RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/shall

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on board the Crystal Symphony on July 19, 2018, during a Hillsdale College educational cruise to Hawaii.

The recent news that the University of Notre Dame, responding to complaints by some students, would “shroud” its twelve 134-year-old murals depicting Christopher Columbus was disappointing. It was not surprising, however, to anyone who has been paying attention to the widespread attack on America’s past wherever social justice warriors congregate.

Notre Dame may not be particularly friendly to its Catholic heritage, but its president, the Rev. John Jenkins, demonstrated that it remains true to its jesuitical (if not, quite, its Jesuit) inheritance. Queried about the censorship, he said, apparently without irony, that his decision to cover the murals was not intended to conceal anything, but rather to tell “the full story” of Columbus’s activities.

Welcome to the new Orwellian world where censorship is free speech and we respect the past by attempting to elide it.

Over the past several years, we have seen a rising tide of assaults on statues and other works of art representing our nation’s history by those who are eager to squeeze that complex story into a box defined by the evolving rules of political correctness. We might call this the “monument controversy,” and what happened at Notre Dame is a case in point: a vocal minority, claiming victim status, demands the destruction, removal, or concealment of some object of which they disapprove. Usually, the official response is instant capitulation.

As the French writer Charles Péguy once observed, “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” Consider the frequent demands to remove statues of Confederate war heroes from public spaces because their presence is said to be racist. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for example, has recently had statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson removed from a public gallery. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has set up a committee to review “all symbols of hate on city property.”

But it is worth noting that the monument controversy signifies something much larger than the attacks on the Old South or Italian explorers.

In the first place, the monument controversy involves not just art works or commemorative objects. Rather, it encompasses the resources of the past writ large. It is an attack on the past for failing to live up to our contemporary notions of virtue.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/state_power_now_being_used_to_force_parents_to_transgender_their_kids__or_else.html

A disturbing report from The Federalist details efforts by transgender activists to school the courts in how to deal with parents who refuse to transgender their young children. In some cases, the courts have seized children whose parents refuse to recognize their child’s “true” gender.

Margot Cleveland of The Federalist talked to Dr. Michelle Cretella, executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, who described “two waves” of this trend.

“I first began hearing from distraught parents in this situation in 2016 and in 2017, I heard from seven families in as many different states in this situation. In all but one case the child was a 15 year-old girl who never had any sexual identity confusion prior to her parent’s [sic] divorce,” Cretella said. “The other case involved 4-year-old triplet boys whose mother desperately wanted a girl. The mother was a psychologist herself and had cross-dressed one of the boys for two years, insisting that it was his idea. In each of the seven cases the guardian ad litems and judges removed the right to medical consent and/or custody from the parent who objected to transition with puberty blockers and hormones.”

The “second wave” is even worse.

We have since moved on to the second wave, Cretella told The Federalist. “The second wave is going on now, with emergency room staff, therapists, or doctors reporting parents to Child Protective Services who refuse to affirm their child’s false gender.”

More recently, Cretella explains, she has heard from two sets of parents who were accused of being “abusive parents” for refusing to consent to hormone treatments for their teen children. In one case, the parents sought treatment for their son’s suicidal depression. Their son was adopted out of an abusive family, had a long history of depression and anxiety, had been in therapy in the past, was on medications, and never had any sign of gender dysphoria.

https://pjmedia.com/video/lesbian-feminist-lgb-are-based-on-sex-transgend

On Tuesday night, lesbian feminist Julia Beck went on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to explain the LGBT breakup. She insisted that the L, G, and B — which stand for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual — are fundamentally different from the T — transgender — and that transgender identity is dangerous to women.

“The letters in the acronym share not much,” Beck told Tucker Carlson. “The L, G, and B are based on sexualities; they’re based on sex, biological realities. But the T is based on gender identity, which is not based in biological reality. In fact, I would argue it is supposed to biological reality.”

“The LGB is very different from the T, and I don’t think it’s fair to lump us into the same acronym,” Beck declared, arguing against the use of the LGBT acronym.

“Well, when we get down to it, women and girls all share a biological reality,” she insisted. “We are all female. But if any man, if any male person, can call himself a woman, or legally identified as female, then predatory men will do so in order to gain access to women’s single-sex spaces, and this puts every woman and girl at risk.”

Julia Beck was not arguing that people who genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria (the persistent condition of identifying with the gender opposite their biological sex) are a threat to women, but rather that enshrining gender identity into law would put women at risk. Indeed, voyeurs at Targets across America took advantage of that company’s transgender policy. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/a-transgender-hero-breaks-ranks/

Even though it’s still young, the transgender movement has occasioned many bizarre and horrific stories. But even in that company, the saga of Jamie Shupe stands out.

Born in 1963, Shupe has been married to his wife, Sandy, for three decades; they have a daughter. He spent eighteen years (1982-2000) in the U.S. Army. In 2013 he began identifying as a transgender woman, claiming that he had struggled for years with a deep sense of being different and had been harassed in the military because he was perceived as gay. After declaring that he was a woman, he “lived for a year in Pittsburgh, got hormone treatments and a name change,” but never had a sex-change operation. Finding Pittsburgh inhospitable for a trans woman, he relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he continued living as a woman for another two years. In 2015, the New York Times profiled Shupe as part of a splashy, upbeat series celebrating “transgender lives.”

“I have effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities,” Shupe lamented in the full-page Times testimony. “I now live in a world where radical, conservative politicians and religious groups routinely attack my very existence with legislation to deny me basic human rights such as a bathroom that matches my gender-identity….I am a transgender woman. My civil rights are fragile. I live in daily fear in a country that claims world leadership. And my trans brothers and sisters are forced to serve their nation in silence.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/virginia-democrats-controversy-intersectional-politics/

Who is the greatest victim of them all? Leave it to the mob to pick the ‘winner.’

From The Ox-Bow Incident to To Kill a Mockingbird, novelists warned of the American propensity to become mob-like and often lethally so. Our Puritan roots, when coupled to elements of Athenian-style democracy, can on occasion vary wildly between dangerous bias and equally mindless self-righteousness.

Update those traditions within the modern bane of electronically charged instantaneous social media, identity politics, the decline of journalism, and vicarious virtue-signaling, and we increasingly suffer psychodramas like the Virginia fraternity mess, the Duke Lacrosse fiasco, the Kavanaugh hearings, and the Covington nightmare.

In such cases, predictable constructs often set afire the new mob. “Vulnerable” women or minorities or both are juxtaposed against young white males who have the scent of traditionalism, conservatism, or “privilege.” I say “psychodramas,” because the point is never to assess guilt or innocence or to establish some set of objective standards by which to condemn or exempt the accused. No, the aim is to vent outrage — the quicker, the more venomous, and the more public, the more advantageous either in a careerist or psychological sense.

The result is that there are now no rules in the Roman arena of feeding the accused to the carnivores — except two. If the progressive cause can be advanced, then necessary, one-time adjustments can call off the mob. And, two, given the complex hierarchy of victimhood and the relative degrees of perceived progressive correctness, it is sometimes difficult to sort out who should be rescued from, and who served up to, the famished lions.

https://quillette.com/2019/02/04/psychologists-respond-to-the-apas-guidance-for-treating-men-and-boys/
Introduction — John P. Wright, Ph.D.

John Paul Wright is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati. He has published widely on the causes and correlates of human violence. His current work examines how ideology affects scholarship. Follow him on Twitter @cjprofman.

Thirteen years in the making, the American Psychological Association (APA) released the newly drafted “Guidelines for Psychological Practice for Boys and Men.” Backed by 40 years of science, the APA claims, the guidelines boldly pronounce that “traditional masculinity” is the cause and consequence of men’s mental health concerns. Masculine stoicism, the APA tells us, prevents men from seeking treatment when in need, while beliefs rooted in “masculine ideology” perpetuate men’s worst behaviors—including sexual harassment and rape. Masculine ideology, itself a byproduct of the “patriarchy,” benefits men and simultaneously victimizes them, the guidelines explain. Thus, the APA committee advises therapists that men need to become allies to feminism. “Change men,” an author of the report stated, “and we can change the world.”

But if the reaction to the APA’s guidelines is any indication, this change won’t happen anytime soon. Criticism was immediate and fierce. Few outside of a handful of departments within the academy had ever heard of “masculine ideology,” and fewer still understood how defining traditional masculinity by men’s most boorish—even criminal—behavior would serve the interests of men or entice them to seek professional help. Instead of passing quietly into the night, as most academic pronouncements do, the APA’s guidelines did what few such documents have ever done: They engendered a social media maelstrom, and likely not only lost professional credibility, but potentially created new barriers for men who need help.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/04/art-exhibit-invites-people-throw-trash-vacuuming-ivanka-trump-lookalike/

“Ivanka Vacuuming” is now a thing in the nation’s capital. Because art, or something.

The exhibit, on display at CulturalDC’s former Flashpoint Gallery in Washington, D.C., is a piece of “performance art” where an Ivanka Trump lookalike wearing a pink dress with bows and stiletto shoes vacuums crumbs off a plush, pink carpet. To make the spectacle interactive, onlookers are encouraged to take crumbs from a pedestal and throw them at her to vacuum up.

“Inspired by a figure whose public persona incorporates an almost comically wide range of feminine identities – daughter, wife, mother, sister, model, working woman, blonde – Ivanka Vacuuming is simultaneously a visual celebration of a contemporary feminine icon; a portrait of our own relationship to that figure; and a questioning of our complicity in her role-playing,” a press release on the project reads. “The public is invited to throw crumbs onto the carpet, watching as Ivanka elegantly vacuums up the mess, her smile never wavering. This process repeats itself for the entire duration of the performance.”

The irony, of course, is that the exhibit reflects every stereotype feminists claim to stand against, oversexualizing Ivanka’s body and ignoring her hard work. (One can only imagine the feminist rage if it were, say, Michelle Obama on display.)

In addition to mocking Ivanka for her looks, the exhibit demeans the First Daughter’s success as a business woman and White House advisor to that of a woman with a vacuum—as if something’s wrong with that, too. Worse, in the process of shaming stay-at-home mothers, “Ivanka Vacuuming” encourages onlookers to throw trash at her. Again, because “art,” or something.

Therein lies the only interesting insight offered by artist Jennifer Rubell, who is of course female because no male could get away with such sexism masked as art.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/gender-identity-ideology-honest-inquiry-demonized/Honest inquiry into the causes of gender dysphoria is being demonized.

With debate over the Equality Act looming, two groups held events in Washington D.C. last weekend. The first, “Women Stand Up,” was organized by members of Standing for Women, along with other bipartisan women’s- and lesbian-rights groups across Britain and North America. The second, “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns from the Left,” was put on by the Heritage Foundation and featured an all-liberal panel.

Jennifer Chavez, a liberal lawyer on the Heritage panel, pointed out an irony:

One of the significant differences between here and the U.K. is that there are journalists in the U.K. speaking out about [the issue]. And here there are journalists speaking out but not with the sort of national reach and name recognition that the journalists who are speaking in the U.K. have had and I think that has made a humongous difference. So, we need journalists to speaking about this and covering both sides of the story at least.

Ironically, Chavez was later misquoted (and a correction was issued) by Tim Fitzsimons of NBC News. Fitzsimons’s piece focused on the conservative politics of the Heritage Foundation and ignored the progressive parents’ testimony.

This is particularly striking, since the host at the Heritage Foundation, Ryan T. Anderson, explained that the event had only come about once a progressive mother, whose autistic daughter has identified as a boy for the past four years, contacted him saying she’d been ignored by liberal organizations and media.

“As a lifelong Democrat I am outraged by my former party and find it ironic that only conservative news outlets have reported my story without bias or censorship,” the mother, who wished to remain anonymous to protect her daughter’s privacy but is known to National Review, wrote.

Anderson introduced the event by acknowledging that while he and the panel and audience likely disagreed on a range of issues from abortion to taxes, “If ‘gender identity’ becomes a protected class in federal civil-rights law, there will be serious negative consequences. That’s where we agree. And that’s where we can work together.”

https://quadrant.org.au/hard-to-swallow/

In his Road to Wigan Pier, which touches often on the miserable diets of the poor in that unfortunate town, George Orwell reserved a special contempt “the food crank” who is

…by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.

Such sorts were attracted, he said, by

… the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ [which] draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

Those words were published in 1937, when the Left’s ratbag fringe was the chief sanctuary of those given to lecturing a population recently reminded of what they were missing by the empty bellies of the Great Depression and, according to the food fanatics, shouldn’t be eating anyway. In one word: meat to build bones and bodies.

That was then. Today the commissars of cuisine no longer need hector and lecture from the outer edges of rational discourse. Indeed, the local variety now get to deliver their sermons from the pulpit of Their ABC’s news pages, where authors Rosemary Stanton and Kris Barnden today prescribe the diet we must embrace to stymie “the ongoing devastation of our planet.”

Blessed with the authoritative tag line “analysis”, rather than the more appropriate “opinion”, they detail a menu that, while it might not help you live longer, will certainly make it seem that way (emphasis added).