This week has seen much ado regarding the supposed rights of transgendered people. North Carolina and Mississippi have each passed recent laws that will, among other things, provide that people use restrooms designated for their biological gender. Response from across the culture has been mind-numbing. PayPal announced that it will pull a major development from North Carolina on account of the new law. The company claimed to protest discrimination, despite doing business in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuals are executed for their orientation. Other entities have taken similar action. Whatever their expressed intent, their true gripe is with free association and the facts of reality.
The religious freedom debate has revealed widespread cultural psychosis, defined as “a serious mental disorder characterized by thinking and emotions that are so impaired, that they indicate that the person experiencing them has lost contact with reality.” Here are but three expressions:
1) Denial of Biological Reality
Transgenderism was once widely regarded as a mental disorder, and properly so. We know, scientifically and objectively, what distinguishes a male from a female. The terms are not subjective, arbitrary, or debatable. Excepting for rare defects, human beings are born male or female. They stay that way. Surgical mutilation does not change a man into a woman, or vice versa. A man does not become a woman because he feels like one, or vice versa. We are each whichever gender our chromosomes determined at conception. This is not an opinion. It is as objective a fact as any fact can be. Yet we now live in a culture intent upon denying this reality and enabling transgendered fantasy.
2) The Contradictory LGBT Narrative
Politically, it makes sense that homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered constituencies would unite in common cause. Coalitions prove important to political endeavors. However, the narratives of these three communities completely contradict one another. Homosexuality, we are told, is an inherent and inescapable orientation. Efforts at conversion therapy are inappropriate and offensive, we are told, because a gay individual cannot naturally be attracted to the opposite sex. Except when they are. Then it’s called bisexual. Similarly, no one chooses their orientation. Except when they do. Then it’s called bi-curious. Apparently, orientation is an ironclad biological determination, or a trendy social experiment, whichever proves most convenient in a given context.
3) The Orwellian Re-Writing of History and the Constitution
Serving as guest on a local radio program, discussing the ongoing religious freedom controversy, I was confronted by a caller named Brenda who claimed that the libertarian philosophy underlying religious freedom laws was “intellectually and morally bankrupt.” She claimed that it is “illegal to be a bigot” in America.
Forgoing the question of how acknowledging biological reality constitutes bigotry, the hosts pressed Brenda to explain from where she had derived the notion that people could not hold and express ideas in a free country. Her answer? “The Constitution.” What part of the Constitution? “Free association.”
We were flabbergasted. Free association? What could Brenda possibly have been talking about? Free association is the principle which upholds the right of individuals to determine who they do business with. Free association is a mark in our column, not hers. But she had redefined the term:
Consumers have the right to participate in the market. You do not have the right to deny them access to the market… [LGBT people] have the right to purchase goods and services that are offered on the free and open market.
This was positively Orwellian. Brenda maintained that “free association” and a “free and open market” meant precisely the opposite of what they actually mean. To her mind, “free association” means you have no choice in who you associate with. This psychotic view is shared by a large segment of the population and has become a dominate force in our culture.
We live in a time that largely rejects objective reality and reacts violently to any attempt at correction. The answer to discrimination, according to its supposed opponents, is to discriminate with the full force of law. On the one hand, they present a mirror universe concept of “free association” that paradoxically requires people to associate with others. On the other, they applaud when governors and corporations defy that notion by boycotting religious freedom states.
We’re dealing with nothing less than a war against realty itself. And reality, it would seem, is losing.
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