Every week I read something that makes me say, well, now I’ve seen everything. The next day I find I haven’t.
This time the star columnist of The Times David Aaronovich has come up with something truly emetic.
David, you see, has never seen a destructive New Age cause he couldn’t love. I don’t even have to mention any: you name it, he supports it.
This time it’s the ‘transgender’ cause that has made him pick up the banner. Now an old hand like me who has indeed seen, if not everything, at least most things, doesn’t have to drink a whole bottle of corked wine to realise it has turned to vinegar. One sip or, in an article, one word is enough.
In this instance, the word is ‘gender’, in the meaning of sex. Show me a man who uses it, and I’ll show you a leftie nonentity. Such a man is so scared of offending other leftie nonentities (and they do offend easily) that he’d rather offend taste, logic, decency, morality and a few other minor things. Such as 2,000 years of civilisation.
‘Gender’, David, denotes a grammatical category. What separates men from women is called sex. At least that’s what people with a modicum of taste call it.
Anyway, the case that got David going involves Bradley Manning, an American traitor currently serving 25 years in prison. While there, Bradley decided that he wanted to become a woman. Ergo, he demanded that the requisite procedures be administered while he paid his debt to society.
David ruefully admits that he started from a position of bigotry, that is from a normal human reaction to an aberration. This is something he now regrets, presumably because he had a vision.
Chelsea Manning, née Bradley, must have appeared before his eyes and asked the lapidary question: “Why do you persecute me so?” David fainted and fell off his high horse. When he came to he wrote, “When Bradley became Chelsea Manning I laughed – until the transgender truth shut me up for good.”
At this point I jumped up, punched air and cheered loudly. Alas, I was immediately disappointed. David didn’t shut up not only for good but even for a second.
Without missing a beat he tugged on our heart strings by relating several soppy stories about the suffering of transsexuals. David was deeply moved, but then it doesn’t take much to make this lot deeply moved by any perversion.
“As I’ve read more about it, it becomes apparent that there is a small group of people… who were, if you like, ‘born in the wrong bodies’. These people need our help and understanding and are as deserving of them as anyone else. But they have received none so far from me. Why not?”
I can answer that, David. Because you had normal human instincts that have now been overridden by a pernicious ideology.
A Christian would emphatically disagree that these people deserve ‘help and understanding’, in the sense of publicly financed sex-change procedures. Such people deserve love – because all people do.
If they indeed suffer, they deserve it even more – and perhaps also advice on the noble role of suffering. David is of course unfamiliar with such things, and if he isn’t he despises them, but suffering is the formative experience of our civilisation.
Every great Western thinker has written about its morally and spiritually elevating role in the development of a personality. To put it simply, without suffering there is no development and hardly any personality.
Those born with the disorder that has so excited David’s puny imagination are unlikely to find much physical happiness in life. But they’d have a head start in their search for spiritual happiness – provided the Zeitgeist weren’t shaped by the likes of David.
He then goes on to admit that the sight of a woman with a beard or a man with breasts makes him feel “threatened”. Such heartlessness is to him a deadly sin and, in the good tradition of our civilisation, he expiates it by repenting. He recognises the error of his previously normal ways.
“This recognition [made me] look my ‘transphobia’… full in its fearful face.” A lovely neologism, that. If David invented it, this knack for new coinages will get him into the thesaurus of quotations before he’s through.
Once the repentance wagon got rolling, David went on to repent his reaction “to other situations – like the wearing of the burka – in which my discomfort may be overwhelming my reason. … It is not actually a big problem in this country. Nor is it ever likely to be.”
Islamisation of Britain, a problem? Perish the thought. Of course there’s the small matter that the same chaps who make their women cover up would happily eviscerate anyone named Aaronovich, but David rises above personal interests.
Speaking of his interests, I understand David is a Spurs fan. Well, the IT worker Paul Lovell is currently on trial for corrupting the morals of a sheep next to the club’s training ground in Enfield. David ought to start a campaign for his release.
After all, the poor man was born that way. He can only find happiness in tucking ovine hind legs into his Wellies. Paul Lovell deserves help, understanding and a publicly financed flock of sheep, not prison.
And we must also take up the cause of David Aaronovich, a mindless creature trapped in the body of a columnist.