Welcome to the slippery slope, please mind your step

I can’t take it anymore.  After a short stint of blogging I had hung up the old keyboard and decided to refrain from social commentary.  However, this whole transgender bathroom fiasco is about to make my head explode. I have seen too many news stories, blog posts and videos of people telling me that I’m a bigot because and narrow-minded because I don’t support transgender people’s choice to urinate in whichever restroom they choose.  I have also seen a number of posts and videos of people claiming they will shoot transgender people on site. What I have not seen is a lot logical argument from either side.  So let me, with my limited public school education, give you my perspective on this situation and why all the emotion in this debate needs to be replaced is facts and logic.

To what end?

I read one blogpost that said that Christian people just need to open their minds with regard to transgenderness (is that a word?  Pansexual is a word so let’s make transgenderness a word too).  How far do you want us to open our minds?  We’ve been told by some scientists and Lady Gaga that homosexuals are born that way. Even if you were born gay, you still choose how to dress yourself.  So if living as the opposite gender is a choice how far do we need go to accommodate people’s choices?  How far do you want us to open our minds?  And if you demand that we open our minds to accommodate people’s choices then I demand that you contemplate a world where everyone’s choices need to be accommodated.  

Here’s a link to a video (here’s written story as well) about 52-year Paul Wolscht who lives his life as an six-year old girl.  If you peel back his rhetoric for a second and you will see that this where we are heading once we accommodate people’s choices in order for them to be happy. The narrator states that Paul is not a cross-dresser, but discovered he was was transgender—which is a person whose gender is different than the sex they were assigned at birth.  Wait, what?  Different than what was assigned at birth? Is there proof, for this?  I’m sorry, but you will have to prove to us that this is not just a choice?  Is there a test?  Is there a brain scan that peers into someone’s brain and shows that they are actually a woman and not a man?  Does their DNA show double X chromosomes instead of an XY?  If there is no proof, then it is a choice and if it is a choice then how far do we have to go to support this choice?  

So again I ask you where is the end? If I can be a woman, can I be black?  Can I be Asian or Hispanic?  Can I be a monkey or a dog?  Where does it end? 

You can’t have it both ways

In the video about Paul he said that he would have guys come over to his house wanting to try on his clothes.  At one point he described how surreal it was for there to be a 300-pound man with a goatee asking if he could kiss him while wearing one of his dresses.  But wait I thought you were a six-year old girl named Stefoknee.  Isn’t that man kissing you committing child rape?

Let’s just Bruce the biker gets picked up the cops and is questioned about his whereabouts. 

Cop: Where were you last night?

Bruce: I was with Stefoknee at her house.

Cop: Did you have sex with Stefoknee?

Bruce: Yes

Cop: How old is she?

Bruce: She’s 6, no wait, she’s 52, no wait, she’s, I mean he’s 52.  

Paul can’t have it both ways.  Either he is a six-year girl or he’s a 52-year-old man.  He can’t demand that we treat him how he feels only when it is convenient for him, that’s not how life works.  Otherwise I would be a woman when it came time for my annual fitness test or if I wanted to apply for a small business loan or when I wanted to compete in sports.  

Safety is paramount

Many of the opponents of the transgender bathroom policy cite safety as their biggest concern.  They don’t want their daughters and wives in a public restroom with some dude dressed in women’s clothes.  Proponents of this policy argue that this concern is not valid because not all transgender people are pedophiles and rapists.  Okay fine, let’s concede that point.  In fact, let’s go one step further let’s say that all transgender people in America are fine citizens who have no ill intent.  Safety is still a concern, and here’s why.  

I would venture to guess that 99% of high school boys have at some time been curious to know what it is like to go into the girl’s locker room at school.  I was a high school boy and I wondered.  I’m not a pervert, but I sure as heck had hormones and I liked girls in high school.  But here’s the thing, I didn’t go into the girl’s locker room because I knew it was wrong and I had enough respect the girls in my high school to give them their privacy.

Now imagine a world where a boy can choose to go into the girl’s locker room simply because he feels like being a girl that day.  How about the locker room at your gym or college?  Forget all the well-meaning transgenders who are trying to find happiness, but now you have opened the door to scrupulous people who don’t mind exploiting a situation for their benefit and other people’s harm.  

This is why people are upset, it’s not because of hate or bigotry, it’s because they realize that there are bad people in this world who want to do bad things.  It’s true that a little blue sign may not stop someone from committing a crime, but when we relax social norms it gives the predators a place to operate.  And trust me there are predators in this world.

The numbers don’t add up

According to this New York Times Article there is an estimated 700,000 transgender people in America or .3% of the U.S. population.  The article also says that since 1936 only 135,000 people have officially changed their name and sex with the Social Security Administration. So here’s my take.  A person’s happiness should be subservient to the greater good.  If what makes a person happy puts other people at risk shouldn’t that person abstain from the behavior so as to not put others in danger? 

Again, if you are asking me to not be so narrow-minded then I implore you to think about the ramifications of accommodating everyone’s choices in order to make them happy.  Do we really as a society want to go to that rabbit hole?  What happens when people ask to the lower the age of consent from 18 to 16 or to 14?  What if a man 40-year old man lives as a 12-year old girl and wants to wants to have sex with a 12-year old boy?  At what point do we devolve into looking at people as either the penetrator or the penetrated with no question of age or gender?  That is where we are heading if we don’t change course. 

The demise of our society will not be guns or the environment; the demise of the American society will be when we exchange moral absolutes for moral relatives.  

Leftovers, enjoy

L. Kyle

Hostage crisis…

The First Amendment of the Constitution provides every American with freedom o f speech.  The freedom has been tried and tested many times, sometimes in favor of the individual, sometimes in the favor of the government.  Americans are free, for the most part, to criticize their government, like Rush Limbaugh, without a fear of being dragged into the gulag.  Americans are free, for the most, to speak in a lewd manner, like Howard Stern, without fear of penalty (that might even attract more listeners). 

Despite the freedom, legally, to speak our minds we are not free from the court of public opinion.  The recent comments by Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-Fil-A restaurants have created an outpouring of anti-Chick-Fil-A comments, sponsorship rejections and even a same-sex kiss-in in August to protest Mr. Cathy’s comments.  For what?  Because he said they support heterosexual marriages?  GASP!  That hate monger! 

This all started last year when an LGBT (that’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender for those of you who have not attended a repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” training session) group accused Chick-Fil-A of donating more than $3million to Christian groups who support traditional marriage.  In an interview which was printed 18 July, Mr. Cathy said that the company was “guilty as charged”.  They indeed do support the idea that marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman.  And he and his company have been tried, convicted and sentenced in the court of public opinion. 

So severe is the sentence that the Boston mayor said he would block future Chik-Fil-As from being started in the Boston area.  Jim Henson and the Muppets, once affliate of Chik-Fil-A has since pulled their affiliation. 

The fact that Mr. Cathy is being halted from building restaurants or shunned by celebrities is proof that we are being held hostage.  We are being held hostage with language not guns.  Dan Cathy did not use hateful rhetoric or mean-spirited language like the idiots from West Borough Baptist Church; he simply and politely stated that he used his money to support a cause he believed in.  The fact that he is being lambasted in the media and demonized as a hatemonger should serve as a wake-up call for everyone in America. 

We have truly come to a place in our society where if you do not subscribe to a certain belief that you are ostracized or labeled as hateful or labeled as ignorant.  It’s not just with the issue to sexual preference, but global warming and abortion carry the same sentence for those who might oppose.  Recently the Susan G. Komen foundation (the foundation responsible for Race for the Cure) recently found itself in the same predicament when the Chairwoman decided to pull funding from Planned Parenthood.  They faced such a backlash that they reversed their stance and continue to give money to an organization responsible for the deaths of millions. 

How could this happen?  How can a non-profit organization and privately held company be bullied into making apologies for an ideological position?  There was nothing hateful in their speech.  Mr. Cathy didn’t say “I hate all of the gay people in the whole world” or the Susan G. Komen foundation didn’t say “All women who get abortions need to go to hell.” 

It has happened because there has been an ideological shift in our society which has taken control of our language.  The exact time the shift happened really can’t be pinpointed to a certain day or year.  Maybe it was when as a society we stopped believing in absolute truth.  At some point the Enlightenment Era, which was steeped in the assumption that science, art, literature etc. searched for or believed in an absolute truth.  Our Declaration of Independence was formed during the Enlightenment Era and it states “we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal…”

But the Enlightenment Era gave way to the Modern Era where people began to reject the certainty of a Creator.  Science, art, and literature no longer had that foundation to begin with, but a foundation of humanism, which is to say that humans are the center of the world and human pursuit should be above all. Humanism rejects anything supernatural and replaces it with human reasoning and the idea of human nature is essentially “good.” 

This line of thinking is what has led us into the Post Modern Era which further separates us from absolute truth.  Postmodernism rejects any objective way to explaining reality.  So in the post-modern world if a person says they believe the sky to be purple, well, it’s purple.  Even if scientific evidence supports the sky being blue, the sky is purple in their mind and in their mind they are right. 

It is from this line of thinking that our language has been hijacked and anyone who does not subscribe to the postmodern thought process is held hostage.  Postmodernism is responsible for the politically correct world we live in.  No longer can Dan Cathy (or anyone like him) state that he doesn’t support gay marriage.  He can’t say this because he is telling people he believes in a standard and that anything that deviates from that standard is wrong. 

But if Dan Cathy says that gay marriage is wrong he is demonized, he is tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty of being hateful.  The scary thing is that in Canada’s hate speech law sexual orientation is included in the protected classes of people.  Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not advocating for gay-bashing or saying cruel things.  This is scary because a person, let’s say, oh, a pastor perhaps, gives a sermon on Romans 1 and says that homosexuality is wrong.  That pastor can then put into jail.  For what?  For nothing more than his beliefs.

Well, L. Kyle that’s Canada, this is America that would never happen here. 

If Boston and Chicago are successful at blocking the building of a restaurant because the CEO doesn’t support gay marriage,  I would say that we are not far off.

Leftovers enjoy!

L. Kyle