The Pronoun Wars are here.
No, it’s not the latest Star Wars movie. This is a horror movie, not sci-fi, and it’s coming to your town sooner than you think.
Here are three news items for you to ponder:
- The New York City Commission on Human Rights has issued a ruling the requires “employers and covered entities to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun and title regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual’s identification”. The law extends to landlords, fellow employees, even patrons of businesses, and severe fines can be imposed to enforce conformity to the ruling.
- Jordan Peterson, a professor from the University of Toronto, has created a national firestorm by refusing to use transgender pronouns, placing him in violation of Bill C-16 which amended the Canadian Human Rights Act last year to include gender identity. For Peterson, the issue is not one of discrimination, but of defending free speech against toxic political correctness. “I don’t trust the people who formulated [non-gendered pronouns],” he says. “And I’m not going to be their mouthpiece. They’re power-mad people who use compassion as a disguise.
- Conservative writer David French has come under a vicious backlash for refusing to refer to Chelsea Manning with a feminine pronoun. He also sees this as a pernicious attack on free speech. “When your definition of manners requires that I verbally consent to a fundamental and important premise, then I dissent. You cannot use my manners to win your culture war,” French writes.
We were always going to arrive at this place in our culture. All the philosophical mumbo-jumbo about “discrimination” and “equality” which led to the legalizing of gay marriage in 2015 included in its verbiage – like malware imbedded in a pernicious software download – the rationale and vocabulary for the current transgender madness.
Our nation is fast coming to a critical Rubicon: either we accept what every sane culture has accepted since the beginning of civilized society – that there are reasonable and healthy boundaries that ought to be placed around human sexual behavior – or we give up any pretense of morality and just allow any sexual proclivity that an individual can imagine to be practiced.
If a person’s freedom to choose is the argument that trumps all others, and nothing will be allowed to sequester that freedom – not the health of children, or the well-being of society, or the sanctity of marriage, or the obvious biological design of the human body – then the end is upon us. If the concept of “love” has now been so watered down that any strong passion or desire for a person or a practice, any little surge of endorphins we feel, any little rise in our serotonin levels is all that’s required to qualify as “love”, and so-help-me-God-(if-I-believed-in-God) if anyone so much as peeps or mutters a word of protest against this, we’ll picket you, fine you, scream at you, edict you, sue you into conformity and silence – then we are truly at the edge of a cliff. Just a few more pushes of the leftword scrum and over the edge we tumble.
Unless…the deplorables rise up, and begin speaking up now loudly and clearly and collectively for common-sense and basic principles of decency, simple Morality 101.
If we leave the speaking and writing to the David French’s and Jordan Peterson’s of society, then the game is over. If we assume that because we got a guy in the White House who would put another of our guys on the Supreme Court that we’ve put in a good day’s work, then we are toast. Stick a fork in us.
It’s not enough just to vote anymore. Not in this world. It’s time to write letters. Pick up the phone. Show up at school board meetings. Get in the street. Speak up in the lunch room. Defend the ones on the front lines. Start questioning the bullet points offered up at the sensitivity training.
It’s now or never. Because they’re down to the crumbs now. Once they start sweeping up the pronouns, the fat lady is tuning up.
Unless a lot more of us start tuning in.
