.@CatoInstitute’s @walterolson: “This is not some apocalyptic rule opening the door to whimsical discrimination. This is a narrowly drawn rule for a minority of federal contractors. It’s really not that radical and not that new.” https://t.co/3rpSL6vwVc
Hymowitz, a contributing editor at City Journal, also writes:
In 1977, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Simone de Beauvoir and dozens of other French intellectuals lobbied the French government to abolish age of consent laws and to decriminalise ‘consensual sex’ between adults and minors under the age of fifteen. In response to a trial of three Frenchman accused of having sex with 13 and 14 year old boys, 69 French intellectuals signed a petition arguing for their release. … Similar questions apply to Desmond Napoles, a pre-teen “drag kid” who has performed in gay bars and has been the subject of an admiring profile on “Good Morning America” as well as a celebratory blog post by a convicted pedophile. When is a child fully capable of autonomy?
I think that consensual relations between sexually active teens and older men can sometimes be confused with, and condemned as, child sexual abuse. But I agree that when you start removing traditional barriers around sex, and gender, you should be mindful that while some constrictions were oppressive and easing them freeing, going too far in uprooting tradition in pursuit of liberation opens the door to appalling evils. It’s a lesson we learn from revolutions, sexual and otherwise, again and again.
We’ve reached a truly insane place in American culture where a celebrity has to apologize for saying that maybe a three year-old child is not mature enough to make decisions about their gender that will irreparably impact them the rest of their life. https://t.co/Ed8gMhKSIC
Rob Smith says when a gender-nonconforming child, such as a boy who “happens to be more effeminate” and therefor identifies with girls gets told “No, no, he’s not a boy he’s a girl…there’s an element of homophobia in that.”
As a gay man, I think this trend is damaging, I’m sad that more gays and lesbians are too afraid to speak out, and I WON’T be bullied into an apology. pic.twitter.com/tKiVOifvd3
[Rep. Ayanna Pressley] just outlined the classic anti-Enlightenment mindset: we are all permanent captives of our superficial race, religion, and sexual orientation. We must at all times think, act, and speak in such tribal fashion—and do so monolithically and collectively, in adopting the party line as set down by such elites as those like Pressley herself. Blacks who oppose affirmative action, or Muslims who recognize Israel, or “queers” whose sexual preferences are incidental, not essential to their personas are thus declared not authentic and thus not to be welcomed by Pressley into the new racialist Democratic Party. In practical terms, Pressley assumes that whites, reportedly about 70 percent of the population, tune her logic out. That is, they should never take her own racist advice and vote en masse according to their superficial shared skin color. If they did, the 55 percent of actual voters who are white in her otherwise minority-majority congressional district might never have elected someone who, according to her own rationale, is not part of their own tribe.
Offices and schools are forced to grapple with all the new gender-neutral pronouns. … It’s wrong, when you meet a new co-worker, to ask his pronouns. (We don’t say “preferred” pronouns—that “implies someone’s gender is a preference”!) You don’t want him wondering if you think he’s transgender or nonbinary. Instead, introduce yourself in a way that summons his pronouns: “Hi, I’m Jim and my pronoun is he/him.” Use “they” a lot. It’s gender neutral. Suggested sentence: “I spoke to the marketing director and they said they’d get back to me.” This is grammatically incorrect but so what? Correct grammar, and the intelligibility it allows, is a small price to pay for inclusion and equality.
Also:
An odd thing is they always insist they’re doing this in the name of kindness and large-spiritedness. And yet, have you ever met them? They’re not individually kind or large-spirited. They’re more like messianic schoolmasters.
Kurt Schlichter captures how a lot of average Americans are feeling these days. He writes:
You’re stupid because you think there’s just two genders and that you don’t consider a “bi-curious femme-friendly questioning two-spirit” an option.
You’re a monster for wondering why boys in drag are competing (and setting “records”) in girls’ sports and for not accepting that men have periods too. …
Racist. Sexist. Ableist. Imperialist. Global Warming Denialist. Fatist.
{Moved up from prior post) We’ve gone from using the state to force religiously conservative bakers to design cakes for same-sex weddings to this. It’s all about exerting power over others to serve your narcism.
Trans activist barbarism:
You are trying to legally force women to touch your genitals. Your behavior is monstrous. You are preying on these women and you should be ashamed and be shamed by society for it. https://t.co/IQ0cABQuGX
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.