Monday, January 16, 2017

But It's NATURAL LAW!


At least that's what the commentariat at Rod Dreher's place (and elsewhere) keep shrieking at us.




By "Natural law," of course, what they mean is "How I believe the world ought to be."

I used to sort of enjoy reading Rod Dreher's blog, and other Conservative and Moderate blogs, because they gave me a look at what people not like me thought, and what they believed. Since Trump's election, though, wow. It's just a gibbering hate-fest over there.

Anyone not precisely like them -- which is to say heterosexual, Conservative, their very own brand of Christian, cisgendered, educated to their precise level of education, and (very often) from their own region of the country has become not just the enemy, but not even human.

Two-minute hate? I wish. Non-stop hate.

ETA: See also this, over at alicublog.

2 comments:

Contingent Cassandra said...

Even if you limit your observations to humans, have they noticed, I wonder, that a certain number of human beings, going a long way back in recorded history, are born intersex in some physically observable way? And that, now that we understand and can easily sequence DNA, we know that quite a few combinations other than XX or XY result in fully-functional (with the possible exception of biological reproduction) human beings? If not, it's time they noticed that there's considerable variation in the "natural" order of things.

If they *have* noticed such variation, I wonder why they're so resistant to the idea that there might also be variations in whatever brain structures/chemistry determine gender identity that don't happen to be observable by the means currently available to us, but are observable through the lived, reported experience of people with somewhat less common variations of same, and may some day be observable in other ways (not that we should need such "physical" proof to accept self-reported experiences of gender identity that, while perhaps not common, are certainly widespread).

Grrr. . .

delagar said...


I've been reading their blogs and articles for years now, and my tentative conclusions is that they require a world of rigid strictures, where only a few ways of behavior or being are acceptable. Any variation from those behaviors are, literally, terrifying to them.

This is, incidentally, why they find (for instance) African-American Vernacular English so offensive, or why they get so seriously upset about new pronouns. I could see if you just shrugged and said, whatevs, not my thing, as I do (for instance) about Rod Dreher's instance that ghosts are, so, real. But no. They get furious.

I'm starting to think it's a form of neurosis -- something like being OCD, maybe?