Where it’s all going

In today’s Friday Quickies post, I wrote about the rather bizarre sexual identity civil war being played out in Congress now that the Dems are in control, as the different sides to the argument fight over whether “transgendered” individuals should be included in an employment discrimination bill.

By the way, before I get any further in this post, I want to say I want a short persons anti-discrimination bill. Or maybe I want a “looks lousy in pea green sweaters” anti-discrimination bill. What am I saying. How about an “anything that offends my sensibilities is discrimination” anti-discrimination bill. Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964* is, apparently, inadequate to the purpose, despite it’s laundry list of people against whom there cannot be discrimination, and since we apparently need to legislate to the fringe in order to keep Americans behaving decently at work, we’d better line up every single kind of discrimination imaginable and start passing laws like crazy. End of digression. Back to the main purpose of this post, which is transgendered individuals.

If the post RD directed me to is to be believed, the feds are already acting as if transgendered individuals are a protected class. How else to explain this:

James Watson’s forced recantation reminds me of a situation that has arisen at a particular government-administered intelligence program with which I am familiar. One of the employees at this office has decided he is a woman, and has demanded–and so far received–the right to use the women’s restroom. Management has informed the women who work there that if they even voice disagreement, they will lose their jobs on the spot. All employees are required to call him by his new female name, to use female pronouns in reference to him, and to otherwise assent that this very sick individual really is a woman. Again, failure to do so will result in immediate termination, no questions asked. They have been instructed, in other words, that they shall accept as true whatever they are told. Any suggestion that they believe their own eyes over what management tells them shall result in being cast into the outer darkness–this is a very privileged world and once you’ve been expelled, it is nearly impossible to get back in.

What has been astonishing to behold is the number of employees–particularly the functionaries in middle management–who have taken the view that because we humans make our own reality, they now believe–really believe–that this man is a woman. Management has said so. He has said so. To deny it is to commit an act of discrimination. All discrimination is wrong. I believe he is a woman. And so forth.

There are some who have privately reacted with horror, and the thing that horrifies them most is that so many people are willing to surrender their minds to the control of others, and to believe that reality is whatever they are told it is by the authorities. A scene which as always stuck with from from 1984 involves Winston watching his interrogator destroy a piece of evidence that the government was lying. You must remember that such evidence existed, he insists. You yourself held in in your own hands only moments ago. “I do not remember it,” his tormentor replies, and Winston sinks into despair.

Watching men as accomplished as Watson debase themselves and profess not to believe what they know to be true fills me with the same kind of despair.

I don’t think the 1984 comparison goes too far at all. George Orwell, raised in the socialist milieu fully understood would happens when variations of socialism take over.

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* By the way, regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s interesting to note the operative language:  “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”  By “sex,” Congress of course meant “gender,” as the legislative history clearly shows.  Nevertheless, it would seem to me that a court can easily expand sex to mean sexuality, as well as gender, without the necessity of enacting brand new legislation.