The fad continues. Ellen Page, lesbian, has come out as Elliot Page, straight transgender dude (or something.) Now, Eddie Izzard, the comedian known for dressing in drag, has also come out as trans, and has asked to be addressed with female pronouns. The media, of course, has obliged, memory-holing decades of previous coverage.
***
To help children understand all of this, the Cartoon Network is unveiling some helpful comic strips to explain that the binary has been smashed. From The Christian Post:
The text at the bottom of the first comic strip asserts, “We can’t tell someone’s gender just by looking at them, and we shouldn’t assume we know. There are many gender identities beyond ‘girl’ or ‘boy’: some people don’t identify as any gender!”
One of the three characters in the first comic strip remarks, “Gender pronouns describe a person’s gender identity.” “Examples of pronouns are she/her, they/them, and ze/zir!” said another. The third character explains, “A lot of people are learning about gender. If you’re comfortable, you can share your own pronouns!”
For the millionth time: Please, parents—know what your kids are watching, reading, and looking at online.
According to newly revealed House rules for the just-begun 117th Congress, terms such as “father, daughter, mother, and son” as well as gendered pronouns are banned. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the new rules reflect “the views and values of the full range of our historically diverse House Democratic Majority.” And as if to make the depravity of their obsession with gender inclusiveness abundantly clear, during yesterday’s first session of the new year Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) ended the opening prayer by declaring “Amen, and Awoman.”
Never mind that “amen” is Hebrew for “may it be so.” The Dems have virtue to signal, and you’re a bigot.
***
These days, medical ethicists spend a good deal of time figuring out how to defend murder. The latest, example, highlighted in National Review, is particularly egregious:
As if we needed another reason to lose faith in the expert class, here is a medical ethicist in the New York Times discussing the CDC’s rollout of the coronavirus vaccine:
Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter,” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
So if you’re old and white, you’re expendable. This must be the “white privilege” I’ve been hearing so much about.
***
I’ve been covering the abortion wars in Latin America—most recently, in Argentina—pretty consistently over the last several years. Charles Camosy of Fordham University makes an important point about the recent legalization of abortion in Argentina in The Catholic Herald:
“Here there are not two lives as some say,” said Argentina’s health minister. “There’s clearly a single person and the other [thing] is a phenomenon. If it were not like that, we would be facing the greatest universal genocide, [because] more than half the civilized world allows it.”
He said out loud the quiet part of what many pro-choice people believe. And it is indeed refreshing compared to what we often get from typical abortion rights activists.
Sometimes we hear anti-science positions so wacky that one wonders how anyone could believe them. They describe the prenatal human being as a clump of cells, mere tissue, or the “products of conception.” Anyone who has taken a high school biology class knows that such talk in nonsense.
Sometimes we hear outlandish moral positions. “A human doesn’t have rights unless it is an independent being, not reliant on someone else,” some supporters of abortion rights say. That is a truly horrific moral principle to live by, one that marginalizes those who are the most vulnerable, rather than lifting them up as in need of protection.
Dr. Garcia gives us a fascinating and rare glimpse into one of the reasons why some pro-choicers speak like that. Simply put, the alternative is simply too horrible to imagine.
Indeed, his statement reveals one of the most important structural problems of the abortion debate. Those who engage the issue honestly enough to see the implications of the pro-life position quickly see that it is orders of magnitude easier on one’s mental health to take a pro-choice position, when compared to facing the reality that the “greatest universal genocide” is indeed permitted (and in some cases even embraced as a positive good) by most of the developed world.
Camosy is bang-on. For most people, the truth about the abortion debate is simply too difficult to grapple with—and so, instead, they comfort themselves with lies, delusions, and alternative realities. In this reality, sadly, millions of babies are killed by abortion every year.
***
Over at Unherd, Mary Harrington has a fascinating article on how culture—including Disney movies—laid the groundwork for the trans movement. Entertainment is not neutral. Stories have storytellers. We are reaping the consequences of the stories that our cultural tastemakers have been telling for decades.
