Guest Editorial
By Matt Barber | JUNE 15, 2016
Indecent exposure: The 'gender identity' agenda
“War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.” This was the slogan of George Orwell’s fictional English Socialist Party (INGSOC) of Oceania, from his timeless dystopian novel “1984.”
Orwell depicted a mind-control technique employed by INGSOC called “doublethink,” which “describes the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts.” If the malleable masses could be made to believe self-contradictory, patently absurd and empirically impossible concepts as true, went Orwell’s thesis, they could then be made to believe, or do, anything.
We have entered an age that George Orwell might never have imagined. Today’s “American Socialist Party” (the secular left) has applied the doublethink mind-control technique on a grand scale. Its slogan?
“Male is Female; Female is Male; Evil is good.” Indeed, not only do secular leftists like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton stubbornly maintain that objective morality be treated as relative – that evil is good and good evil; they now demand that the immutable laws of physics and biology be similarly repealed.
There are things true and things untrue. It is true, for instance, that water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen (H20). No amount of wishful thinking, angry foot-stomping, or even a tyrannical presidential edict issued to America’s public school chemistry classes can change this unchangeable reality.
It is likewise true that a person born with XX chromosomes is, and shall always be, female, while a person born with distinct X and Y chromosomes is forever male. Again, no amount of self-delusion, gnashing of teeth, cross-dressing, genital mutilation surgery, or utterly bizarre presidential doublethink dictates can alter this unalterable fact.
While we would call a person who subjectively insists that water is comprised of pure hydrogen either ignorant or insane, we incongruously call the person who similarly insists that a man can somehow “transition” to a woman, “progressive.” Even so, it is neither ignorance nor insanity that drives the progressive goal of a creating a “genderless” society. It is something far more sinister.
It is temporal control.
And it is spiritual defiance.
Progressive efforts to “legalize” genderless “marriage” by way of extra-constitutional judicial fiat do not make it legitimate marriage any more than “legalizing” abortion makes it not murder. Likewise, calling a sexually confused man a “trans-woman” makes him no more a woman than cutting the stem off a banana makes it a cantaloupe.
Yet, this “Emperor’s New Clothes” agenda moves ahead at breakneck speed. The necks to be broken, of course, are possessed by those who embrace the biblical sexual ethic and the morality of modesty.
There are multiple layers within progressivism’s pseudo-utopian, truly dystopian philosophy. The left’s lust for redistributionist statism is well-known. Less understood is the progressive rush toward cultural Marxism. With the fast-burgeoning and well-organized push to open girls’ bathrooms and showers to sexually confused men, the menace of cultural Marxism has reached unprecedented levels.
Cultural Marxism entails, among other things, that secularist aspect of left-wing statist ideology that seeks, within society, to supplant traditional values, norms and mores with postmodern moral relativism. It endeavors to destroy innocence, sexualize children, desensitize them to sexual perversion of every stripe and, quite literally, expose as many young girls as possible to adult male genitalia.
Cultural Marxists aim to scrub America of her Judeo-Christian, constitutional-republican founding principles and take, instead, a secular-statist Sharpie to our beloved U.S. Constitution.
Historian and U.S. military affairs expert William S. Lind describes cultural Marxism as “a branch of Western Marxism, different from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union. It is commonly known as ‘multiculturalism’ or, less formally, Political Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work, hence the use of terms such as ‘multiculturalism.'”
Pastor, attorney and former Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Scott Lively is globally admired by liberty-loving traditionalists. Conversely, he’s universally reviled by cultural Marxists. He drills down a bit deeper: “Cultural Marxism is a variation of the Marxist strategy to build a utopian socialist order on the ashes of Christian civilization, but through subversion of the moral culture, especially the elimination of the natural family, rather than solely through destruction of capitalism.” True though this may be, the ideological seeds of contemporary cultural Marxism nonetheless sprout from deep within the dead soil of historical communism. It is not economic redistributionism alone through which progressives seek to both “fundamentally transform America” and otherwise conquer the world, but rather, and perhaps primarily, it is through victory over the pejoratively tagged “social issues” (i.e., sin-centric “gay marriage,” “gender identity” and “neutrality,” perverting human sexuality, morality and the natural family structure, child sacrifice via abortion on demand, abolishing religious liberty and so on).
Regrettably, today’s “low-information voters,” as Rush Limbaugh calls them – to include the useful idiots within the GOP’s “moderate” and libertarian wings – are simply too lazy, shortsighted or both to learn the facts. “Surrender on the ‘social issues’!” demands the GOP’s cultural Marxist-enabling kamikazes.
Still, as the American Family Association’s tremendously successful boycott of Target, which has cost that gender-bending company billions of dollars and millions of customers, coupled with the dozen or more states that have rejected Obama’s open bathrooms and showers edict reveals: We Americans who happen to be tethered to scientific and moral reality will never, ever surrender.
In the temporal realm, secular leftists’ chaotic crusade to destroy marriage, the family and create a “Brave New World” of despotic androgyny is a revolt designed to bring down Western civilization – an oppressive patriarchy, as they view it, which stems from the archaic precepts of Judeo-Christian morality.
In the spiritual realm, the gender agenda represents fist-shaking rebellion against the very Creator who, “at the beginning … ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'” (see Matthew 19:4-5).
It remains to be seen how the temporal battle will play out.
The spiritual battle is a foregone conclusion.
Matt Barber is founder and editor-in chief of BarbWire.com. He is an author, columnist, cultural analyst and an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. Having retired as an undefeated heavyweight professional boxer, Matt has taken his fight from the ring to the culture war. (Follow Matt on Twitter: @jmattbarber).
