This is how a progressive in 2014 can consider it an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for gay couples to be denied the right to marry — and base that argument on the claim that a gay man’s love and natural desire for another man, like a lesbian’s love and natural desire for another woman, is irreducible and ineradicable — and then insist just five years later that it is an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for anyone to be presumed a man or a woman at all.
As Andrew Sullivan has powerfully argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible. The first, which morally justifies same-sex marriage, presumes that biological sex and binary gender differences are real, that they matter, and that they can’t just be erased at will. The second, which Manjoo and many transgender activists embrace and espouse, presumes the opposite — that those differences can and should be immediately dissolved. To affirm the truth of both positions is to embrace incoherence.
One Comment for “From Equal Treatment to Gender Radicalism”
posted by Jorge on
As Andrew Sullivan has powerfully argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible.
No he didn’t (the best statement came from someone he quoted), no they’re not, and Mr. Linker explains why not better than I ever could: rules and authority constrain individuals from carrying out inclinations and choices that we find intuitive, even natural. It is the attempt to explain and justify the inclination that is artificial and inconsistent.
And so progressives fall into the trap of philosophically empty pragmatism that usually claims moderates.
One Comment for “From Equal Treatment to Gender Radicalism”
posted by Jorge on
As Andrew Sullivan has powerfully argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible.
No he didn’t (the best statement came from someone he quoted), no they’re not, and Mr. Linker explains why not better than I ever could: rules and authority constrain individuals from carrying out inclinations and choices that we find intuitive, even natural. It is the attempt to explain and justify the inclination that is artificial and inconsistent.
And so progressives fall into the trap of philosophically empty pragmatism that usually claims moderates.
Big whup.