The Transgender Juggernaut

Last Saturday’s Conway Daily Sun reported on a “Drag Queen Story Hour” at the local public library scheduled for later this month. According to the national organization for drag queens who want to read books to children, the target demographic is children aged 3-8. Books that “may be read” include: "Jacob's New Dress" by Sarah and Ian Hoffman and "Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress.” Children must be accompanied by an adult so parental permission is assumed. If that’s something to which parents want to expose their kids, so be it.

It’s hard to see this as anything but a further assault on societal sexual norms. I mean it’s not as if homosexual men are suddenly dedicated to raising literacy rates. The library program is voluntary but elementary schools are mandatory and supported by our tax dollars. Similar homosexual propaganda is endorsed by teachers’ unions and education bureaucrats at all levels and we’re paying for it.

Just before I retired from teaching, I learned that a boy in the lower grades thought he was a girl. His parents evidently believed he was and insisted that everyone at the local elementary school behave as if he were. I figured I’d be gone before he got to my classroom and wouldn’t have to deal with the situation, and that’s the way it worked out. All elementary staff used female pronouns and he used the girls’ bathroom. I don’t know how long his confusion lasted and I wondered if the parents went ahead with puberty-blocking drugs and penis amputation for him as well.

Perhaps the boy overcame his confusion. Seventy or eighty percent do according to brave psychiatrists not afraid to speak out, but when everyone with whom a sexually confused young person comes in contact cooperates with the pretense it will likely persist. I felt bad for the little boy because the rate of suicide attempts for so-called transgenders was and is higher than 40%. The LGBTQIA (and whatever other letters have added to the ever-expanding acronym) lobby insists it’s because of discrimination by people who continue to maintain that humans are male and female and cannot switch sex on a whim.

Others dispute that. According to Daniel Payne writing in the Federalist: “[I]t utterly ignores the most salient feature of transgender individuals: that they are mentally ill and need serious treatment. This is not a moral or ethical judgment. It is, rather, a fact. Individuals who believe they are a different sex than that of their biology are psychologically ill—self-evidently so—and one would quite reasonably expect a higher suicide rate from a portion of the population that suffers from so significant a mental illness (particularly a mental illness it is fashionable to indulge rather than treat).”

It was possible that a sexually confused student might transfer into my class and I resolved that I would not call her “him” or him “her” even if school authorities insisted and if I were fired I’d sue. I didn’t want to hurt the student’s feelings but I had a responsibility to other students. If I went along I’d signal that I believed it was possible to change from male to female or vice versa, and I didn’t. I wouldn’t pretend to admire the emperor’s new clothes or Morris’s tangerine dress as it were. I would resist the education Thought Police as well.

Mainstream media ignore developments counter to the LGBTQIA narrative so you’re not likely to read about so-called “transgenders” who regret their transition and seek to reverse their surgery. The Daily Wire quotes Professor Miroslav Djordjevic of Belgrade, one of the world’s leading genital reconstructive surgeons: “Definitely reversal surgery and regret in transgender persons is one of the very hot topics. Generally, we have to support all research in this field.” But universities will not fund it because it counters the LGBTQIA narrative.

Last week, Maine Governor Janet Mills signed a bill banning “conversion therapy” defined as: “any practice or treatment that seeks or claims to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” Maine therapists could lose their license if they help a child accept his/her biological sex. Canada’s Supreme Court ruled last month that a parent must allow his 14-year-old daughter to receive male hormone injections. Last year, an Ohio judge removed a female child from her parents’ custody because they refused to allow hormone injections.

Last year, Brown University Assistant Professor Lisa Littman MD published a research study on ROGD — “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” in PLOS One a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Among her findings: “Parents describe that the onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a[an adolescent female] peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe.” To this former teacher of adolescent girls, her conclusions seemed eminently plausible.

Littman was vilified by the LGBTQIA lobby for “using transphobic dogwhistles” because she pulled the rug out from under the fashionable transgender juggernaut now getting its nose in the tent of the Conway Public Library.

Buried With Bush

“Have they buried him yet?” I kept asking last week. Observances of former President George H.W. Bush’s death seemed to go on forever. For a week or more, media were completely dominated by commemorations of his passing. Services held in Maine, Texas, Washington, DC, and elsewhere were extensively covered. Very few stories have that much staying power in America’s public consciousness anymore, so why was it so hard to finally put old George to rest and move on?

It was a combination of factors, I think. He was the last president from the World War II generation, or “The Greatest Generation,” as NBC’s Tom Brokaw called it. When former senator, presidential candidate, and fellow WWII vet Bob Dole paid his respects to Bush, he had to be assisted to stand from his wheelchair in order to salute. Very few of that generation remain with us and soon they will all be gone. Not only will they be put to rest, but so, we fear, will the values by which they lived.

To them, family, church, and country mattered most. Not everyone from that era lived by those values but no one disputed them as ideals. Today there is no general agreement on any of them. Bush was married for more than seventy years. That he loved his wife and was loved back by her no one doubted. Except when he lay in state at the Capitol, most remembrances were held in churches where his extended family — and it is extensive — participated. The final theme dominant in the wall-to-wall coverage was his service to country beginning in WWII and continuing through his presidency.

Five current and former presidents were seated in the front row at Bush’s service in Washington. Of those, all but Trump remain in their original marriages, but lies and coverups of marital infidelities led to the impeachment of President Clinton — and may for President Trump as well. Last week’s release of data from the Mueller investigation prompted soon-to-be US House committee chairmen to salivate over the prospect of impeaching Trump for alleged campaign finance violations in the form of payoffs to two professed mistresses. It’s likely that many presidents have been unfaithful and some biographers have documented their infidelities. The same is true of kings, queens, and other past leaders, but publication was usually delayed until after they died. Not anymore.

Most dictionaries still define family as: “a group consisting of parents and children living in the same household,” but that description is now disputed by many calling themselves “progressives.” They see traditional family as a source of oppression, a haven for “the patriarchy.” Homosexual and transgender activists tend to agree and work to broaden the definition to include almost any grouping of human beings wishing to address themselves as such. If we haven’t reached that point already, most children will soon be born into a collection of people not comprised of a mother, a father, and children.

Churches are in steep decline across America as well with some predicting that soon the majority of us will be “unchurched.” That’s already true in many “progressive” regions. Religions we used to consider “mainstream” have sanctioned marriage between two men or two women. After over two thousand years, even the Roman Catholic Church is making noises in that direction since the election of Pope Francis in 2013. A preliminary statement emerging from a Synod of Bishops on the family in 2014 called “Relatio post disceptationem” hinted at a relaxing of Catholic teachings on homosexuality and divorce. Prominent bishops attending the synod, however, condemned that document and claimed that most bishops wished to preserve traditional teachings. In the four years since divisions within the Catholic Church have only deepened.

As for devotion to country, many Americans calling themselves “progressives” dispute the very concept of the nation-state, of national sovereignty, and of national borders. They support abolishing ICE, which stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They marched in Washington, DC recently chanting “No borders! No wall! No USA at all.” Democrat leaders deny they support open borders while consistently blocking serious efforts to control illegal immigration or funding for a wall on our southern border.

Not only is there widening disagreement about family, church, and country, it seems we cannot even agree on who is a man or who is a woman. More and more “progressive” psychologists, clerics, and politicians are insisting that homosexuals are born that way but men and women are not. People who consider such notions crazy place themselves in danger if they voice their opinions. They could lose their jobs, be forced to undergo “sensitivity training” which some would call brainwashing, and they could be charged with a “hate crime.”

Buried along with George H.W. Bush, we fear, were the values of the generation that produced him. What comes next, no one knows.

Curb Your Judgement?

Mrs. H. is a strong-willed woman who likes to stay in shape. While living here in western Maine, she fought off a man who tried to assault her sexually as she was jogging. She avoided rape but emerged bruised, battered, and traumatized, which is why she wants anonymity. She lives in Florida now where she is suing Planet Fitness for revoking her membership after she complained about a man ogling women in the locker room. She contacted me recently about the situation.

Attorney Mathew Staver describes the case: “‘Mrs. H.’ is a survivor of a violent rape attempt. On May 29, 2018, staff at the Leesburg location revoked ‘Mrs. H.’s’ membership after she was intimidated by and complained about the behavior of Jordan Rich in the women’s locker room. Rich claims to be ‘transgender,’ but is obviously a man and his behavior indicates he derives enjoyment from depriving women of privacy.”

Eric Stagno

Planet Fitness declares itself a “judgement-free zone” which has been problematic in at least two other cases. Last month, Eric Stagno was arrested in the Plaistow, New Hampshire Planet Fitness facility and charged with indecent exposure, lewdness and disorderly conduct because he was walking back and forth and doing poses on a yoga mat in the nude. The Lawrence Eagle Tribune reported: “The only statement police said Stagno made during the arrest was that he thought the gym was a ‘judgement free zone,’ apparently referencing the workout chain's slogan.”

CNN reported that Yvette Cormier of Michigan lost her Planet Fitness membership after warning other women about a man who called himself “Carlotta” in the locker room. “If you have male parts you don't need to be in the women's locker room,” said Cormier. “I don't care what you are; I don't care if you're gay lesbian, transgender or transvestite. I am uncomfortable with you as a male in my locker room, in my restroom.” Planet Fitness got support from the Michigan ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign — a national homosexual lobbying group, as well other LGBT pressure groups. Cormier’s lawsuit was dismissed in two lower courts but then upheld by the Michigan Supreme Court last month.

Cormier and "Carlotta"

Jordan Rich is a man who says he’s a woman and Mrs. H. was uncomfortable changing while he watched her in a big locker room mirror two feet away. She politely asked him to leave, but he refused. When she left, he chased her into the parking lot, then called 911 as she drove off to report that she had sexually harassed him. Police responded, but evidently didn’t take Mr. Rich’s charge seriously.

Jordan Rich

Mainstream media habitually champion “transgenders” who say they feel uncomfortable in the locker rooms or bathrooms corresponding to their actual sex. Such people comprise less than 1% of the population but don’t seem to mind making others uncomfortable when they take either their clothes off in the presence of women, or watch women undress in women’s locker rooms. Yvette Cormier won her case in Michigan, but will it be appealed to federal courts? Will Eric Stagno sue the Plaistow, New Hampshire police who arrested him? Will Jordan Rich file suit against Mrs. H. for sexual harassment? Will more women file suits like these?

Planet Fitness is a private company and they can make any policies they want, but they should state them in their contracts so women who are joining know that men are allowed in women’s locker rooms. As stories like that of Mrs. H. and others get out there, profits may decline and they might consider changing their policies.

Meanwhile, government schools have been allowing girls in boys’ locker rooms — and mandating that boys and parents accept it. A group of parents filed suit in federal court against an Oregon school declaring the presence of a girl in the boys’ locker room was causing their sons “embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, intimidation, fear, apprehension, and stress.”

Obama-appointed Judge Marco Hernandez threw out the suite last month declaring that: “High school students do not have a fundamental privacy right to not share school restrooms, lockers, and showers with transgender students whose biological sex is different than theirs.” He said the stress the boys felt was not "comparable to the plight of transgender students who are not allowed to use facilities consistent with their gender identity.”

Hernandez’s ruling will stand unless it’s overturned in a federal court of appeals, and that won’t likely be quick if it happens at all. What can we expect when schools open this fall? Will boys be allowed in girls’s shower rooms? After that ruling, public schools won’t be able to stop it. It’s one thing for private entities like Planet Fitness gyms to allow it; people can go to another gym — but now the federal government can force it on public schools.

I don’t believe I have to ask Mrs. H. what she thinks of this development.

Out of Fashion?

This is the unabridged version of a speech I’m delivering for a luncheon at the Eagle Mountain House in Jackson, New Hampshire later today. An abridged version will run in newspapers tomorrow. Young women from area high schools whose essays were selected by the Daughters of the American Revolution will receive awards and possible scholarships.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.

By greeting you in such a manner, I have identified myself as someone who views the human race as binary. That means I know and publicly state that every human is born male or female and remains so throughout his or her natural life. There are two sexes, and I reject attempts by academia and many in government to refute that basic truth. We are not “assigned a gender” at birth. We are created male and female.

It’s likely that, holding these beliefs and being inclined to profess them, I would not be permitted to speak at whatever university you ladies attend next year. If you joined student government — which is likely, given each of your records in high school — and you were to suggest inviting me to speak, you would be criticized. You would be opposed, and if the invitation were issued anyway and I showed up, I might be shouted down. That’s how it has become on campuses across our great country. Colleges and universities preach diversity, but only the diversity of skin color. Most disdain intellectual diversity and censor opposing views.

Many faculty in our colleges and universities today have been strongly influenced by movements like post-modernism, critical theory, and other neo-marxist-freudian ideas which may read like so much gobbledygook if you were to look up definitions for them. If you have courage enough to admit confusion and question professors who propound them, you’ll likely be told that they’re “dialectical,” as if that would explain everything. If you remain courageous and ask what dialectical means, you’ll be given still more of what sounds like gobbledygook. If you reach this point, trust your instincts. Remember the axiom: “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck.”

Deliberate gobbledygook accepted and published in "academic" gender studies journal

Realize that many college faculty today do not believe there is any such thing as objective truth. considering that idea only a social construct. In other words, they don’t believe it exists so they do not seek it. Their view of the world can be summed up by the old Beatles tune Strawberry Fields: “Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about.” So, don’t let them take you down to Strawberry Fields of nihilism. Objective Truth is real. Seek it, always.

Perhaps you noted that I believe we were created, you and I. That’s what our Founding Fathers believed as well, and proclaimed in our founding document — The Declaration of Independence, and I quote: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…”

That concept has also become unpopular among our academic and political elites. When President Obama spoke during his first term before a group of Hispanic Americans, he stumbled over the passage I just quoted you. As he read from his teleprompter “…we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal” — here he paused and fluttered his eyelids nervously before continuing: “endowed with certain inalienable rights, life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” He conspicuously left out the phrase, “…by our Creator.”

Belief in a Creator has declined among those who govern us and who teach our children in government schools. They believe our rights come from government, which would imply that the government which grants those rights could also infringe on them or even take them away entirely. They’re enumerated in our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to our Constitution, which each of you praised in your qualifying essay.

Our academic and government elite believe that most important of documents to be malleable — something that can be changed in ways that were not intended by the men who wrote it, that is, changed by judicial fiat in our courts and not through the amendment process outlined in Article Five. The Constitution allowed for change but only through a deliberately long and difficult process. It’s much easier to “legislate from the bench” with the votes of only five Justices on the Supreme Court. Whatever opinions they might render, however, can be overturned just as easily by five votes on a subsequent court. That’s an unstable process and not what our Founders intended.

The men who wrote our Constitution were nearly all godly men and assumed American citizens would be as well. As John Adams stated, and I quote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

There are still religious people on college campuses but they’re increasingly closeted. Religion is considered naive, childish, even moronic — certainly not fashionable. The pervasive idea now is that God did not create man but that man created God. “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to create Him,” goes the aphorism. Some claim that new Gods have been created by those who believe the Judeo/Christian God to be dead, as philosopher Frederich Neitzche declared more than a hundred years ago. Those gods include the newer religions of environmentalism and big government.

Speaking of big government, this year, 2017, marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Josef Stalin birthed an 80-year experiment called the Soviet Union — the ultimate state of atheistic, big government that mandated equality (for everyone but Communist Party members) and brutally persecuted dissenters. Historians estimate that somewhere between 40 and 60 million were exterminated by the Party in the name of preserving “The Revolution.” Documentation of this tragedy is so thin due to the absence of a free press that we cannot know if it’s 40 million or 60 million. Twenty million are simply unaccounted for. Consider that. Twenty million people were “disappeared” from the historical record.

President Reagan called it “The Evil Empire” and he is credited with winning the Cold War that brought it down shortly before you were born. The killing was even worse to the southeast during the Cultural Revolution in Communist China. Some historians estimate that 80 million died there under Mao Tse Tung. Then there was the communist regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia where three million more were murdered. It’s a sordid history of which your generation seems largely unaware. An article last week in the Sacrament Bee contended, and I quote: “Ask a millennial if they would rather live under a socialist or capitalist country, and they’re likely to give an answer much different than their parents or grandparents would.”

“That’s according to a new YouGov study commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-communist organization, which found that 44 percent of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist country, with another 7 percent saying the same about communism.” Remember, the Founders wrote a Constitution designed to restrict government, not grow it into the behemoth it has sadly become.

How many of you were born in the 20th century? One could say the struggle between capitalism and communism defined that century. Did capitalism prevail? For now it has, but your generation may see communism’s revival. Right now you seem to believe the US Constitution to be the most brilliant governing document ever written.

Well, you’re right. It is. Never forget that.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

Social Engineering By Census

Does racial discrimination still exist in the United States? If so, how does it show? One manifestation, perhaps the biggest, is in the US Government. As it prepares to fulfill its constitutional responsibility under Article I, Section 2 to count how many people live here, let’s ponder what the Census has become. Its original purpose was to figure out how many seats in the US House of Representatives each state gets as our population grows and shifts, but America’s obsession with race has expanded the function of this basic count. Right now, there’s a political struggle to add even more racial categories to the 2020 census. Why? Well, the Census Bureau itself brags that the data it collects determines how and where $400 billion of federal money is spent, much of it according to race.

Article I Section 2 originally mandated that Congress count: “the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons… within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”

Linda Sarsour

The “Manner” Congress has subsequently directed leads us to look at ourselves not as Americans, but as members of some oppressed minority competing for taxpayer funds. Left-wing activist Linda Sarsour is lobbying the Office of Management and Budget to include another racial category President Obama wanted: “MENA” for “Middle East and North Africa.” Sarsour calls herself a Palestinian American. She wants Persians, Arabs, Turks, Lebanese, and Somalis and Sudanese to be categorized under that label too. Why? She explains:

“When we look at accessing federal, you know, any types of federal support, for example, we lose out dramatically because we don’t have a separated category … because we are quote ‘white,’ we are not seen as a priority area for city or state or federal funding.”

At least she’s honest about it. According to the Heritage Foundation, Sarsour wants: “Another ‘oppressed’ group that will be eligible for racial preferences (‘affirmative action,’ ‘disparate impact,’ ‘underrepresentation,’ etc.) in employment, college admissions, federal contracts, and congressional redistricting.” She wants a bigger slice of the $400 billion pie.

Under the first census conducted in 1790, the head of household was listed as well as number of “free white males” over and under sixteen, the number of “free white females,” the number of “free persons” (boarding in household) and the number of slaves. That was all. No questions about race, but we can assume the slaves were black. Ten years later more questions about the ages of both free white males and free white females were asked. Twenty years later, data on the number of factories in a given district were gathered. In 1820, the census takers asked the ages and sexes of slaves, as well as whether people worked as farmers, factory workers, or other commerce, and counted “foreigners not naturalized.” In 1830, more specific data on ages of white males and females, slaves, as well as the number of all who were deaf, dumb, or blind was determined.

In 1850 came the first questions on race. There were two broad categories: “Free Inhabitants” and “Slave Inhabitants,” but free non-white inhabitants were differentiated between “black” and “mulatto.” Also gathered were values of real estate owned, data on occupation, place of birth, marital status, schooling, literacy, and if person was "deaf, dumb, blind, insane, idiotic, pauper, or convict.” Slaves were given numbers, not names, and classified black or mulatto. Listed under “Owner” were “uncaught escaped slaves in the past year”; “the number of slaves freed from bondage in the past year” and, “is the slave deaf and dumb, blind, insane, or idiotic?”

More race questions came in 1870 with categories for Chinese and [American] Indian. In 1890: “Enumerators were instructed to write ‘White,’ ‘black,’ ‘Mulatto,’ ‘Quadroon,’ ‘Octoroon,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Japanese,’ or ‘Indian.’”

More questions about Indians came in 1900, including tribal affiliation, “Fraction of person's lineage that is white”; “Is this person living in polygamy?”; “Is this person taxed?” A note on the Census site explained: “An American Indian was considered "taxed" if he or she was detached from his or her tribe and was living in the White community and subject to general taxation.

“Mulatto” was dropped in 1930 and “Mexican” added, but only that year. “Hindu” was called a race. Mixed black and white was marked as Black. Mixed Indian and white was marked as “Indian.” Ethnic questions were increased in 1970, asking about Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Central American, or “Other Spanish” descent. Now those groups also want to be classified as a “race” separate from white in 2020. If you’re not white, you're eligible for a piece of the pie.

Whenever I’m asked to describe my race, I write in “human,” and refuse to go any further. How soon before government substitutes the subjective term “gender” for the scientific term “sex” and how many categories will there be? Five? Ten? Thirty? How long before questions about sexual preference are included? They were drafted under the Obama Administration but dropped by the Trump Administration last March. Had Hillary won, they’d have been on there for 2020.