Deconstructing Deconstructionism

Finishing graduate school in 1977, it’s been forty-three years now since I was a full-time college student. School came easily to me, except for math, and I could work a full-time job.which kept me grounded in the real world. Most of my professors were classical liberals as opposed to doctrinaire liberals who became so common in the 1980s and after, and who predominate on today’s campuses. Back then, nobody had ever heard of “trigger warnings” or “safe spaces.”  Contrary ideas were welcomed, not condemned. 

Then along came French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida who had outsmarted themselves. Their deconstructionist and relativist ideas strongly flooded campuses across the western world. Objective reality was scorned in favor of perceived reality. The real world was whatever you wanted it to be, they thought. Nothing was real. Everything was socially constructed, they believed. You could have your own reality. There were no absolutes and the dictatorship of relativism ruled.

None of it influenced my formation and for that I’m grateful. Would it have if I’d been born twenty years later? Maybe, but I don’t think so. As an outsider, an anachronism, I could impartially observe creeping nihilist deconstructionism and the resulting erosion of collective sanity in a world that denied objective reality. I remember singing along with the Kinks’ “Lola”: “Boys will be girls and girls will be boys; it’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world…” but I never took that seriously. I suspect the Kinks didn’t either.

Today though, the Democrat left is determined to continue pushing the idea that boys really can change into girls, and vice versa, if they simply declare it. Twenty years ago, no one would have predicted this concept would be accepted by any but a wacky few, much less such a large portion of American citizenry. Efforts to criminalize those still daring to publicly voice a contrary opinion continue nationwide. Nonetheless, there’s a chink developing in the Democrat LGBTQIA… armor: women’s sports. They have been infiltrated by men pretending to be women, and real women cannot compete.

Cheryl Radachowsky, mother of a champion high school track star, wrote in a New York Post article last October: “As a parent, it is gut-wrenching to know that no matter how hard my daughter works to achieve her goals, she will lose athletic opportunities to a pernicious gender ideology. Left unchecked, this ideology will in the long run eliminate fair play for all biological females in all sports.”

Radachowsky pointed out that men are stronger and faster than women “Even when the men’s testosterone levels matched that of ­biological women [according to a recent Swedish study], the men’s competitive advantages remained almost fully intact, with muscle size and bone density remaining virtually unchanged in some and decreasing only 5 percent in others.” Men are setting records in women’s sports. They’re taking championships and scholarships away from real women like Radachowsky’s daughter, Alanna Smith.

As a sophomore, Ms. Smith set two new records at a recent New England championship meet held in Maine and is a complainant in an ongoing Title IX investigation with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. She and about 30,000 others would like to prevent males from competing against females. The reader may notice that I’m not calling them “trans-females” because I don’t accept that there’s any such thing.

If the so-called Equality Act passes Congress and is signed by a Democrat president, I would be subject to lawsuits by LGBTQIA… litigants for writing such things. President Trump won’t sign it, but a President Biden would. Should it ever become law, Alanna Smith and other real females athletes would have to permanently give up their dreams of an athletic scholarship. Doctors and nurses who refuse to cut off healthy breasts, penises, and testicles would be fired. The 15% of our hospitals that are Catholic and would be sued for sticking to their beliefs.

As the Heritage Foundation puts it: “[The Equality Act] would empower the government to interfere in how regular Americans think, speak, and act at home, at school, at work and at play. Any bill promoting such authoritarianism is a danger to our freedoms.” The feminist movement is divided on the Equality Act and some radical feminists have joined conservatives in opposition. Has the LGBTQIA… “community” finally pushed the envelope too far? Could be, but then who ever thought it would get half as far as it has?

Left & Right June 5, 2019

Mark Guerringue again sits in the left chair. The producer asks us both if we support President Trump's increasing tariffs on China and Mexico. I support the China tariffs but not necessarily the recent ones on Mexico. Mark questions all tariffs and thinks conservatives should too. They always did.

Mark says tariffs never worked anywhere but I point out how the US Government used tariffs almost exclusively to support itself until the Graduated income tax was enacted in the early 20th century. Mark raises history too saying that tariffs on Merino wool were a boom to sheep farmers in northern New England in the early 19th century resulting in all the stone walls through what are now woods.

I bring up historian and biographer Dave Garrow's claim that Martin Luthor King was much more of a womanizer than previously reported. He participated in orgies and witnessed a rape by a fellow minister and laughed. Mark questioned why I brought it up and I answer that it shows mainstream media's bias against stories that don't fit their left-wing narrative. Mark says it's insulting when I question the professionalism of the New York Times and others in media. We go back and forth on that for quite a while.

At about the halfway point Mark brought a print-out of my column submission to his newspaper for the week and voiced several criticisms, ultimately saying he would not run it. It pertained to the Drag Queen Story Hour due to run at the Conway Public Library later this month. I see it as a danger for drag queens who are usually homosexual men to be models for children aged 3-8 who may become confused about their own sex. Mark says I'm wrong to conflate drag queens, homosexuality, and transgenders.

I contend there's a spectrum and what is lately referred to as gender dysphoria is on it. Mark says that's just wrong and they're all separate and distinct. This discussion takes up nearly all the second half of the show and gets heated. He claims I pull people out of thin air who support my ideas.

I cite research by Lisa Littman MD of Brown University who documented a group of fourteen-year-old females that together declared they were males after showing no signs of gender dysphoria previously. Mark contends she rescinded her study but I disagreed, pointing out that the former dean of Harvard Medical School backed up the science behind Littman's study. (Later I learned that she republished the study with minor modifications but didn't change her basic claims.)

Mark suggests I'm unenlightened and need therapy because my beliefs run counter to the LGBTQ narrative. I obviously disagree and claim that whoever dares publish data or opinions contradicting that narrative is publicly vilified by the LGBTQ lobby and Littman suffered a politically-correct assault at Brown University reminiscent of fascist tactics.