Why the Left Is in a Frenzy Over Transgender Ban

© Jack Cashill - July 26, 2017 - WND.com

As recently as three years ago, no Democratic politician in America would have insisted that the U.S. military ought to allow transgendered people to serve in the military, but today they are hysterically defending their right to do just that.

Even the most celebrated “T” in the military, the traitorous Bradley/Chelsea Manning, is up in arms at least metaphorically. “So biggest baddest most $$ on earth cries about a few trans people but funds the F-35? Sounds like cowardice.”

Most other tweets don’t merely express their disagreement with Donald Trump’s decision to bar the transgendered from serving. They express their disgust. Some samples off the top.

“This is a sad, dark day.”

“Donald Trump, who dodged the draft 5 times, is trying to rally his base by targeting LGBT w hate.”

“It is beyond deplorable to issue a ban like this.”

It goes on and on. I would suspect that not one out one hundred of these angry tweeters ever said boo about this subject during the seven sad dark years of the Obama administration when the transgendered could not serve.

Progressive anger, however, derives not from self-assurance but from anxiety. They never quite know what the boundaries of thought and language on a given subject at a given moment might be.

Resident Duck Dynasty philosopher Phil Robertson got it right when he described their belief system as “constantly changing and evolving” and eventually “morphing into a dark maze of nonsense.”

Tweet after tweet argues that any patriot should be allowed to serve in the military. Does this include the blind? The mentally challenged? The handicapped? No, of course, not, but thinking is not part of the progressive package.

The further this system estranges itself from reason, the more confused progressives are about what to attack and what to defend, and the less sure they are of what a “perfect faith” entails.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, all virtues are compatible. One can just say no to wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony more or less simultaneously without semantic assistance from the Ministry of Truth.

Progressivism, to say the least, lacks that kind of coherence. The biggest slacker in Logic 101 can sense the dust-up coming when the friends of the transgendered and the friends of Islam try to hammer out a multicultural Ten Commandments. Heads just might roll. Literally.

Like their spiritual forebears, progressives cope with this anxiety by aggressively asserting their rightful place among the elect.

Author Shelby Steele coined the phrase “zone of decency” to describe the sacred preserve in which progressives imagine themselves clustering.

To distinguish themselves from lesser mortals, argued Steele, they are quick to “decertify” those who do not embrace the values du jour and to dispatch the condemned to the basket of deplorables.

As Steele argued, progressives need “only the display of social justice to win moral authority.” Twitter is the perfect medium for that. To support the T’s takes absolutely no work at all.

Christians, at least, can turn to a fixed source of authority in the Bible. As Robertson noted, “Biblical correctness has never changed.”

When the Puritans “decertified” one of their own, the individual almost always understood why. The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne acknowledged she committed adultery and did not protest the scarlet “A” with which she was branded. Her sin was willful and conscious.

Those subject to progressive rule have no such assurance. If the charges against Prynne were legitimate, the charges against contemporary “haters” rarely ever are.

“Even when you have no idea you’re committing a hate crime, chances are you still are,” writer Mark Steyn wryly opined after Canadian progressives dragged him before that nation’s official inquisitors.

Progressives exaggerate the sins of the targeted or concoct them out of whole cloth. In either case, like Hawthorne’s Puritans, they publicly brand the sinner to render him or her, in Hawthorne’s words, “the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point.”
“If there is no God,” said Jean Paul Sartre in his famous paraphrase of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, “everything is permitted.”

Observed Obama mentor and small-c communist Bill Ayers, “The old gods failed and the old truths left the world. Clear conclusions were mainly delusional, a luxury of religious fanatics and fools.”

Given this latitude, progressives add new sins regularly and new sinners daily. An awkward phrase, a misunderstood joke, a manufactured quote, a frank look at data, a persistent belief in a revered tradition can cost you your job.

In Trump’s case, a realistic return to reason after a one-year experiment in PC absurdity will earn him the Scarlet “T” for transphobia, one more letter on a very crowded letter sweater.