social liberal, a feminist, a backer of gay rights and a public supporter of the Labour Party. And now, she’s cancelled. I wonder if the NYT op-ed page will invite a column from a liberal feminist who agrees with Rowling. I hope so, but I doubt it. On the left today, pseudo-women are more important than actual women. I see Rowling as a kind of Havel’s Greengrocer figure: a person who refuses to go along to get along, no matter what comes — and in so doing, shows that one doesn’t have to surrender to tyranny. Here’s what I wrote about Havel’s greengrocer in The Benedict Option:

Havel, who died in 2011, preached what he called “antipolitical politics,” the essence of which he described as “living in truth.” His most famous and thorough statement of this was a long 1978 essay titled “The Power of the Powerless,” which electrified the Eastern European resistance movements when it first appeared. It is a remarkable document, one that bears careful study and reflection by orthodox Christians in the West today.

Consider, says Havel, the greengrocer living under Communism, who puts a sign in his shop window saying, “Workers of the World, Unite!” He does it not because he believes it, necessarily. He simply doesn’t want trouble. And if he doesn’t really believe it, he hides the humiliation of his coercion by telling himself, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Fear allows the official ideology to retain power—and eventually changes the greengrocer’s beliefs. Those who “live within a lie,” says Havel, collaborate with the system and compromise their full humanity.

Every act that contradicts the official ideology is a denial of the system. What if the greengrocer stops putting the sign up in his window? What if he refuses to go along to get along? “His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth”— and it’s going to cost him plenty.

He will lose his job and his position in society. His kids may not be allowed to go to the college they want to, or to any college at all. People will bully him or ostracize him. But by bearing witness to the truth, he has accomplished something potentially powerful:

He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.

Because they are public, the greengrocer’s deeds are inescapably political. He bears witness to the truth of his convictions by being willing to suffer for them. He becomes a threat to the system—but he has preserved his humanity. And that, says Havel, is a far more important accomplishment than whether this party or that politician holds power (a fact that became painfully clear during the debasing 2016 U.S. presidential campaign).

“A better system will not automatically ensure a better life,” Havel goes on. “In fact the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.” (emphasis mine).

Of course in Vaclav Havel’s fable, the greengrocer is powerless. J.K. Rowling has a fortune estimated between $650 million and $1 billion. Nevertheless, as anybody who has paid attention to social media and the news media coverage since Rowling stood up for feminist Maya Forstater, whose opinion that males cannot become female was denounced by a British judge as unfit for democratic society, the woke tyrants will do what they can to inflict damage. Note well that the media coverage of the event has almost entirely been framed as a famous writer causing pain to her trans and trans-supportive fans. The encouragement Rowling’s stance has given to feminists and others who do not accept gender ideology has been ignored by the media. Naturally, because “bigots” are not to be allowed to think that anybody supports them.

If you think that the Rowling row is something you can safely ignore, you are mistaken. This morning I received the following from a reader who grew up in a communist country, and who emigrated to the US as a young person. The writes about an exchange yesterday with a genial woman merchant. I altered this slightly to protect the reader’s identity, and slightly rewrote it for easier reading. I publish this with the reader’s approval:

“J. K. Rowling pissed off all her fans,” said the shopkeeper.

“Not all,” the reader replied.

The shopkeeper paused.

“I suppose you can still love someone’s work even if you hate the author.”

“What did she do?”

“She supported a transphobe, a hater.”

“Maya Forstater is not a transphobe. She’s a feminist. She stated, very politely, a fact. You cannot fire people for stating opinions, let alone irrefutable facts.”

“Depends on their jobs.”

“Hmm. Did you read what Maya Forstater wrote?”

“No, but a woman with a penis is still a woman”

The reader goes on:

She is a well-educated, very intelligent, and very nice woman. I have known her for quite a while. In the book you are writing, it is very important to state clearly that nearly all the horrors of the 20th century were perpetrated by nice people in the name of common good.

The audience you are writing for is the nice people among us, the compassionate ones. It’s not me, and it’s not the ideologues and puppeteers. It’s the people who will act or submit out of compassion; the nice little old ladies who will petition the government to give the death penalty to dissidents. It is your job to convince them that compassion has to have a context. Without that context it will kill us all.

This is not soft totalitarianism. It is made of concrete, and it is setting fast.

Maya Forstater must be unemployed, and the works of J.K. Rowling entered onto the Woke Index Of Forbidden Books, so that transgendered people and their allies may never, ever confront a thought that troubles them. Silencing and punishing dissenters is the nice, compassionate thing to do. Father Smith, the prophetic Catholic priest in Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome:

“Beware, tender hearts! Don’t you know where tenderness leads? To the gas chambers. Never in the history of the world have there been so many civilized tenderhearted souls as have lived in this century. Never in the history of the world have so many people been killed. More people have been killed in this century by tenderhearted souls than by cruel barbarians in all other centuries put together. My brothers, let me tell you where tenderness leads. To the gas chambers! On with the jets!”

The Rowling/Forstater case goes to the very heart of the struggle upon us now. A couple of years ago, Maggie Gallagher wrote:

In 2002, the sociologist James Davison Hunter gave an extraordinary talk to Church leaders. Most Christians, he said, think of culture as the values in individual hearts and minds, and imagine therefore that changing culture is the task of evangelising individual hearts and minds. Hunter called this view of culture “pervasive” and completely wrong. “If one is serious about changing the world,” he said, “the first step is to discard this view of culture and how cultures change, for every strategy based upon it will fail – not most strategies, but all strategies.”

Culture, instead, is a form of capital, a kind of power. But what sort of power? “It starts as credibility, an authority one possesses which puts one in a position to be taken seriously,” Hunter said. “It ends as the power to define reality itself. It is the power to name things.”

A culture war is a struggle over who has the power to name what is real.

Is a woman with a penis really a woman? Who decides? What is a woman anyway? This is the power to define reality. The answer to these questions is being worked out right now, in the trenches of the culture war. Neutrality is impossible. Silence means consent.

(Speaking of the power to define reality, if you haven’t read my piece about the phony “epidemic” of trans murder, a pseudo-narrative propagated by LGBT activists and the media, you really need to.)

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The Phony ‘Epidemic’ Of Anti-Trans Murder

At last night’s Democratic debate, Elizabeth Warren solemnly declared that if she is elected, she will make a point of coming out onto the White House lawn once a year and reciting aloud the names of all the transgendered Americans who have been killed in the past year.

Dying While Trans is a big thing on the Left, and in the mainstream media. We keep having stories — Google them, you’ll see — on the “epidemic” of murders of transgendered Americans. The American Medical Association has also labeled it an “epidemic.” According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the leading LGBT lobby, 22 trans persons have been murdered so far in 2019. One is too many, but to put this in perspective, in 2018, there were over 16,200 murders in the US. In my medium-sized city alone in 2019, there have already been 75 homicides — over three times the “epidemic” of trans murders. Nobody is talking about an “epidemic” of murder in Baton Rouge. Nor should they, as awful as the killings are, because to label it an epidemic would be meaningless.

The word “epidemic” when applied to the killing of transgendered people is 100 percent a political term, one that has no real-world meaning whatsoever, except insofar as it can advance the pro-trans narrative. It is pure propaganda. 

The New York Times said earlier this year:

The paucity of reliable data makes it difficult to measure whether violence against transgender people has increased. But many advocates say that hostility has intensified, as a rise in visibility has also stirred animosity and emboldened people to attack.

“Advocates.” Here are some high-profile advocates:

The violence against transgender women has been cited by several Democratic presidential candidates, including Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and Julián Castro, the former housing secretary. At a candidates forum on L.G.B.T.Q. issues in Iowa last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren read aloud the names of those who have been killed this year.

Who are these people? Last month, HRC released a report on what it calls “the epidemic of anti-transgender violence.”Here is a statistic from the report on the 22 dead trans people:

That’s interesting. Nine out of 10 were black. Are 90 percent of transpeople black? Of course not. And four out of five were young. You know who else is wildly disproportionately represented in homicide statistics, both as killers and victims? Black males under the age of 30 — like these dead transgendered people.

I did a little digging into the backgrounds of each person on HRC’s list, to see if I could find out the circumstances of their murder. You would think from the way HRC talks about it, and the way the news media talks about it, and politicians like Elizabeth Warren talk about it, that these people were murdered in an anti-trans hate crime. It is not true. Most of them were street prostitutes, which is about the most dangerous work anyone can do. The Trans-Industrial Complex is creating 100 percent propaganda out of their deaths. Here’s what I found. All these people below are on the HRC “epidemic” list:

1. Dana Martin, first trans person killed in America in 2019, as lots of media said. As far as I can tell, police haven’t arrested a suspect yet, and have offered no motive. There is no reason at all to believe that Martin was targeted because he identified as a woman. But Martin was not exactly a model citizen. A year earlier, Martin was arrested for macing a store employee who tried to stop him in the act of shoplifting.

2. Claire Legato was shot to death when he interfered in a violent argument between his mother and a man over a tax refund check.

3. Muhlaysia Booker was shot by an alleged serial killer who trolled the neighborhood where he picked her up, looking for prostitutes.

4. Ashanti Carmon, a prostitute for 11 years, was shot and killed as he worked the streets near DC. None of the stories about Carmon’s killing on gay activist website mention this inconvenient truth.

5. Michelle “Tamika” Washington, shot and killed in Philadelphia. The man who confessed to the murder said it was over an illegal gun deal. Police did not charge the killer with a hate crime.

One of Washington’s friends, Mikal, was profiled in VICE. He is a young gay black man who has lost five male-to-female trans friends to murder in the past few years. Whaddaya know, they were all prostitutes:

After breakfast with Mikal, he took me to an alleyway in the gay neighborhood behind a popular bar where trans girls perform some nights. But, Mikal told me, it’s the alleyways where the real Black, trans community is built. Girls will turn a trick, or shoot the shit with their sisters after hours. Mikal stood at the intersection of those narrow Philadelphia streets, looking up at the trans and gay pride flags mounted on top of the building before him, as if looking up at heaven, where too many of his sisters are now.

6. Paris Cameron, a black M-t-F transgender, was shot to death at a house party, along with two gay black men. A motive has not been established. Police believe it was linked in some way to the sexual identities of the victims, but it’s complicated. The 19 year old arrested for the shooting (he walked into the party and opened fire) is said by one witness to have had sex with some at the party, and was mad because they called him gay.

7. Jazzaline Ware, 34, was found dead in his Memphis apartment. According to HRC, there is not much online information available about Ware’s death, but HRC quotes “sources” as saying that Ware’s death might have been from natural causes. Still, HRC included Ware in its report, because hey, why not?

8. Chanel Scurlock — shot to death in an armed robbery. 

9. Zoe Spears was a prostitute shot and killed while working the streets. Police charged a suspect in the killing, and said it had nothing to do with Spears’s gender identity.

10. Brooklyn Lindsey was a Kansas City prostitute shot to death by a man trying to pick her up.

11. Denali Berries Stuckey, born Derrick Stuckey, lived on the wild side. In 2013, he and another transgender prostitute invited two guys living in a cheap motel to come over for sex. When the men discovered that the two “women” were actually men, they began to argue with them. Derrick Stuckey pepper-sprayed one of the men, and was arrested for it. Stuckey was shot and killed by a man who turned himself in and confessed. He says he knew the victim, who was a former neighbor. Police did not classify the murder as a hate crime, but said they would if their investigation turned up information validating the charge.

12. Tracy Single was killed by his boyfriend.

13. Kiki Fantroy was shot and killed on the street by a teenage thug with a long criminal record. Miami police do not believe that Fantroy’s gender identity had anything to do with the crime.

The murders of Black trans women in America are a crisis. We must call it out and fight back, until everyone is free to be who they are without fear. Say her name: Denali Berries Stuckey. https://t.co/wXTAseFfio

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) July 23, 2019

14. Bubba Walker was a man who presented as female. His body was discovered in a burned house. Circumstances surrounding his death are murky. Some who knew him said he was homeless. Police are investigating, as he had been reported missing, but it is not known if he was murdered. Nevertheless, he was on HRC’s “epidemic” list.

15. Pebbles LaDime Doe was murdered in South Carolina. It made national news — NBC News reported it — even though there was no evidence at all that the killing had anything to do with Doe’s gender identity. All it took was a bleat from a local LGBT activist group to make national news:

“We are sounding the alarm — we are in an absolute state of emergency for black transgender women,” said Chase Glenn, executive director of South Carolina LGBTQ group the Alliance For Full Acceptance. “We are at a crisis point that demands the nation’s attention.

An absolute state of emergency! 

Ernest Devontay Doe — Pebbles’s real name — had been on law enforcement’s radar as a fugitive.

He was found in a car, shot to death, this past summer in Charleston, SC. I have not been able to find anywhere online details of the investigation. If anybody has solid reason to believe the murder has anything to do with Doe’s gender identity, they aren’t saying so.

16. Jordan Cofer. The only female-to-male transgender on the list, Cofer was killed in that horrifying Dayton, Ohio, mass shooting this year. There is no reason to believe that Cofer’s gender identity had a thing to do with it; the killer was her own brother, a disturbed mass-killing obsessive who was high on drugs when he murdered 26 people.

17. Bailey Reeves, 17, was shot to death leaving a Baltimore party. I could find no information about the homicide investigation, including whether or not police suspect bias as a motive in the crime. Again, though, the fact that the victim was trans is sufficient for these activists to cite the killing as evidence of anti-trans hate.

18. Florida police named a “person of interest” in the gruesome killing of MtF transgender Bee Love Slater, 23.But so far, no one has been arrested. Police have not offered a theory of why Slater was killed, much less if it had anything to do with his gender presentation.

19. Jamagio Jamar Berryman was shot to death in what police believe was a dispute with someone he was dating. There was a dispute over whether or not he was transgender. His family said he identified as male but presented as female. There is no reason to believe Berryman was targeted for his gender presentation.

20. Police in Houston arrested the roommate of Itali Marlowe in connection with the MtF transgender’s shooting death. No motive has been disclosed.

21. Brianna “B.B.” Hill was shot to death in Kansas City by a man who waited at the scene for police to arrest him. Excerpt from a local news account:

Police Capt. Tim Hernandez said 30-year-old Brianna Hill of Kansas City was killed Monday morning in eastern Kansas City.

Hernandez said he could not discuss a possible motive but the shooting wasn’t related to Hill being a transgender person.

22. The body of Chynal Lindsey was discovered by Dallas’s White Rock Lake. Police arrested Salvador Alvarado in connection with the killing, but have not offered any information about a suspected motive. Here’s what we know:

Police released no details of the circumstances surrounding the arrest, but the Dallas Morning News, citing an arrest warrant affidavit, reported Lindsey texted Alvarado an address in Arlington at about 10 p.m. on May 31.

Just past midnight, Alvarado then called Lindsey and spoke to her for about 40 seconds.

Later that day, police found Lindsey’s body floating in a lake.

Dallas’s WFAA Channel 8 did a story about Lindsey’s death. In it, a family member tells the station that Lindsey had worked as a prostitute. In the same story, a Dallas transgender activist says:

“We’re in a crisis right now, and the crisis is are we safe to walk the block to the park? To walk our animals? To go to the store? To get gas? It’s very scary.”

Call me crazy, but I think you’ll be pretty safe walking your dog or going to the store for a six-pack of diet Coke. But going out in the middle of the night to meet men you’ve met online and agreed to have sex with? Maybe not so much.

So that’s the background on all the names on the Human Rights Campaign list. HRC’s report also cited the deaths of two other trans people — an immigrant who died in the hospital after being released from federal detention (he died of a condition untreated in prison, says HRC), and a transwoman who died in Rikers Island because, according to the victim’s family, police did not treat the transwoman’s epilepsy. There is no evidence at all that the two victims’ transgender status had anything to do with their untimely deaths, but HRC claims that both “were likely impacted by circumstances fostered by hate, indifference and dehumanization.”

Right. It’s society’s fault. And Trump’s. And Pence’s. Probably J.K. Rowling’s too.

There is another murdered trans person showing up on some lists, and mentioned by HRC. Ellie Marie Washtock, a male who identified as both male and female, was shot while doing personal investigation of the suspicious death of a friend who might have been murdered by her boyfriend. There is no reason to think that Washtock’s death was related to gender identity.

Also, HRC flags the death of Nikki Kuhnhausen, a MtF transgender, who was 17 years old when he disappeared in June; his body was recently discovered. This week, a man was charged with Kuhnhausen’s murder. According to prosecutors, Kuhnhausen spent the night drinking and partying with David Bogdanov, a Russian immigrant. It is believed by detectives that Bogdanov  strangled Kuhnhausen when he found out that he was actually trans.

To my mind, if those facts bear out in court, that is the kind of thing that can legitimately be called a murder committed because of the victim’s transgender status. But surely we can recognize that pulling a Crying Game surprise reveal on a burly male Russian immigrant is not the same thing as a bigot seeing a trans person on the street and targeting that person for violence. But that complication didn’t stop HRC from blaming Donald Trump and Mike Pence for Kuhnhausen’s murder in its press release:

HRC will continue to hold the Trump-Pence administration and all elected officials who fuel the flames of hate accountable at the ballot box.

This epidemic of violence that disproportionately targets transgender people of color — particularly Black transgender women — must cease.

Such lies and slander! Of the HRC list and follow-up material, one one murdered transperson seems clearly to have been in some substantive way targeted because of gender identity — Nikki Kuhnhausen. Paris Cameron might have been too, but that is murky. There are some victims for whom gender identity was entirely incidental to their murders. There are others for whom no information one way or the other is available. But every one of them are claimed by the Human Rights Campaign as victims of anti-trans hate. 

None of these people deserved to die. Every murder is a tragedy for the victim and those who loved him. But let’s be clear: this is a phony “epidemic,” a fake “crisis,” entirely ginned up by LGBT activists and their allies in the news media to advance a political goal. If you spend the afternoon as I did, searching news accounts of these deaths, looking for details, you will find that the news media typically do not report it when these victims worked as prostitutes (“sex workers” is the woke euphemism). This is typical liberal media political correctness, trying to spin the story by eliminating facts that might put the victim in an unflattering light. If a transgender person is shot and killed while meeting a john for sex, or working the streets at two in the morning seeking clients for sex, then that is important information to have. Prostitution — especially street prostitution — is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. There is a world of difference between a transgendered person jumped and beaten to death by bigots, and a transgendered person who lives and moves in the world of street prostitution, and who crosses paths with a killer.

What government policy would have saved the lives of these trans people murdered by their boyfriends, or in an armed robbery? There is not a law in the world that is going to make walking the street as a transgender prostitute safer. It is absurd to act as if there were such a thing.

I repeat: nobody deserves to be killed — not street prostitutes, nobody. But transgender activists need to be called out on their propaganda efforts. Politicians like Elizabeth Warren need to be called out on their empty virtue-signaling. And the news media need to be shamed into knocking off the advocacy, and practicing actual journalism when reporting on violence against transgendered people.

Once more, 75 people have been murdered in my city this year. If the demographic breakdown this year is anything like years past, the overwhelming majority of the victims are young black men who live in poverty, and who were in some way connected to the drug trade. All those black men are almost certainly baptized Christians, or at least identified, however nominally, with Christianity. Using the dishonest and hysterical standards of the Human Rights Campaign and other trans activists, we would be in the middle of an “epidemic” of anti-Christian violence in Baton Rouge, with over three times the number of murders of Christians in one city alone than the number of murders of transgenders in the entire United States.

Obviously that would be a ridiculous claim to make. It would also be slander to lay those killings of these Christian men at the foot of gay activists, liberal politicians, and others critical of Christians.

You could make the same propagandistic claim that the deaths of all these young impoverished black men is an “epidemic” of homicides against blacks, or against men, or against young people, or against poor people. Pick your victim category, and the press release writes itself.

The trans thing is really important, though, because making transgendered people into sacred victims is how activists and allies attempt to destroy any opposition to what they demand. They have monstered this British feminist Maya Forstater for refusing to say that trans people are the sex they claim to be — this, despite the fact that she says she defends their right to present in a chosen gender, and will use their pronouns. The fact that she refuses to share their delusion is enough to make her Public Enemy No. 1. And activists have also now monstered left-wing feminist and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling for defending Forstater. Here’s the headline on a pathetically whiny article on the popular liberal site Vox:

Trans activists and sympathetic journalists are committed to the Big Lie about this so-called “epidemic.” Don’t you believe them.

UPDATE: I would also point out that in these cases when someone has been arrested and charged with murder, the suspect is always a black man. If trans activists were interested in the facts here, they would be talking about how based on the facts, black men have a problem with transgendered people. But none of this is fact-based. It’s all about propagandizing the public.

 

 

The post The Phony ‘Epidemic’ Of Anti-Trans Murder appeared first on The American Conservative.

Christianity Today Anathematizes Trump

Christianity Today, once the flagship magazine of American Evangelicalism, published a blistering editorial calling for Donald Trump’s removal from office. Mark Galli, the editor-in-chief (who is retiring in January), has the byline. Excerpts:

Let’s grant this to the president: The Democrats have had it out for him from day one, and therefore nearly everything they do is under a cloud of partisan suspicion. This has led many to suspect not only motives but facts in these recent impeachment hearings. And, no, Mr. Trump did not have a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story in the House hearings on impeachment.

But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

If anything, that understates it. I see Trump as a dazed, isolated figure, like Theoden under Wormtongue’s spell, slumped in the armchair in his White House bedroom, watching cable news, iPhone in hand, while flies drawn by the scent of decay buzz around his head. Richard Nixon in extremis was tragic. I don’t know what this is.

More:

To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?

Read it all.

Here’s the transcript of Galli’s conversation with The Atlantic’s Emma Green about the editorial:

Green: I was struck by how directly you called on your fellow evangelicals to be honest about what you see as Trump’s misconduct. You wrote, “Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency.” That’s very, very direct. Were you at all worried about how other Christians may hear or read those words?

Galli: Not too much. I know some will read it very negatively. They’ll consider me partisan, that I’m a closet Democrat—which I’m not, I’m independent. They’re going to say that Trump appoints pro-life justices, he’s working for religious freedom. And it occurred to me today, as I was writing the editorial, that the “on the one hand, on the other hand” logic of whether you’re going to support Trump or not—that falls apart at some point.

Imagine, for example, that a woman is being verbally abused by her husband. He’s a great father—he gets along with the kids, and he’s a great supporter. So, you think, “Alright, he’s verbally abusive to me, he has kind of a hot temper. But he’s got these other things going for him, so I’m not going to rock the boat too much. I might try to get him to calm down, but I can live with it.”

Then he starts to become violent, and dangerously violent. He’s still a good provider. He still loves the kids. But nobody would say, “You need to weigh this!” They would say, “Get the man out of the house immediately.” The moral balancing no longer applies.

And the same seems to be true of the Trump presidency. Yes, he’s done some good that I am grateful for. But the moral scales no longer balance. It’s time for him to get out of the house, so to speak.

Galli goes on to say that he cannot understand why so many of his fellow Evangelicals, for whom high moral standards in political leaders has always been important (CT called for Clinton’s removal from office too), don’t understand that they are destroying their credibility by their embrace of Trump.

Readers of this blog who are not part of Evangelicalism should not overinterpret this editorial. CT has for some time now stopped addressing the mainstream of the movement (which has moved right), and instead remains the magazine for what you might call Wine Cave Evangelicals. Galli admits this to Green:

We speak for moderate, center-right, and center-left evangelicals. The far right—they don’t read us. They don’t care what we think. They think we’ve been coopted by liberalism. So, I understand that we do not represent the entire movement. And anyone who thinks that CT does, that’s just not the case.

I know Mark Galli a little bit, and respect him greatly for what he has written, though I don’t agree with all of it. You won’t be surprised to learn that I’m more in line with Erick Erickson’s reflection about Trump in light of the CT editorial. Excerpts:

As to the matter of 2020, when Trump was a hypothetical with the known character flaws, I voted 3rd party. I wasn’t going to vote for him or for Hillary. Now we have a host of Democrats, each progressively nuttier than the other, and all of whom support the wholesale legal extermination of human beings they deem convenient in addition to other terrible policies. I’ll have to hold my nose to do it and would rather it be Pence at the top, but I’ll vote for Trump in 2020. He’s not the hypothetical President we can’t trust. He’s a deeply flawed, immoral politician who has both surprising managed to keep many of his campaign promises and not squander the lives of our soldiers and sailors for righteous causes that lose their purpose.

More:

I don’t really disagree with what Christianity Today said about witness and character and the church. I don’t think this impeachment was appropriate or an appropriate vehicle to remove the President. But I am glad they said what they said and didn’t compromise. They’re also right that evangelicals willing to defend everything this President does are harming evangelicalism in the United States. Too many self-described Christians seem to be looking to the White House instead of Heaven.

That’s pretty much where I am today, though something may change in the coming months. Who knows what’s around the corner?

I am very sure that I would prefer to have a drink with any of the candidates on the Democratic stage last night than with Donald Trump.  I’ll likely vote for Trump, but only because abortion is very, very important, and so is religious liberty, and so is stopping the laws the Democrats want to roll out on sexual orientation and gender identity. And so is immigration. I think Boris Johnson is a million times more appealing than Donald Trump, but if I vote Trump, it will be because I look at the Democrats and see Jeremy Corbyn.

I really do think that the Spanish Civil War is a reasonable way to understand the extremity of the choices facing voters in this country. Watch this first episode of a terrific six-part documentary film series about that hideous war, and see if you agree. There was no middle ground remaining between the far left and the far right. You had to decide. As a priest, you might have had big problems with Gen. Franco, but if you didn’t side with him, you stood to be shot by the left-wing Republicans, and have your church burned down. Mind you, nobody’s going to get shot or have their churches burned down here; I bring up the comparison to show that there aren’t any moderates of any kind left. Biden is the most moderate seeming one, but if you look at what he’s promising, he’s way to the left too.

And then there’s Trump. A lawyer guy I know told me that he’s been watching closely all the federal judges that Trump has been appointing, and that the GOP-controlled Senate has been confirming. My friend knows how strongly I feel about religious liberty. He told me that these judges are going to be the only line of defense for people like me in the years to come. It’s not a joke. He was Trump skeptical before, but having watched the judges this president has appointed, and having come around to the belief that the country is going to start voting a lot more liberal as the Boomers die, he’s on the Trump train for 2020.

Anyway, regular readers know this about me. Convinced Trumpers hate my lack of commitment. Convinced anti-Trumpers hate my lack of outrage and spite. Your Working Boy lives in the worst of both worlds! But hey, I can’t pretend Trump is a good man or a good president. Nor can I pretend that the Democrats in power would be better for the country from the point of view of me, a socially conservative Christian.

I used to hold the Christianity Today/Evangelical view that personal morality in presidential politics was paramount. The George W. Bush administration cured me of that. In my opinion, President Bush was, and is, a decent and good man. I respect him a lot. But that decent and good man also led this country into a disastrous war — and he did it in part by following some of his good and decent instincts.

Jimmy Carter was probably the most decent man to inhabit the White House. He was also one of the worst presidents of the 20th century.

I think all of the Democrats running for president are far more personally decent than the jackass who made fun of Debbie Dingell’s dead husband the other day. But all of them are for keeping it legal to exterminate the unborn, and to compel religious institutions to accept gender ideology. Nope, I’ll take the personally corrupt short-fingered vulgarian, and won’t apologize for it.

Mark Galli has a really good point when he says, in his editorial, that at some point, Christians can’t keep accepting this deal: exchanging votes and support for judicial appointments. What’s solid about his point is that there has to be some line in the mind of Christians that Trump could cross, at which Christians would say, “Enough — that’s too far.” In my mind, given the stakes for the long-term future of the things I care about most, I have not seen that line. I agree with Mark Galli that Trump is guilty of what got him impeached (and I probably would have voted for impeachment, though I would not vote to convict him, instead favoring letting voters make that call in the fall). But that’s not enough to make me abandon Trump. But I can’t in good conscience say that there is no line. There has to be a line, or, to borrow a line from Erick Erickson’s piece, we are in a cult. I do not understand these Evangelical leaders who embrace Trump without any sense of conflict within themselves.

There is something about the American character that demands that we identify in some way with the moral conduct of our political leaders. The French, by the way, do not have this problem, nor do the people of south Louisiana. I don’t understand why it’s so hard for some Evangelicals and other conservative Trump supporters to admit that he’s a dirtbag, but that they’re still going to back him, for totally pragmatic reasons. I admit I have changed. I was for a long time outraged — I tell you, outraged! — by the grossness of journalist Nina Burleigh writing in Mirabella in 1998 that she herself would have given oral sex to Bill Clinton to thank him for keeping abortion legal. It was, and remains, a disgusting line.

But you know, in the end, her main point was correct. If you are the kind of person whose hierarchy of political values places abortion rights at the top, and the only thing standing between Roe v. Wade and oblivion was this morally rotten Democratic president, you bite the … bullet. But if that’s the route you take, you also don’t have a right to expect people to take you all that seriously when you lecture them about men sexually harassing women. I never took Bill Clinton’s feminist defenders seriously after that.

Well, we Christians who vote Trump with conflicted consciences are Nina Burleigh now, at least in our hearts. But we don’t have to be proud of that, as she was. Just vote, and understand that we live in a rotten time in the life of the Republic, and that the only choice you have is among various evils. Kind of like Spaniards in the early 1930s.

UPDATE: The editorial director of Christianity Today tweets this morning:

That message at the bottom, for those who can’t read the fine print, is here:

That is so over the top that I am pretty sure it’s trolling. But you just can’t tell with people these days. If that is a sincere message, then right there you are looking at the spirit of Antichrist. No, I’m not saying that Trump is the Antichrist. I am saying the spirit in those words is the one that will cause Christians to welcome the Antichrist.

Some of you have written me privately to ask me to clarify my position on the CT editorial. My position is this: I don’t fully agree with it, but I think it is a perfectly legitimate and respectable position for believing Christians to take.

 

The post Christianity Today Anathematizes Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.

Joe Biden’s Stutter

Did you hear Joe Biden stuttering tonight on the debate stage? When he did, I confess that my first thought was, “Is Uncle Joe losing it?” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former White House press secretary, was, shall we say, more critical:

She got carpet-bombed by people telling her that Biden has struggled with stuttering since childhood. Then Biden himself tweeted:

I’ve worked my whole life to overcome a stutter. And it’s my great honor to mentor kids who have experienced the same. It’s called empathy. Look it up. https://t.co/0kd0UJr9Rs

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 20, 2019

To her credit, Sanders tweeted back:

I actually didn’t know that about you and that is commendable. I apologize and should have made my point respectfully. https://t.co/fbmVAqDoWI

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) December 20, 2019

I would love to join in piling-on Sanders, for a reason I’ll explain in a minute, but in all honesty, I did not know that about Biden either, and I kinda-sorta snickered when Biden got hung up on the word “I,” thinking it was just another Uncle Joe senior moment. True, I didn’t jump on Twitter and make fun of Biden — honestly, Twitter is a terrible thing — but watching how Sanders reacted, I can’t help but feel more than a twinge of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Which makes me feel pretty bad, even though I said nothing mean on Twitter. There is someone in my family who has struggled for a long time with stuttering, as I myself did as a very small boy (they say stuttering, a neurological condition, runs in families). If anybody should know better than to make snap judgments about this kind of thing, it’s me. Had any of the other candidates on stage tonight gotten hung up on a word like Biden did, I would have been puzzled by it, but I wouldn’t have jumped to conclusions about a “senior moment.” But it fit a narrative, so I went there, at least in my mind. I didn’t make fun of Biden, to be clear, but I did think, “There he goes again!”

About having a “narrative,” a word. I learned online just now that John Hendrickson, an editor for The Atlantic who suffers from a very serious stutter, did a profile earlier this year of Biden the Stutterer. I hope you’ll read it. I came away from it with mad respect for Uncle Joe, and what he has overcome (and, frankly, for John Hendrickson). Check this out:

The cultural perception of stutterers is that they’re fearful, anxious people, or simply dumb, and that stuttering is the result. But it doesn’t work like that. Let’s say you’re in fourth grade and you have to stand up and recite state capitals. You know that Juneau is the capital of Alaska, but you also know that you almost always block on the j sound. You become intensely anxious not because you don’t know the answer, but because you do know the answer, and you know you’re going to stutter on it.

From long conversations with my family member who stutters, I know that he has felt (as Biden says he has) deep shame over it, watching the faces of other people as he (my kinsman) tries to say what’s on his mind. I’ve observed this myself in him. It is heartbreaking. It makes other people uncomfortable, because they don’t know how to behave. Strangers, he has told me, sometimes look at him as if he were mentally ill. I’ve seen this guy, my relative, come to tears talking about his struggles. He’s handsome and charming, and he doesn’t always stutter, but he told me that he thinks of it constantly, and has for years. The burdens people carry!

Reading the Biden profile, and how he was treated in school, brought to mind the stories my relative has told me about how some kids treated him in school. Heartbreaking and infuriating to think about. I don’t remember my own stuttering, because it went away by the time I made it to first grade, but my mother says it was significant. One of my sons struggled massively with stuttering when he was little, but it went away as he got older. I remember from those days learning that people who have no experience with stuttering or stutterers assume that they have control over it, and if they would just calm down, they would be able to speak.

In a way, I’m glad that Sanders’s mean tweet ended up sending me to that profile. Hendrickson writes:

A stutter does not get worse as a person ages, but trying to keep it at bay can take immense physical and mental energy. Biden talks all day to audiences both small and large. In addition to periodically stuttering or blocking on certain sounds, he appears to intentionally not stutter by switching to an alternative word—a technique called “circumlocution”—­which can yield mangled syntax. I’ve been following practically everything he’s said for months now, and sometimes what is quickly characterized as a memory lapse is indeed a stutter. As Eric Jackson, the speech pathologist, pointed out to me, during a town hall in August Biden briefly blocked on Obama, before quickly subbing in my boss. The headlines after the event? “.” Other times when Biden fudges a detail or loses his train of thought, it seems unrelated to stuttering, like he’s just making a mistake. The kind of mistake other candidates make too, though less frequently than he does.

How about that! How many of those “Uncle Joe senior moments” were not his mind failing in the senility sense, but Biden using strategies he learned decades ago to cope with his stutter? I’ve watched my kinsman (who is much younger than Biden) do the same thing. Maybe he got so good at it when he was a younger man that he hasn’t had to work at it for ages, but now that he’s aging, and under a lot of pressure, it’s not so easy anymore. (That’s not remotely disqualifying for the presidency, I hasten to say.)

I hope Joe Biden will use this unfortunate incident with Sarah Sanders to raise visibility for stutterers. In the Atlantic piece, Hendrickson writes:

During his 2016 address at the American Institute for Stuttering, Biden told the room that he’d turned down an invitation to speak at a dinner organized by the group years earlier. “I was afraid if people knew I stuttered,” he said, “they would have thought something was wrong with me.”

My first thought when I read that was to think that this shame is a generational thing for Biden. But then I thought about how my family member is a lot younger than Biden, and struggles with the same thing. The rest of us put this on stutterers. We can take it off of them, if we want to. Nothing to be ashamed about. I’m not at all a fan of Joe Biden’s politics, but reading that profile made me a fan of Joe Biden.

“Did you know that Joe Biden stutters?” I asked my kinsman last night. He did not. Just now I sent him the article. I know it’s going to give him courage, and hope. And for that, I thank Joe Biden, John Hendrickson, and yes, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

The post Joe Biden’s Stutter appeared first on The American Conservative.

Totalitarian Trans War On Reality

From the ruling that UK employment judge J. Tayler issued against Maya Forstater:

“The Claimant believes that “sex” is a material reality which should not be conflated with “gender” or “gender identity”. Being female is an immutable biological fact, not a feeling or an identity. Moreover, sex matters. It is important to be able to talk about and take action against the discrimination, violence and oppression that still affect women and girls because they were born female.”

More:

At the end of September 2018 the Claimant stated in a conversation on Slack,

when challenged about what she had said about Pips Bunce [a Credit Suisse manager who sometimes dresses in women’s clothing, and identifies as “genderfluid” — RD];

“Thanks Arthur. Yes I think feminists and non gender conforming and trans people are natural allies. If you look at the people that are concerned about this they are lesbians, longtime LGBT activists,

transsexuals, left wing campaigners. They don’t want to enforce gender conformity.

But I think there are also a group of misogynist people, and others who want to undermine protections for women and children that have become entryists to the Trans Rights Activists movement that are not natural

allies to women: gamergaters, incels, narcissists, extreme porn advocates. They are exploiting vulnerable young people and everybody’s empathy and concern to do the right thing in respect of them – (For an example see the recent case of …

(I am not saying all trans people – -I know this sounds like ‘moral panic’ and I know most people just want a quiet life, but there is a dark side to some of the people making a political career out of arguing that males should be allowed into women’s spaces. – – this vocal group is never going to be on common ground with feminists, or benefit people suffering gender dysphoria or depression etc)

You are right on tone. I should be careful and not unnecessarily antagonistic. But if people find the basic biological truths that “women are adult human females” or “transwomen are male” offensive, then they will be offended.

Of course in social situations I would treat any transwomen as an honourary female, and use whatever pronouns etc…I wouldn’t try to hurt anyone’s feelings but I don’t think people should be compelled to play along with literal delusions like “transwomen are women”

More:

On 2 October 2018 the Claimant stated in part of her response to the complaints against her:

“I have been told that it is offensive to say “transwomen are men” or that women means “adult human female”. However since these statement are true I will continue to say them. Yes the definition of females excludes males (but includes women who do not conform with gendered norms).

Policy debates where facts are viewed as offensive are dangerous. I would of course respect anyone’s self-definition of their gender identity in any social and professional context; I have no desire or intention to be rude to people.”

More:

On 10 August 2019 the Claimant responded to a very strongly worded complaint to the Scout Association made by Gregor Murray, who describes themself as a “non-binary person”, who alleged that the Claimant had

misgendering them:

“28. On Twitter I referred to Murray by the pronoun ‘he’. This was not purposeful or meant to cause harm. I had simply forgotten that this man demands to be referred to by the plural pronouns “they” and “them”.

29. Murray states that my failure use the pronoun “they” in relation to the complainant breaks the third and seventh scout laws (“A Scout is friendlyand considerate” and “A Scout has self-respect and respect for others”) because Murray believes that Murray is not a man. Murray also calls it “transphobic” that I recognise a man when I see one. I disagree.

30. In reality Murray is a man. It is Murray’s right to believe that Murray is not a man, but Murray cannot compel others to believe this. Women and children in particular should not be forced to lie or obfuscate about someone’s sex.

31. I reserve the right to use the pronouns “he” and “him” to refer to male people. While I may choose to use alternative pronouns as a courtesy, no one has the right to compel others to make statements they do not believe. I think it is important that people are able to refer to the sex of other people accurately and without hesitation, shame or censure. This is important for children to be able to speak up about anything that makes them feel uncomfortable, and for adults to be able to risk assess the difference between a single sex and mixed sex situation.”

Among Forstater’s other tweets (mentioned in the ruling):

39.5 “Sex is determined at conception, through the inheritance (or not) of a working copy of a piece of genetic code which comes from the father (generally, apart from in very rare cases, carried on the Y

chromosome).” Para 16

39.6 “Some women have conditions which mean that they do not produce ova or cannot conceive or sustain a pregnancy. Similarly, some men are unable to produce viable sperm. These people are still women and

men.” Para 17

39.7 “I believe that it is impossible to change sex or to lose your sex. Girls grow up to be women. Boys grow up to be men. No change of clothes or hairstyle, no plastic surgery, no accident or illness, no course of hormones, no force of will or social conditioning, no declaration can turn a female person into a male, or a male person into a female.” Para 23

This is fascinating. More of the ruling (emphasis below mine):

41. When questioned during live evidence the Claimant stated that biological males cannot be women. She consider that if a trans woman says she is a woman that is untrue, even if she has a Gender Recognition Certificate. On the totality of the Claimant’s evidence it was clear that she considers there are two

sexes, male and female, there is no spectrum in sex and there are no circumstances whatsoever in which a person can change from one sex to another, or to being of neither sex. She would generally seek to be polite to trans persons and would usually seek to respect their choice of pronoun but would not feel bound to; mainly if a trans person who was not assigned female at birth was in a “woman’s space”, but also more generally. If a person has a Gender Recognition Certificate this would not alter the Claimant’s position. The Claimant made it clear that her view is that the words man and woman describe a person’s sex and are immutable. A person is either one or the other, there is nothing in between and it is impossible to change form one sex to the other.

Even if the state issues a piece of paper declaring that 2 + 2 = 5, Maya Forstater will insist that 2 + 2 = 4. Thought criminal!

Comes the ruling itself:

84. However, I consider that the Claimant’s view, in its absolutist nature, is incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others. She goes so far as to deny the right of a person with a Gender Recognition Certificate to be the sex to which they have transitioned. I do not accept the Claimant’s

contention that the Gender Recognition Act produces a mere legal fiction. It provides a right, based on the assessment of the various interrelated convention rights, for a person to transition, in certain circumstances, and thereafter to be treated for all purposes as the being of the sex to which they have transitioned. In Goodwin a fundamental aspect of the reasoning of the ECHR was that a person who has transitioned should not be forced to identify their gender assigned at birth. Such a person should be entitled to live as a person of the sex to which they have transitioned. That was recognised in the Gender Recognition Act which states that the change of sex applies for “all purposes”. Therefore, if a person has transitioned from male to female and has a Gender Recognition Certificate that person is legally a woman. That is not something that the Claimant is entitled to ignore.

Notice that the judge is saying that the state has the right to overrule biological reality.

Finally:

90. I conclude from this, and the totality of the evidence, that the Claimant is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.

Feminist Maya Forstater is an enemy of the state, then. Read the whole ruling.

Turn in your copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the part where the torturer O’Brien is teaching prisoner Winston Smith the facts of life under totalitarianism. Here are some quotes for you to consider in light of Judge Tayler’s ruling:

[O’Brien:] “But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny—helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.” “Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.” “But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals—mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.” “Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.” “But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light- years away. They are out of our reach forever.” “What are the stars?” said O’Brien indifferently. “They are bits of fire a few kilometers away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the center of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.”

More:

Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind—surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten.

A faint smile twitched the corners of O’Brien’s mouth as he looked down at him. “I told you, Winston,” he said, “that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing; in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,” he added in a different tone. “The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.” He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.

Are you listening, Maya Forstater? You will be made to agree.

Orwell continues:

“If I wished,” O’Brien had said, “I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.” Winston worked it out. “If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.” Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: “It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.” He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a “real” world where “real” things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

Nothing is real outside the mind. What the Party says is true, is true. What the Party says is real, is real. It is important for all good citizens not just to say it, but to believe it. This is the essence of totalitarianism: it doesn’t simply want your obedience; it wants your soul.

Now do you see what free people are up against? Nothing less than the denial of reality, and even the right to say 2 + 2 = 5 without breaking the law.

The most influential gay rights lobby in the US stands against Maya Forstater, and her new Twitter ally, J.K. Rowling:

Trans women are women.

Trans men are men.

Non-binary people are non-binary.

CC: JK Rowling.

— Human Rights Campaign (@HRC) December 19, 2019

Every single Democratic presidential candidate should be asked if they stand with HRC, or with Maya Forstater and her right, as a feminist, to state an opinion contrary to transgender dogma. This is incredibly important.

One more line from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

So does the British legal system. So does the Human Rights Campaign. Where do Democratic Party lawmakers and presidential candidates stand?

Maya Forstater could be you, you know. And probably will be, unless this madness is stopped.

Take off that Party dress!

UPDATE: Sohrab Ahmari’s take. Excerpt:

As I said, Maya Forstater’s case will outrage you. What it calls for isn’t the heat of anger but cold, lucid sobriety. The kind that might awaken the bulk of Christians to the reality that we are toiling under a religious order—one that puts the temporal power at the service of a spiritual or metaphysical belief system and its clerisy.

An integral regime, if you will.

UPDATE.2: Jesse Singal is one of the best journalists writing about the trans issue. You should follow him. He’s on the left, but he recognizes how corrupted journalism has been by trans activism:

"In her tweet, Rowling echoed Forstater’s claims that sex cannot be changed, a belief considered to erase the existence of both intersex and transgender people."

JFC the reporting on this issue. it's INSANE. People just type words that make no sense.https://t.co/lIXTbbTcvU

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 20, 2019

2/ Not long ago we were told all this dumb "literally erased" stuff and similarly bizarre language was just Tumblr, don't worry about it. Now you have professional journalists using it in ways that make absolutely no sense, solely to advance very specific political claims.

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 20, 2019

I caught some of the PBS Democratic debate tonight. Transgenderism came up. Do you know what the question was? Do you really want to know? Something very close to, “You all support the Equality Act, but if elected, what more will you do to stop violence against transgendered people?”

This whole massive discussion is going on about the clash between transgender activist and allies on one side, and feminists, J.K. Rowling, and like-minded people on the other side, but this — this! — is the question that the White House correspondent for the PBS NewsHour puts to the Democratic candidates in the debate. What a bubble these liberal journalists live in. Sick of them, just sick of them all.

The post Totalitarian Trans War On Reality appeared first on The American Conservative.

J.K. Rowling Takes On Big Trans

Glory, glory hallelujah, the pop culture big guns (well, big gun) have arrived!

Dress however you please.

Call yourself whatever you like.

Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.

Live your best life in peace and security.

But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 19, 2019

What she’s talking about is this outrageous ruling from a UK employment tribunal:

A researcher who lost her job at a thinktank after tweeting that transgender women cannot change their biological sex has lost a test case because her opinions were deemed to be “absolutist”.

In a keenly anticipated judgment that will stir up fresh debate over transgender issues, Judge James Tayler, an employment judge, ruled that Maya Forstater’s views did “not have the protected characteristic of philosophical belief”.

Forstater, 45, a tax expert, was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), an international thinktank that campaigns against poverty and inequality. Her contract at the charitable organisation, which is based in Washington and London, was not renewed in March after a dispute over publicising her views on social media.

She was accused of using “offensive and exclusionary” language in tweets opposing government proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow people to self-identify as the opposite sex.

More:

Forstater has been supported by Index on Censorship. Its chief executive, Jodie Ginsberg, has said previously: “From what I have read of [Forstater’s] writing, I cannot see that Maya has done anything wrong other than express an opinion that many feminists share – that there should be a public and open debate about the distinction between sex and gender.”

But in a 26-page judgment released late on Wednesday, Tayler dismissed her claim. “I conclude from … the totality of the evidence, that [Forstater] is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

Not worthy of respect in a democratic society. Orwell wept. One more excerpt:

In response to the ruling, Forstater said: “I struggle to express the shock and disbelief I feel at reading this judgment, which I think will be shared by the vast majority of people who are familiar with my case.

“My belief … is that sex is a biological fact, and is immutable. There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex. These were until very recently understood as basic facts of life by almost everyone.

“… This judgment removes women’s rights and the right to freedom of belief and speech. It gives judicial licence for women and men who speak up for objective truth and clear debate to be subject to aggression, bullying, no-platforming and economic punishment.

This is exactly what LGBT activists want here in the US: people like Maya Forstater — who doesn’t appear to be any kind of conservative, but rather a feminist — to be fired and silence. What is it going to take to wake people up? This is a totalitarian movement. It honest to God is. It has colonized the minds of the liberal establishment, like the judge here.

Maybe the fact that J.K. Rowling has come out foursquare in support of Maya Forstater will move the debate. James Kirkup writes in The Spectator:

But the broader effect of the Forstater case is that issues of sex and gender, the implications of transgenderism for society and individuals, are now going to be talked about by more people.

Because JK Rowling, lovely JK Rowling, is involved. JK Rowling who has 14 million followers on Twitter and a good claim to being one of the most popular and even beloved women in the world today. And as a result, people are going to talk about this, and about her.

I do not underestimate the courage it has taken for Rowling to do this. It’s easy to say ‘well, she’s got billions and a huge platform – what took her so long?’ but I think that’s unfair. With that fame comes pressure and scrutiny that the rest of us cannot imagine. By entering this arena, she is exposing herself to significant risks, volumes of criticism beyond anything most of humanity will ever experience. I applaud her.

Words matter, and with just a few words, JK Rowling has changed the gender debate for the better. The tide is turning, the waves are getting bigger. Thank you, JK.

Yes, thank her to the stars and back! Rowling is no kind of conservative. She has been quite vocal in her support for the Labour Party, and for gay rights. But she is a feminist, and she is drawing a line here, boldly so. If somebody of her pop cultural influence takes this stand, maybe, just maybe, the woke zombies of the mainstream media will have to listen.

The rest of us had better listen. Maya Forstater was fired — fired! — simply for saying that men born male are men and women born female are women. The other day, Twitter suspended the account of the trans-skeptical website 4thWaveNow because it sent out a tweet containing the words “natal male.” I’m not kidding: to speak of a biological fact on Twitter is to risk your account. This is how totalitarian this movement is. Big T takes no prisoners. But now, they’re going to have to try to roll over the author who inhabits the collective imagination of an entire generation.

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Trump Impeached: The Death Of Outrage

So, it has happened, like we knew it would. Donald Trump is only the third American president to be impeached. I think there cannot be many of us who didn’t know when he was inaugurated that sooner or later, this day would come. Character is destiny. It was for Bill Clinton, and it is for Donald Trump.

Here’s part of The New York Times‘s coverage:

Really? The nation is convulsing? Maybe they’re convulsing on East 43rd Street, and in Times Square, and in the green rooms of the cable networks, but I’m not seeing any convulsions where I live, in Louisiana. Are you convulsing? Maybe the nation really is convulsing, and I’m too sinful to see it.

“Finding it alarming how impossible it is to take any of this seriously,” tweeted a friend just now. She lives in New York, and is absolutely positively not a Trump fan. But I share her sentiment. Let me see if I can explain why.

I remember where I was when the House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton: sitting on the couch in my East 58th Street apartment, watching live on CNN. The word “impeachment” was one of my earliest political memories. I was six years old when Watergate broke. I remember that strange word, redolent of the fruit tree in our backyard. I knew it had something to do with the president, and that impeachment, despite the ripe loveliness held in place by those stiff Latinate skewers, was a very bad thing.

I suppose that for anybody with even the slightest memory of Watergate, the idea of impeachment carried with it a sense of dread. If you were a kid and saw your dad take his pistol in his hand when he saw a prowler lurking in the nighttime shadows outside, but also saw him put it back in his top drawer, unfired, because the police showed up just in time, well, you might not ever look at that gun in the same way. He could have used it, if the prowler had pushed him to. I think that’s how I saw impeachment, leading up to Clinton’s moment of reckoning.

The thing is, by the time we arrived at Clinton’s impeachment, everybody knew that he was as guilty as hell of perjuring himself, and obstructing justice in an effort to hide his shame. Donald Trump’s actual guilt in the Ukraine matter is in dispute, but what’s really not a matter of serious contention is that the president brought this onto himself by his extraordinarily reckless behavior. As usual with Donald Trump, he creates messes for himself that a person with a normal sense of self-discipline would never dream of doing. Come on, what kind of lunatic gets on the phone with the Ukrainian president on the day after dodging the Mueller bullet, and even gives the appearance of quidding the distribution of military aid for the big fat quo of investigating his chief political rival?

Anyway, when the hammer came down on Bill Clinton (21 years ago tomorrow, in fact), it felt right. Justice had been served. Two months later, the GOP-run Senate would acquit Clinton of the charges. He served out the rest of his term, and went on to become very rich, a globalist grifter of great renown. One day, he will die peacefully in bed. His bed, one hopes. Life went on.

In 1998, on the verge of the start of impeachment proceedings, Bill Bennett, who — young people, listen! — was a famous Republican moralist of the time, published a bestseller titled, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals.  In it, Bennett wrote that “on Bill Clinton’s behalf, in his defense, many bad ideas are being put into widespread circulation.

It is said that private character has virtually no impact on governing character; that what matters

above all is a healthy economy; that moral authority is defined solely by how well a president deals

with public policy matters; that America needs to become more European (read: more

“sophisticated”) in its attitude toward sex; that lies about sex, even under oath, don’t really matter;

that we shouldn’t be “judgmental”; that it is inappropriate to make preliminary judgments about the

president’s conduct because he hasn’t been found guilty in a court of law; and so forth.

If these arguments take root in American soil — if they become the coin of the public realm — we

will have validated them, and we will come to rue the day we did. These arguments define us down;

they assume a lower common denominator of behavior and leadership than we Americans ought to

accept. And if we do accept it, we will have committed an unthinking act of moral and intellectual

disarmament. In the realm of American ideals and the great tradition of public debate, the high

ground will have been lost. And when we need to rely again on this high ground — as surely we

will need to — we will find it drained of its compelling moral power. In that sense, then, the

arguments invoked by Bill Clinton and his defenders represent an assault on American ideals, even

if you assume the president did nothing improper. So the arguments need to be challenged.

I believe these arguments are also a threat to our understanding of American self-government. It

demands active participation in, and finally, reasoned judgments on, important civic matters.

“Judgment” is a word that is out of favor these days, but it remains a cornerstone of democratic

self-government. It is what enables us to hold ourselves, and our leaders, to high standards. It is

how we distinguish between right and wrong, noble and base, honor and dishonor. We cannot

ignore that responsibility, or foist it on others. It is the price — sometimes the exacting price — of

citizenship in a democracy. The most popular arguments made by the president’s supporters invite

us to abandon that participation, those standards, and the practice of making those distinctions.

That was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

How quaint it is to read “American ideals” in connection with the behavior of a president. Back then, I was disappointed and even disgusted that Clinton was acquitted by the Senate, and that most Americans agreed with that result. Death of outrage indeed! Now, though, I concede that was probably the prudent call. To reverse the results of a presidential election is a big, big deal. In retrospect, Clinton’s crime appears more minor than it did at the time. Still, when you think about how certain Republican types are beclowning themselves defending Donald Trump, I remind you that these words were actually written in 1998 by Nina Burleigh, once a writer for Time magazine, about Bill Clinton: “I’d be happy to give him a blow job just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”

We’ve all been through a lot since then, haven’t we? We’ve lived through a time when the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has been revealed, again and again, to have been festooned with stone-cold liars who secretly oversaw a national clerical gay sex network that had its own special pederast auxiliary preying on Catholic children. And look, kids, I’m old enough to remember that time a Republican president after Clinton got us into a catastrophic war of choice in the Middle East. I can even recall how elites of both parties, under both the Clinton and subsequent Bush administrations, bent over for Wall Street and ended up causing the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Why, I even recall just last week, when the Washington Post published formerly secret government documents showing that from early on in the Afghanistan War — which is still going on, 18 years later — the US civilian and military leadership knew that it was a mess, and that it was likely unwinnable.

It was a hell of a series of stories. How much outrage have you seen about it? None. Outrage is dead, haven’t you heard?

I hate that we have such a lowlife as the American president. But do you know what else I hate? That the Democratic Party went crazy over the last 20 years. That it’s for open borders. That the Democratic Party is for writing into federal civil rights law the destruction of one of the most fundamental building blocks of human civilization: the gender binary. I hate that the Democrats are so drunk on identity politics that a Democratic-run government would create a legal and policy framework in which my own sons would be considered public enemies because of the color of their skin, their sex, and depending on the context, their religion.

Truly, I find all that more outrageous and threatening than what this outer borough yahoo we elected in 2016 says and does. Really, I do. Even though I’m pretty sure Trump deserves it, I’m not convulsing over what happened tonight. I don’t really care. I suppose that’s what decadence and cynicism does to a guy. There is nothing that the House of Representatives can do to Trump that convicts his low character more than what he has done every day or so in the presidency. I hope he is not convicted by the Senate, because it is imprudent to remove a president so close to the next election. Let the American people decide Trump’s fate.

Meanwhile, did you hear today’s news that they can’t find the security camera footage from the hallway outside Jeffrey Epstein’s cell on the night of his first suicide attempt — this, even though lawyers asked the state to impound the footage only two days after it was recorded? Just up and disappeared. Funny how that happens, innit?

UPDATE: Washington Post Congressional correspondents having a ball tonight:

She updated:

I’m deleting a tweeting tonight that is being misinterpreted by some as an endorsement of some kind. To be absolutely clear, we at the Post are merely glad we are getting a break for the holidays after a long 3 months. I will retweet the group photo w/ a better caption !

— Rachael Bade (@rachaelmbade) December 19, 2019

Er, right.

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The Trojan Horse Of Gender Ideology

Earlier today, I wrote about how the issue of gender ideology might be one on which the Democratic Party is Corbynizing itself — that is, staying pure to the radicalism of its leadership, but getting way too far ahead of the public. I want to write something specifically about transgenderism, and why critical Attention Must Be Paid. None of this is being talked about outside relatively narrow circles. It is never in the mainstream media, which, as we know, will not waver from its agenda to advocate for and normalize transgenderism. Many priests and pastors won’t touch it, nor will Republican politicians, because they are all terrified of being labeled as bigots.

But this is a very big deal.

As many of you know, I am a great booster of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, regarding the quarterly interview show as the single most valuable resource available to small-o orthodox Christian intellectuals who want to understand the modern world. I can’t say enough good things about it, but let me point out here that we are one week away from Christmas, and if you know a bookish Christian — Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox — who likes podcasts, you can hardly do better than to buy him or her a gift subscription. I have found nothing else like it. In fact — this is a topic for another time — I would love to know who else in my city, Baton Rouge, subscribes to the Journal. I would love to start getting together regularly a couple of weeks after each volume comes out, to talk about it.

Anyway, Journal editor and host Ken Myers has been putting a lot of his resources into developing the Journal app, leaving the website kind of bare-bones-y. Even if you don’t subscribe, you should have the MHAJ app on your phone, because Ken puts some free stuff on there a fair amount. Today I listened to a recent interview he did with Margaret Harper McCarthy, assistant professor of theological anthropology at the JP2 Institute in Washington, on the question of transgenderism, the law, and our culture.  I was mistaken earlier; you can’t stream it on the website, so get the app and listen to it on your smartphone.

It’s a 28-minute segment, Ken’s interview with Prof. McCarthy is, though alas, there’s no transcript. Listening to it will clarify a lot of things for both opponents and supporters of gender ideology. Most of the people I know think of transgenderism entirely in terms of individual rights and autonomy. This makes sense, because that’s how our entire culture trains people to think. Opponents of gender ideology, in my experience, tend to be active Christians who frame their stance in religious liberty terms. This, says Prof. McCarthy, is a big mistake. There is a religious dimension to the debate, of course, but it is not in its essence a religious question. It is rather a question of: What does it mean to be human? That is something that concerns everyone, not just religious believers.

I found this essay about transgenderism by Prof. McCarthy on Public Discourse. In it, she covers a lot of the ground that she does in her Mars Hill interview. She’s talking here about the case SCOTUS heard earlier this year regarding the owner of a funeral home that fired an employee who said he was a transgendered female, and demanded the right to show up at work presenting as a woman. Excerpts:

What is at stake here is much more than the right of an individual to free self-expression or an employer’s freedom of religion to hold and act on such “stereotypes.” Since everyone in the workplace of that individual employee will be asked to accept that he is “a woman,” what is at stake is whether or not their—and, by extension, every person’s—pre-ideological, innate knowledge of oneself as a boy or girl, imbibed quite literally at the maternal breast, will be for all practical and public purposes officially overruled as false, a “stereotype.”

Conversely, what is at stake is whether or not the alternative will be for all public and practical purposes officially true: namely, that everyone’s “identity” is arbitrarily and accidentally related to his or her body—as ghost to machine—even if the two are “aligned” in the majority of cases, as the fashionable prefix “cis” means to suggest.

More:

There is no question about the nihilistic objectives of the new philosophy of sex. Those objectives were already in play at the beginning of the sexual revolution. This was conceived by its founder, Wilhelm Reich, to be the most comprehensive of revolutions, because it rebelled against the very principle of reality itself, rejecting the “finalistic” notion of sexual acts. But now, in addition to obscuring the objective reality of sexual acts, “gender” would prevent us from seeing what we are—a man or a woman—or, indeed, that we are anything at all. Taking the “new clothes” of the famous Emperor in a new direction, the cloak of “gender” would render invisible all the naked evidence.

Here is the newness of the ancient attempt to extricate ourselves from the given relations in which sexual difference entangles us. It is, as Hanna Arendt said, “the knowledgeable dismissal of [the visible].” David Bentley Hart suggests a compelling reason for this. If modernity is in large part post-Christian, it cannot simply revert back to paganism and its mores. It must go further back. Since the Christian God is the One who Created all things, it must get behind everything, visible and invisible, to the only “other god” left: “the Nothing” of spontaneous subjectivity. “Gender” is precisely this: the attempt to free the will from any prevenient natural order. This could not have been more clearly stated than by Butler when she channeled Nietzsche, saying: “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming . . . the deed is everything.” But it was also chillingly stated two decades before when the feminist Shulamith Firestone called for the eventual elimination of the sex distinction itself.

Read it all. You need to see the entire argument, not just these excerpts.

As McCarthy tells Ken Myers, what the Supreme Court has been asked to do is to decide not on transgender rights — that is superficially what’s at stake — but more importantly, on the nature of reality. This cannot be avoided. It is undeniably true that there are some people who believe that there is a difference between their given bodies and their individual psychological and emotional orientation. But it is a matter of the greatest consequence for our civilization whether or not that subjective experience describes reality. This is not merely a matter of where transgenders get to go pee, or what pronouns you have to use. This is about human nature and our bodies.

Brad Polumbo, a gay man, writes that it’s time for LGB and T to separate. Excerpts:

Gays, lesbians and bisexuals all have something obvious in common: same-sex attraction. This is an alternative sexual orientation that, to some extent at least, shapes our experiences and alters our life outcomes. We typically identify with our biological sex—and in fact, sometimes have spent many years feeling trapped by it. To be gay is to understand that sex is set at birth. My sexual attraction, likewise, is based on hard-wired factors beyond my control.

Transgenderism is a separate concept. While homosexuality leads to obvious differences in real-life behavior, transgenderism offers a categorial redefinition of what it means to be a man or a woman. As Joyce describes it, a “gender identity” is a quasi-spiritual concept—almost like a soul—that is “something between an internal essence, knowable only to its possessor, and stereotypically masculine or feminine appearance and behavior.”

Gay rights activists simply want society to accept their different ways of living and loving—since gay men and lesbians pursue romantic interests and build families in ways that are at odds with conventional heterosexual expectations. Followers of radical gender theory, on the other hand, demand that we all reject our basic understanding of biological sex in favor of a recently conceptualized abstract notion of human identity.

This is something that the Democratic Party has swallowed whole. More Palumbo:

In the United States, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives has passed the Equality Act, a so-called LGBT rights bill that outlaws discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. That is a noble goal that would seem to be in keeping with America’s larger civil-rights legacy. But the Act explicitly redefines biological sex under federal law according to self-defined gender identity—so it easily could allow for a whole host of adverse consequences. And as we have seen in Canada, where a trans woman tried to leverage human-rights law to force immigrant aestheticians to wax her “female” scrotum and penis, the victims of this movement tend to be women.

Even under current U.S. law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act serves to outlaw discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Activists are arguing that transgender identity is protected under the law’s reference to “sex,” even though “gender identity” is mentioned nowhere in the law. Trans activists also are demanding government support for policies that subject gender-confused children to potentially sterilizing hormones and other aggressive therapies. Their rights are being sacrificed on the altar of gender self-identification as well.

The redefinition of sex as gender is a step that most people—even the most well-meaning and humane members of society—simply will never accept, no matter what laws activists manage to get passed. And the effort to ram this doctrine down the throats of ordinary people will tarnish any movement that insists on such mantras. So long as self-described “LGBT” activists demand that a male with gender dysphoria is “really” a female, many otherwise accepting people will remain opposed to, or at least skeptical of, the wider movement.

Read the whole thing. It’s good.

I am not exaggerating when I say this movement is totalitarian, in that it will brook no dissent, and is attempting to use language to refigure our sense of reality. Twitter has suspended the account of the trans-skeptical website 4th Wave Now because it used the term “natal male” in a tweet. Look:

1/ Okay, final verdict from Twitter on the @4th_WaveNow saga: Yes, it IS “hateful conduct” to refer to someone’s natal sex if you’re then reported for it. This was very confusing. First, Twitter told me that they had erred and reversed the decision. Then, just a little while pic.twitter.com/AMTssuqwlD

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 18, 2019

4/ considered “hateful conduct.”

In a lot of situations, simply describing what being trans *is* could lead to you losing your account. It’s an interesting decision and we’ll see how enforceable it is in practice.

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 18, 2019

Twitter is a very important channel of communication, especially among elites in the media and in politics (ask POTUS), and, to underscore what the journalist Jesse Singal is saying, here we have Twitter deciding that you cannot even describe an actual, scientific fact about history and biology without risking censorship. 

This is the world that the trans advocates and their allies want. Mind you, Twitter is a private company, and it is not obliged to allow anyone at all to use its platform. But it has now deplatformed an eloquent voice for skepticism on transgender medical interventions on youth, simply because it used the term “natal male” to describe someone who was born male.

It’s breathtaking. This is what George Orwell called Newspeak. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party’s goal was to convince the people that reality is whatever it, the Party, says it is. That is what is going on here with gender ideology. It’s being sold as a matter of personal liberty and self-expression, and people are accepting it without seriously questioning what’s happening. But it is radical. 

If we don’t wake up and speak up, we are going to be in a world of trouble. We already are.

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Big T And The Democrats

Good morning! Welcome to Impeachment Wednesday. Just so you know, I really don’t care. He’s not going anywhere until and unless voters kick him out next fall.

Along those lines, the NYT’s wonkery-based political columnist Thomas Edsall writes today about the dilemma faced by Democrats regarding transgenderism. Here’s how he frames it:

If you’re a Democratic strategist, what do you do to reconcile the moral power of your party’s arguments about the inherent dignity and civil rights of every American with the reality of an electorate that has not caught up with where the party has gone and is slightly — or more than slightly — adverse to it? How do you decide whether what is right is also what is wise?

As recently as 2004, proposed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, particularly one in Ohio, may have cost the Democrats the presidency, so how do you handle President Trump’s calculated assault on transgender rights? You can’t tell people “oh just wait for your rights, they’ll be coming soon” — that has never worked for anyone — so I decided to ask philosophers, ethicists, transgender activists and others how the party should respond to Trump’s provocations.

Well, gosh, how do you think that round of questioning went? Call up academics and trans activists and ask them if the Democrats should pull back on their commitment to transgender rights to focus on defeating Trump — what do you think they’re going to say? You can’t fault activists for saying “slow down? never!”, because that’s what activists do. But academics? Could there possibly be a more out of touch class in America? (Quote: “Robin Dembroff, a professor of philosophy at Yale who prefers the pronouns they/them, wrote me that…”). Besides, in this persecutorial environment within academia, which philosopher or ethicist is going to step out and say, “We have to put getting rid of Trump before all other concerns. If pausing the push for trans rights is what helps us turf Trump out, then that’s what we have to do”? He or she would be monstered as someone whose lack of commitment means the blood of trans bodies on his hands!

In fact, Edsall found someone to speak to this side of the matter: Bill Galston, who does so with exquisite delicacy:

William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and former deputy assistant to President Bill Clinton for domestic policy, makes a different argument, in favor of more incremental change:

The task of decent politicians in a democracy is to move their country as far toward justice and fairness as the current state of public opinion will permit while doing what they can to improve the chances that public opinion will continue to shift in the right direction. This task requires judgment based on a solid understanding of public opinion and of the facts on the ground.

This is not an easy task, especially for a political party that supports challenges to the traditional hierarchy.

Galston went on:

As an elected official or aspirant for elective office, there is nothing dishonorable about defining one’s policy aspirations at any given point in response to what the public is prepared to endorse or at least permit at that time. The higher the stakes in the election, the more defensible this practice becomes. If, as many people believe, the 2020 election implicates not only policy disputes but also the future of liberal constitutional democracy in the United States, then it would be justified to subordinate any policy issue to the overriding goal of protecting our constitutional order.

OMG, TRANS PEOPLE ARE DYING, and Bill Galston has the nerve — the nerve! — to say that Democrats maybe shouldn’t be so quick to ballyhoo their support for a law — the Equality Act — that would force doctors to perform sex changes, force open the doors of women-only spaces (including girls’ locker rooms) to penis-havers, destroy women’s athletics, and so forth! What kind of right-wing spear carrier is he? Cancel him!

Trans is an issue on which the Democratic Party’s journalism auxiliary corps, its academic-activist shouty-boos, and its wokey-woke presidential candidates are Corbynizing the party going into 2020. Take a look at Megan McArdle’s column about the British election. She doesn’t mention transgenders, but think of this in light of Edsall’s piece:

The parallels between our two nations are inexact, of course, as such parallels always are. But the similarities are undeniable: a right-turning populist, hoovering up the white working class even as it sheds the educated and affluent, while its opposition is driven ever leftward by cadres of young activists. Brexit presaged Donald Trump’s election by five months, and it seems all too possible that Britain is once again serving as the canary in the coal mine. (One closed by Maggie Thatcher, destroying the economy of a constituency that is now nonetheless voting for her party, as though God really wanted to drive home just how shocking all this is.)

She’s talking about patriotism. This would be a good place for me to point out that Edsall’s newspaper is so far to the left that it has committed considerable resources and prestige to creating something called The 1619 Project, which claims that America was founded as a slaveocracy, and that this evil act is the center of American history. McArdle points to this amazing piece from Tim Adams, writing in The Guardian, in which he visits a traditional Labour stronghold to find out why people in this former mining community abandoned the party. Excerpt:

[Defeated Labour incumbent MP Phil] Wilson’s father was a miner in the Fishburn colliery. His own speech conceding defeat to Paul Howell, a retired accountant who also grew up in the constituency, could hardly have been more direct in apportioning blame.

“If you are on the doorstep and one person mentions Brexit, but five people mention the leader of the Labour party for being the reason they are not going to vote for you, then things need to change. I believe that the leader of the Labour party should not be resigning today, he should have resigned a long time ago.”

Any Momentum [Corbyn movement organization — RD] diehard who doubts the truth of that sentiment up here should come and talk to the Fishburn regulars. Arthur Hudspeth is playing the fruit machine in the social club. He recently celebrated his 91st birthday. He went down the pit at 14 in 1942 and worked in mines until his retirement at 65. The only two years he missed were for his national service: “first battalion of the Durhams” he tells me, looking me in the eye. He has voted Labour without fail in every election since Attlee’s victory in 1945, but not this time. He is ashamed to say he didn’t vote at all, but winces at the mention of Corbyn’s name and shakes his head. Why? “Rubbish. He’s not my kind of man. Not strong enough. He doesn’t understand us here.”

To start to unpack what Hudspeth means, you need to look in the dominoes room of the Fishburn Club. The symbolic decoration here is provided by the plaques and banners not of mines but of local regiments. It is this strand of the collective memory to which Corbyn, as Labour leader, appears to have had nothing to say.

What an interesting piece. For those working class British voters, it was all about patriotism, and the belief that the highly urbanized left-wing Corbyn has no feeling for his country and its traditions.

There will be some Republicans who try to push that on the Democrats in 2020, but with the possible exception of Sanders (who honeymooned in the USSR), there really aren’t any Dems who have Corbyn’s unique vulnerabilities on that point. This is a man, Corbyn, who refused to sing the national anthem at a memorial service for the Battle of Britain, after all.

But on the trans thing, there are parallels. The only thing standing between the radicalism of the Equality Act and it becoming law is a Republican Senate and Donald Trump. I strongly wish the GOP would do more to protect locker rooms and women’s athletics, among other things, but at least they serve in blocking capacity. That’s not nothing. My sense is that for better or worse, most Americans are pretty much okay with the LGB stuff, as a political matter. But the T — that’s a very big ask. Transgenderism is not even the same kind of thing as homosexuality. But the media are all so 100 percent gone on the subject that they never put the hard questions to Democratic candidates, who, as far as I have seen, have never had to explain their far-left stances in ways that factory workers in the Rust Belt could understand. The questions I’ve seen the press ask have been along the lines of, “Do you support full trans rights by tomorrow morning, or do you believe that we can wait till Friday?”

We, as a civilization, are rushing heedlessly into tearing down the most basic fact of our species, something that evolution has spent tens of thousands of years programming into our bones: the gender binary. In a single generation, the left is determined to destroy it, and call it liberation. And if you don’t agree with that, they will savage you. They’ve done it to distinguished physicians like Dr. Allan Josephson, who lost his career because he took a public stand as a doctor against the views of the trans activists. In my forthcoming book about lessons for us from life under Soviet totalitarianism, I have some quotes from a Soviet-born doctor who lives and practices medicine in America. He would not talk on the record to me about transgenderism, out of fear for his job. From the draft of my manuscript:

Wokeness on gender issues is causing physicians to aid and abet the mental illness of young patients, the doctor tells me. In many clinics and hospitals, it is a matter of formal policy for medical personnel to consent to treatments and interventions requested by patients – even if it violates the doctor’s judgment. The politicization of medicine by progressive activists, and the lies doctors have to sign off on out of fear for their jobs – it’s all making people sicker. It’s not just around gender issues, either. Medicine is undergoing a paradigm shift, replacing the old idea of “health” with “wellness.”

“One of the most important questions in medicine now is, how do we define ‘normal’?” he says. “Health is something based in objective criteria. Wellness is a patient’s subjective feeling of how he’s doing.”

A drug addict, for example, can report feelings of well being, even though his addiction is killing him. Listening to the doctor, I thought of how fear of the consequences of truth-telling compelled Soviet economists to lie to their political superiors. They hid the ugly facts about the decay of the Soviet economy, until the collapse was so far advanced it could not be arrested.

The physician is visibly anxious about the future. “If people don’t act now, if sanity doesn’t prevail, then I’m afraid of what’s going to happen. To maintain a family, you have to be normal. No matter how much wellness you can report, if you are incapable of functioning, you’re going to die.”

I remember that face-to-face conversation with this man, who emphasized that he cannot be identified in my book, because he would be fired. He said doctors like him are being forced to suppress their own best medical judgment to advance the trans agenda. This is the ideological corruption of medicine — and the Democratic Party supports this 100 percent. Under the Equality Act, which every Democratic House member voted for, and all the party’s presidential candidates back, that doctor above would have to surrender his medical judgment not just as a matter of hospital policy, as is the case now, but as a matter of federal civil rights law. 

This is not an invented “war on Christmas” phone button-pushing deal. This consequential war on biology, on women’s rights, on the English language (pronouns!), on sanity itself, is really happening, and it has taken over the minds of progressive activists, liberal journalists, and Democratic lawmakers — and presidential candidates.

Trump would be an idiot not to point out the actual facts of the matter. Trump is many things, a lot of them bad, but I don’t think he’s going to miss this opportunity. I want the Democratic nominee to go down to the mill and tell the men why the federal government should pay for their sons to have their penises removed, and why if they oppose their teenage daughters having their breasts cut off, or their girls getting beaten in high school athletic competitions by biological males fronting as girls, then they’re nothing but a pack of bigots.

UPDATE: I apologize — a couple of readers point out that Peter Singer, in the Edsall article, said that beating Trump has to take priority over trans rights. I read too quickly. Sorry about that.

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