From the editor’s desk:
You probably saw that during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, she refused to answer what a woman is. Joe Biden appointed Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court because she was a black woman, the sole qualification Biden outlined for his first Supreme Court appointment when he was running for president. Asked if she agreed with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that “there are differences between men and women that are enduring,” Brown Jackson responded: “I can’t. Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.” Political pieties require that progressives refuse to acknowledge biological differences between the sexes and pretend that gender traits are a matter of individual choice. I suppose the silver lining on this cloud is that at least the newest Supreme Court Justice (she was later approved 53-47 by the Senate), acknowledges the issue of male and female is a biological one. Many conservative commentators acknowledged the irony that a woman chosen precisely because she was a woman could not define what a woman is; fewer, however, commented upon the fact that Brown Jackson repeatedly referred to women’s issues (such as on abortion) throughout her confirmation hearings and talked about being a role model to women lawyers. Ketanji Brown Jackson also resorted to biological ignorance when asked about abortion and the viability standard to restrict the lethal procedure. “I am not a biologist,” she demurred. “I haven’t studied this.”
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Headline in The Federalist: “Genital mutilation supporters are upset that Bella Hadid got a nose job at 14.” Yes, some of the people who insist that a five-year-old child can understand that they can identify as the opposite of their biological sex and that teenagers who do so should be allowed to undergo so-called “gender-affirmation” (read: sex-change) operations, are also irate with comments by model Bella Hadid, 25, who said in an interview with Vogue that she regretted her decision to have a nose job in her early teens. There was a lot of online indignation that her mother Yolanda Hadid permitted the impressionable and insecure child to have such procedure at such a tender age. It is worth noting that Bella Hadid said, “I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors. I think I would have grown into it.” Could not the same thing be said about gender-confused teenagers and their feelings about their genitalia?
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National Review managing editior Judson Berger surveys pronoun guides for what is officially labeled as offensive nowadays. A University of Maryland guide, Berger says, makes “transgender the default in everyday language” by insisting that man and woman be prefaced by “cisgender.” The same guide counsels against the terms “biological man” or “biological woman” because it leaves out transgender men and women. Springfield College notes that the term “’gender-neutral’ can offend people who are ‘gendered’ but also ‘nonbinary’.” Thus, the use of they/them/their as singular pronouns and the made-up pronouns “ze/hir/hir” should not be referred to as gender-neutral, but rather “nonbinary pronouns.” Got that? The New York City government, Berger notes, says to those who “do not have worry about which pronoun someone is going to use for you based on how they perceive your gender” are afflicted with “pronoun privilege.” While it does not say, you are probably a bigot if you have not considered yourself pronoun privileged.
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It is one thing for gender identity craziness to infect the academy but what happens on campus does not stay on campus. Two recent news items are noteworthy. The Daily Telegraph reported that in the United Kingdom, the Walton Centre National Health Services Foundation Trust in Liverpool will now ask all patients under the age of 60 who will have X-rays or MRI scans if they pregnant. One woman told the paper the question caused her husband “unnecessary confusion and agitation.” Meanwhile, the National Post reported that the Canadian Armed Forces will bring gender-neutral uniforms to the military. Men and women in the armed forces currently are given different style caps and have different rules regarding jewelry, hair, and makeup; combat wear is already gender-neutral.
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When the popular right-leaning podcaster Dave Rubin announced online that he and his homosexual partner were going to have two babies later this year through surrogacy, my colleague Josie noted with disappointment that many right-wingers on Twitter and Instagram congratulated the couple. Some of them are critical of the idea of homosexual “marriage” but can’t bring themselves to condemn their friend. But that, and gay parenting, is only one issue. The other is the acceptance, even celebration, of surrogacy. As Jordan Boyd said at The Federalist, “our culture often heralds the big fertility industry despite the drastic and negative effects is has on babies and women” which is a “lucrative racket … (that) rakes in billions of dollars each year.” Surrogacy is sold as a solution to having children for homosexual couples and women that do not want to endure the bodily changes and symptom of pregnancy. As Boyd said, “plenty of reportedly pro-life and conservative outlets congratulated Rubin on Twitter but the truth is there’s not much to praise about needlessly separating a baby from his biological mother to fulfill your own self-interest.” Jennifer Roback Morse wrote in the National Catholic Register that Rubin’s action and the conservative response is indicative of the moral bankruptcy of secular conservatism. Roback Morse describes in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy — the erasure of the genetic and gestational contribution of women to their children — as a crime against humanity and an affront to God. Rubin should be castigated, not congratulated, for getting his supposedly conservative friends to congratulate him and his live-in friend “for erasing women from his children’s lives” and “violating the most basic of human bonds, the bond between parents and children.” She said that there is nothing conservative about stripping children of their birthright or intentional denial of the importance of biological familial relations.
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In the Jennifer Roback Morse column mentioned above, she concludes: “When the history of this era is written, people will look back and marvel at how crazy we have become, how filled with hubris we are, how stubbornly self-indulgent we are.” Of course, that applies to not just surrogacy, but the various manias for proper pronouns and the denial of obvious truths like what a woman is. I hope that Roback Morse is correct that when future historians look at the strange preoccupations of our age, it will be recognized that “only people of faith had the sense to see that this was wrong – and the courage to stand against it.” I say “hope” because there are not nearly enough people of faith standing up against the this denormalization. But I also wonder If her optimism is warranted that future historians will recognize that ours will be an Age of Madness, which presupposes a revival of Right Reason.
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I’d like to share one good pieces of news with you. The BBC reported that Zechariah and Shama, a Jewish couple married for 91 years, recently celebrated their anniversary. The two were Jewish orphans in Yemen and married at the ages of 12 and 10 respectively to avoid being forced into an inter-religious marriage and converted to Islam. They cleaned and lived in barns as they endured poverty, fled Yemeni persecution and arrived in Israel in their 20s in 1948. Shama said, “we didn’t lick honey in life, we suffered,” but Zechariah said, “God protected us all the way.” He does, doesn’t He? The couple, now both centenarians, have 11 children and 64 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
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More good news. Sophia Institute Press has released a new edition of G.K. Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World with a foreword by Sohrab Amari. Chesterton, who was born 148 years ago this month and originally wrote What’s Wrong with the World in 1910, often seems to be talking about attacks on human dignity that see around us today. Chesterton wrote penetratingly and presciently about education, medical ethics, church-going, the family, and numerous other issues you might think are uniquely early 21st century affronts to sanity. Amari notes that “Chesterton saw ‘woke capital’ coming some 110 years ago … he saw how unfettered capital … goes hand in hand with, and promotes, social progressivism.” For Chesterton, insanity is rooted in rejection of Christian truths: “In the modern world we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old.” The immutable truths remain; our ignorance is chosen. Chesterton in a typically wonderful turn of phrase observes, “the secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things if that is any comfort for them.” And with that destruction, the secularists have wrecked, too, the pleasures of a normal, everyday life. Amari says to “read this work is to share the company of a witty friend who trusts your intelligence and addresses you at eye level.” Buy two and gift one.
