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The Increasingly Queer Face of Ideology in America
I had recently been watching Congressional Hearings concerning the promotion of ideological transgenderism within public schools and other public venues. I soon came to understand that the contention was not between conflicting arguments — each based on reason and both prepared to be defended on rational grounds — but a contention between reason and ideology. Given the consistent and adamant refusal of those promoting transgender ideology to engage in rational discourse — that is to say, their unwillingness or inability to provide both logically and biologically consistent reasons for adopting their agendum. And reasons, we must be clear, are not to be conflated with mere statements that such and such “is simply the case” despite the absence of reasons for it necessarily being so. The inability to adduce rational explanations to substantiate their arguments merely results in radically subjective statements of the following sort: “I simply choose to believe this and on these grounds I am prepared to legislate it for everyone else.” Still not agreed? Perhaps I can take another tack: the transgenderist makes no pretense to arguing along rational lines, that is, from premises to conclusions defensible from those premises: instead, he dispenses with premises altogether and immediately moves to a spurious facsimile of a conclusion, one that is not the product of reason — but of will: “I will (choose, desire) that it be so, and no amount of sound reasoning can make it otherwise!” It is not a matter of providing logical reasons that it should be so: I myself am the reason that it should be so! In the end, it quickly became clear that it was not a matter of competing reasons at all, but a matter of reason vis-à-vis the intransigence of the will. It was my introduction to the Theater of the Absurd as I listened to judicial nominees unable (really, only unwilling) to understand the first question that arises in delivery rooms around the world and from time immemorial: “Is it a boy or a girl?” People claiming to be of a sound mind routinely maintain that, within any given sampling of the population, they are unable to identify the male gender as distinct from the female gender, insisting that such descriptors are arbitrary social assignments with no credible basis in science or biology — despite the overwhelmingly apparent presence of biological features in the way of anatomy. Nor will they acknowledge empirical and long-established data more fundamental still in the identification and classification of the human species itself in terms of unalterable chromosomes, particularly DNA. So exhaustive is this structure that a mature individual has a complete set of paired chromosomes within every single cell in his body. It is understood — and not just widely accepted, but universally acknowledged — that males have 1 X and 1 Y chromosome, while females have 2 X chromosomes, and this structure cannot be eradicated or altered, still less can it be “socially” assigned or designated. Prevailing notions of “correctitude” in social discourse can never attain to the realities from which they abstain. Mere statements do not result in biological realities. And statements that conflict with biological realities can only be understood in an altogether spurious language more consistent with an ideology than a reality. It is not just puzzling when someone says, in effect, “It is beyond my cognitive capacity to make a distinction between a man and a woman: I am epistemologically incapable of distinguishing between the two.” Such a statement is so patently bizarre that we immediately identify it, not as a statement sustainable by reason, but merely as an ideological assertion — and even those inclined to tolerate this abuse of language and reason are very well aware of this pretense! If one can give credence to this ideological incapacity, then one must equally give credence to the claim that language itself is incapable of delivering any meaningful descriptive utterances — that is to say, anything descriptive of a presumed reality. This is further to say that there is no longer any correspondence between language as descriptive and reality as objective. And who will argue this? Only those who live in the protean world of ideology uncoupled from reality. In this world there are no men and no women, only fictions of each; fictions, moreover, that are ideologically fluid and unable to find any objective context in an inherently disordered and chaotic world of their making. Sad to say, this is not the last, but only the latest chapter in the annals of insanity gripping America, and almost exclusively promoted by the elitist Liberal Left from their usual haunts in the media and academia. And it is particularly pernicious in that it purposes to abolish language as descriptive of reality, and reason as the custodian of both. In the end, reality ideologically understood as subjective is no reality at all.
Geoffrey K. Mondello September 29, 2023 Comments? Write us: editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
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The Face
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