It’s the gender, stupid

The recent clash between President Biden and Governor DeSantis has highlighted the key conflict of our time and I’ll give you a clue: it has little to do with economics.

Ron, still fighting the good fight

Back in the 1990s, whenever Bill Clinton’s campaign staff went off on a tangent, his strategist James Carville told them to stay on course. “It’s the economy, stupid,” he’d repeat.

That mantra has since lost some of its pulling power, although the economy remains a hot topic in any electoral debates. But the real demarcation line is drawn elsewhere.

If mainstream parties and politicians differ from one another on the economy, it’s only quantitatively, not qualitatively. Should the taxes be exorbitant or extortionate? Should the state print and borrow money promiscuously or suicidally? Should government regulations shackle the economy or strangulate it?

Voters look at such debates and shrug with indifference and ennui: six of one, half a dozen of the other. They do sense there’s a war going on, but the economy isn’t its pivotal battlefield.

What little is left of Western mentality, morality, legality and even aesthetics is fighting a desperate rearguard action against the onslaught of hostile forces hellbent on annihilating traditional culture, in the broadest possible sense. And those forces inscribe on their banners slogans dealing not with economics, but with race and, increasingly, sex.

They have declared war on the core certitudes of mankind in general and the West in particular. Those certitudes used to be based on religion, but they survived for a long time even as the West was steering away from theism. Common sense, custom and taste took up the slack for a while.

No longer. All those good things are reeling under the blows of modernity, and they are ceding their positions one by one. But there’s still fight in the old tradition left, a point made by Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

I don’t follow US politics as closely as I should but, looking from across the ocean, DeSantis increasingly looks the leader I wish we had. I like everything he does, and I never thought I’d be able to utter such praise of a politician.

That leader of the cultural rearguard in America has recently fired a mighty salvo. DeSantis signed a law prohibiting transgender treatment for children and classroom discussions of such issues. The discussions are banned for children of eight or younger, while treatment with puberty blockers, hormones and surgery is banned for new patients aged under 18.

The shells of decency hit home, and the aggressor came back with a return barrage directed by Joe Biden. Joe has never seen a destructive (aka progressive) idea he couldn’t love, and he wheeled out the big guns.

What DeSantis is doing makes Joe feel just awful. He communicated his disgust with his customary fluency: “It’s as my mother would say close to sinful. I mean, it’s just terrible what they’re doing. It’s not like, you know, a kid wakes up one morning and says, you know, I decided I want to become a man or I want to become a woman or I want to change,” Biden said.

“I mean, what are they thinking about here? We’re human beings. They love, they have feelings. They have inclinations . . . It just to me is, I don’t know, it’s cruel.”

When it suits him, Biden likes to describe himself as a devout Catholic. One has to assume his sainted mother indeed was one, which is why her understanding of sin couldn’t possibly have been the same as her son’s. Had little Joey told her he saw nothing wrong with trans- or homosexuality, she probably would have sent him to bed without supper.

Yet for Biden and his ilk the only sin left is the insistence that any sin other than opposing wokery exists.

One senses that the next US presidential election will greatly affect the fortunes of the on-going battle for our civilisation. If DeSantis becomes the Republican nominee, as many observers think likely, and Biden fronts the Democrats, it’ll be so much more than just a clash of two candidates or two parties.

One urge of modernity is to turn grown-ups into children and children into grown-ups. To that end, adults are deprived of their intelligence and children of their innocence. I mean it’s like, you know, just terrible what the little ones are exposed to – my mother, though, unlike the late Mrs Biden, an atheist, would say it’s close to mad.

If the so-called leader of the free world thinks it’s cruel not to enlighten eight-year-olds about the joys of trans- and homosexuality, then this world is no longer free, nor indeed sane. And anyone who thinks that such teaching can ever be anything other than propaganda is sorely mistaken.

At that age, children should be taught stories about bunny rabbits going hop-hop up the hill, not about the rich panoply of sexual variants. If they do have perverse inclinations, let them sort it out for themselves when they grow up. Any elucidation of such issues is bound to sound like encouragement.

In most cases, the angle of trans inclinations isn’t sufficiently acute for people to fall that way. Hardcore transexuals and homosexuals will find their level one way or another, with or without formal education to that effect. But more people find themselves sitting on the fence, and depending on circumstances they can come down on either side.

There used to be a stigma attached to perverse sexuality, which helped such borderline cases stay on the right side. Now they are taught that neither side is wrong. Both are equally right, and the choice is up to every individual. It takes wilful ignorance of human nature to think that teaching such diabolical nonsense to little tots won’t have an effect.

Transsexuality in particular was a non-issue when I was young. In my whole, lamentably long, life I’ve only met three or four transsexuals, and seen just a few more. That tallies with statistics: in the past transsexuals numbered in the hundreds; today, in the tens of thousands. Britain, for example, boasts 260,000 of them.

What has caused such an inordinate growth? Something in the air? Carbon monoxide? Meat in the diet? Clearly, destigmatising perversion contributes to its numerical spread.

Yet numbers don’t paint the full picture. For in cultural wars, the face value of the banner slogans doesn’t matter all that much. Connotation dominates denotation. Subtext trumps text.

What’s going on is a concerted effort to destroy a civilisation, which isn’t accompanied by any clear idea of any workable replacement. Hence the specific targets in that assault are irrelevant, which is why they can be thrown together at will.

Biden showed how in the same interview. First, he vowed “to protect LGBTQ Americans, especially trans kids who are dealing with all these regressive state laws”.

From there, he effortlessly switched to touting another newly hatched orthodoxy: “People can’t deny it anymore. If we don’t keep the temperature from going above 1.5 degrees Celsius raised, then we’re in real trouble. That whole generation is damned.”   

Eudaemonic bliss will only descend on the world if we busily castrate children in operating theatres lit with electricity generated by windmills. That’s how Biden sees life, but it’s not how DeSantis sees it. I and what’s left of the free world will pray for his victory. It may well be our last hope.

8 thoughts on “It’s the gender, stupid”

  1. “I and what’s left of the free world will pray for his [De Santis] victory. It may well be our last hope.”

    Gonna be hard if next to impossible for a Republican to ever win the White House again. Demographic change occurring for decades places the Republican candidate in bad circumstances.

  2. Activists tell us that if children are not able to openly express their transsexuality they will commit suicide. In recent years we have encouraged thousands more children to claim they are not the sex we can all see. We have also seen a dramatic rise in suicide rates. So, which is it? Do children recklessly encouraged to pretend they can change their sex live happier, better lives or do they commit suicide? The numbers seem to indicate we are heading on the wrong direction.

    We do not let our children decide what to wear to school or what to eat for dinner, but we are prepared to let them make the decision to mutilate their bodies? As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.” These people are insane.

    1. If only they were just insane, it wouldn’t be so bad. I fear they may simply be evil, which is much worse. And I’m not surprised about the juvenile suicide rate. Children’s mental stbility depends on a moral and intellectual discipline that only religion can provide (but please don’t tell anyone I think so – I may well get arrested, if not now then later, when the bastards’ victory becomes final).

    2. “Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.”

      A sword time, an axe time, a red time. Let us not forget that one too.

  3. Going to my main city library I often pass through the children’s section, where most of the picture books destined even for 5 year olds peddle the latest woke messages on race, gender, transsexuality, homosexuality, etc., etc., and window dress all the short shelves.
    I think, nothing short of a Ukrainian like response will do against these criminals. Alas, we are not Ukrainians…

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