In a crisis-ridden era, the U.S. Navy focuses on…pronouns By Andrea Widburg
Winston Churchill memorably described British Navy traditions as “rum, sodomy, and the lash.” In America, the lash, thankfully, is gone and rum is for off-duty hours but sodomy (that is, homosexuality) has moved front and center. The latest example is the childish video the Navy is having its members watch so that they can learn how pronouns work, including avoiding “misgendering” fellow members of the Navy.
Our military exists to defend America against foreign enemies, whether the battle is fought overseas or, God forbid, ends on American soil. Currently, we have a lot of enemies: Biden is busy trying to get us into a hot war with Putin, China is expanding its military and geographic reach, Iran continues its efforts to develop a nuclear bomb, and North Korea already has a nuclear bomb.
And while those threats face America, our Navy is focused like a laser on pronouns. This focus doesn’t just represent a complete collapse in the military’s mission. It also represents a serious threat to the military’s operational efficiency.
Pronouns actually aren’t complicated, whether in English or any other language. They are the word we substitute in lieu of nouns or proper nouns when referring to any person, animal, or object. A sentence such as “Mary went to her room to gather her books and bag so that she could go to her school” becomes a clunky nightmare if we remove the pronouns: “Mary went to Mary’s room to gather Mary’s books and bag so that Mary could go to Mary’s school.”
But in today’s day and age, as explained by Naval Undersea Warfare Center engineers Jony Rozon and Conchy Vaquez, both attired in the now ubiquitous “Pride” clothes, pronouns aren’t about the utility and clarity of the English language. They are, instead there to support navel-gazing self-aggrandizement. Thus, Conchy explains in the simple tones reserved for speaking to a mentally damaged child, “A pronoun is how we identify ourselves apart from our name and it’s also how people refer to us in conversations.”
Personalized pronouns are also a way to reduce the English language to a nonsensical joke. Take the modern pronoun-rich sentence, “Mary went to their room to gather their books and bag so that they could go to their school.” Ostensibly, that sentence is about Mary but the literal meaning is that Mary has some sort of roommate or companion sharing her room and dogging her footsteps the entire way.
Pronoun madness makes sentences even more unintelligible when you add in so-called “transgender” issues: “There are Carol and Fred. I told you about them. She is their father.”
Image: Our modern Navy. YouTube screen grab.
Imagine a cutting-edge, time-sensitive, urgent naval emergency. And then imagine the sailors and marines involved trying to communicate what’s going on through a welter of illogical and imaginary pronouns. If they can’t figure out who’s doing what to whom (and who is responsible for what), ships and planes crash, bullets fly, and people die. And even if they can figure it out, they may lose so much precious time that the outcome is the same.
Obama started the grotesque practice of turning the U.S. military, a highly functional, color-blind, well-integrated, merit-based organization into a social justice experiment. Biden has taken that misbegotten experiment and run with it. I fear that a lot of people—both in the military and in America’s civilian population—are going to die because of this Marxist social justice policy.
I have a very simple pronoun policy. If it’s reasonable to believe you’re female, I’ll use female pronouns for you; if it’s reasonable to believe you’re male, I’ll use male pronouns for you. If your gender is a mystery, well…I’ll make my best guess. But I will not mangle English, logic, and safety to cater to your narcissism.
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