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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Love Just Keeps On Winning

How the Sexual Revolution institutionalizes itself through conformist merchants and the Pill of Murti-Bing
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The State of New Jersey is trying to keep love from winning, looks like:

Despite her doctor’s assurances that insurance would pay for fertility treatment, Ms. Krupa’s provider, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, denied coverage. The company cited a state insurance mandate from 2001 that required most women under 35 — no matter their sexual orientation — to demonstrate their infertility through “two years of unprotected sexual intercourse.”

Now the Krupas [Marianne and Erin], along with two other women, are suing the commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance, claiming the mandate discriminates against their sexual orientation — essentially forcing infertile homosexual women to pay for costly procedures to try to become pregnant.

More:

Dr. William Ziegler, the medical director of the Reproductive Science Center of New Jersey, said the issue of insurance coverage had long weighed on the field of fertility treatment.

“I’m not sure if there was a lot of thought given to the implications of what this would cause and how many New Jerseyans it would exclude,” Dr. Ziegler said of the mandate. “It’s a double standard. It discriminates against same-sex couples because they don’t have the biological equipment to have a baby the way a heterosexual couple does.”

I’m just going to let Dr. Ziegler’s statement hang out there. Centuries from now, when historians are trying to figure out how, exactly, the most advanced nation on earth lost its mind and fell apart, Dr. Ziegler’s realization about the thoughtless bigotry grieving barren lesbians of New Jersey will be of interest.

Meanwhile, in Charlotte, North Carolina, the public school leadership has a new plan for love to win:

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District addressed transgender issues in their new recommended policies.

The recommendations ask principals to implement and enforce ways to reduce bullying.

If implemented, the policies also would allow transgender students to take part in extracurricular activities and overnight trips with the gender they identify with.

The policies also asks school officials to stop referring to children as boys and girls, and instead refer to them as students and scholars.

Members of the North Carolina Values Coalition called the rules radical, and said the policies take the focus off of education and puts it on “gender fluidity.”

Bigots, the lot.

By the way, the other night at an event in the city, I met a lawyer. We got to talking about politics, and eventually he said that his son is gay. The lawyer said he has been bowled over by the number of kids his son’s age who have embraced gender fluidity. “Oh, it’s a thing now,” he said, shaking his head. I told him this story, and he said, more or less, “Yep.”

Progress.

Love is even winning over military medicine. From a recent directive by the Secretary of the Navy:

b. No later than October 1, 2016.

(1) The DoD will issue a training handbook for Commanders and Commanding Officers, transgender Service Members, and the force; and medical guidance for providing transition related care to transgender members.

(2) The Military Health System will be required to provide transgender Sailors and Marines all medically necessary care related to gender transition, based on the guidance that is issued. [Emphasis mine. — RD]

(3) Reference (b) is effective October 1, 2016. Sailors and Marines will be able to begin the process to officially change their gender in personnel management systems. Once the Sailor or Marines gender marker is changed, the member will be responsible for meeting all applicable military standards in the preferred gender and will use military berthing, bathroom, and shower facilities associated with their preferred gender.

As one military blogger puts it, “If you want a sex change but can’t afford it, join the military.”

Like the public schools, the military has become a locus for advocating radical social change. It’s all the Law of Merited Impossibility, you know. They’ll tell you it will never happen, that you’re being an alarmist, and when it happens, they’ll say shut up, because only a bigot could possibly object.

Meanwhile, on the far edges of progress, here’s a screen grab from Rowman & Littlefield, an academic press, of a new volume in its catalog:

Screen Shot 2016-08-09 at 6.32.47 AM

I can hear the howls of derision now: You Santorum-y monster! How dare you compare pedophilia to [whatever the Left wants today on the sexual progress front]! And it is true that nothing is equivalent to pedophilia. My point is not to make a moral equivalence, but rather to show that this is how it works. Once the barriers are down, things that were once unthinkable — the US Armed Forces paying for sex changes, for example, or public schools directing teachers and school staff not to call students “boys” or “girls” — first become thinkable, then become debatable, then become normative, then become mandatory.

Finally, a reader sends in this photo taken outside an outlet of the trendy furniture store West Elm:

Reader photo
Reader photo

Has there ever, in the history of selling furniture — especially trendy, high-end modern furniture — been a store that has not welcomed gay customers? Of course not. This is pure virtue signaling. And you know, posting this kind of thing in store windows is becoming the equivalent of the Greengrocer’s “Workers Of The World, Unite” store sign under communism. John Kay of the Financial Times explains the reference:

Václav Havel, the first and only president of post-communist Czechoslovakia, died last week. The central figure of his famous dissident essay, The Power of the Powerless, was a greengrocer with a placard in his window saying: “Workers of the World Unite!” Havel asked an apparently simple question: what is the purpose of this display?

The shopkeeper is not motivated by an intention to communicate his enthusiasm for unity of the workers of the world. Nor was his superior seized by such desire. And the leaders of the authoritarian system in which the sign is displayed know that their power would not long survive unity of the workers of the world. In fact, it is unlikely that anyone who sees the sign gives attention to its substantive content.

The real meaning is not conveyed by the printed words. The greengrocer’s intention is to signal conformity and avoid trouble. Havel translates the slogan as: “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.”

More from John Kay:

Thirty years before Havel, George Orwell identified the corrupting influence of discourse based on the repetition of pre-packaged phrases. A corrupting influence not just on language but on society itself. He described the speaker who “has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine”, observing: “The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.” We often hear such speakers at business conferences and on political platforms.

Havel also emphasised the mechanical nature of the process of effusion. “Part of the essence of the post-totalitarian system,” he said, “is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so they may realise themselves as human beings, but so they may surrender their human identity in favour of the system.” The empty exhortation of “workers of the world unite!” conceals the reality of the power structure that lies behind it. But the vacuous rhetoric traps the speaker as well as the hearer, the leaders as well as the led. [Emphasis mine — RD] “Both are objects in a system of control, but at the same time they are its subjects,” wrote Havel. They are inhabitants of a world whose assumptions are false, and self-descriptions fraudulent.

“Love wins,” and variations of this message posted in shop windows and disseminated through the culture, and made into a de facto test of conformity, is how conformity to the ideology of the Sexual Revolution is now enforced by the system it now controls.

What, you don’t think workers of the world should unite, comrade? Then why not put the sign in your window?

What, you don’t think that love is winning? Then why won’t you post the sign? Why won’t you wear the rainbow badge in the office? Why won’t you declare yourself an ally?

This form of social control is part of the mechanism that opens the door to the polymorphous forms of moral chaos highlighted above. We are just getting started. Below, from an earlier post of mine denouncing the culture of silence over abuse in churches, a Nobel Prize-winning anti-communist dissident explains part of what’s going on here:

We all understand, I think, the problem with leaders not wanting to lose what they have: power, wealth, fame, etc. The more difficult problem is explaining why people much farther down the power structure — specifically, those who are being exploited by the leadership — are willing to cooperate in their own exploitation. They too are unwilling to risk what they have — but what do they have, really?

Here’s an answer. The dynamic behind this phenomenon is what the Polish dissident writer Czesław Miłosz, in his classic study of intellectuals under Polish communism, The Captive Mind, called “the Pill of Murti-Bing.” The concept comes from a 1927 dystopian novel by Stanisław Witkiewicz in which an Asian army overruns Poland, and conquers its people in part by giving them pills to assuage their anxieties over their condition. From The Captive Mind:

Witkiewicz’s heroes are unhappy in that they have no faith and no sense of meaning in their work. This atmosphere of decay and senselessness extends throughout the entire country. And at that moment, a great number of hawkers appear in the cities peddling Murti-Bing pills. Murti-Bing was a Mongolian philosopher who had succeeded in producing an organic means of transporting a “philosophy of life.” This Murti-Bing “philosophy of life,” which constituted the strength of the Sino-Mongolian army, was contained in pills in an extremely condensed form. A man who used these pills changed completely. He became serene and happy.

For Miłosz, Polish intellectuals who capitulated to communism and Soviet rule had taken the pill of Murti-Bing. It was what made their condition bearable. They could not stand to see reality, for if they recognized what was really happening in their country, the pain and shock would make life too much to take.

This is why people who have no financial or status tied up in protecting abuse of corruption within an institution can nevertheless be expected to rally around that institution and its leaders. Those who tell the truth threaten their Murti-Bing pill supply, and therefore their sense of order and well-being. To them, better that a few victims must be made to suffer rather than the entire community be forced to wean itself from Murti-Bing.

Better that a (relative) few Christians will be forced out of their jobs or forced to lose their businesses than the entire community be forced to wean itself from our own Murti-Bing.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Along with these issues, very few people understand why religious liberty is important anymore. They just can’t see why anyone’s “private” beliefs should inform anything having to do with the public square.

Today I read where LGBTQ groups want BYU excluded from the Big 12 over their “discriminatory” policies, and I think it’s going to be increasingly hard for big schools like that to maintain a religious identity because, well, “Bigots!!”

And we (orthodox Christians) have lost the sexuality debates with younger generations. They buy into the whole fluid sexual identity thing, the whole paradigm of “this is how God made me”.

The late 20s/early 30s young people of my own church have no problem at all defining any discussion of transgender issues as inherently “transphobic”. To even suggest that there is a discussion to be had is to be on the wrong side of things. These are kids who went to Messiah and Gordon and were raised in orthodox Christian homes.

And what do you do when our own VP – that “good Catholic” – officiates at a gay marriage in his own home?

“Love wins” or whatever you care to call it – has won. It’s over.

Christians need to focus on making a strong public case for why religious liberty is important.

This is how gloomy I am: I think it’s way too late for that, even. I began advocating that in 2008, and was denounced by Maggie Gallagher and others for being a surrender monkey. We all know how well that worked out. I think there’s little left to do but prepare to live under “occupation,” so to speak, and do our best to keep them from capturing the minds of our kids. We can’t just hope for the best.

In other news, Italian Muslims demand polygamy rights, citing gay rights precedent. Excerpt:

Responding to a new law allowing same sex couples to enter civil unions, Hamza Piccardo argued that if gay relationships, which Muslims disagree with, are a civil right then Italians must accept polygamy as a civil right too.

The founder of the Union of Islamic Communities and Organisations (UCOII) in Italy took to Facebook to claim polygamy is a “civil right” and that Italy would benefit from the large number of Muslim births it would promote.

The UCOII president wrote: “When it comes to civil rights here, then polygamy is a civil right. Muslims do not agree with homosexual partnerships, and yet they have to accept a system that allows it. There is no reason why Italy should not accept polygamous marriages of consenting persons.”

What’s Arabic for “love wins”?

And there’s this exciting news: a mother and son pair of lovers — both consenting adults — say they are willing to go to jail over their relationship, and have become advocates for the next bleeding-heart cause: Genetic Sexual Attraction:

GSA is defined as sexual attraction between close relatives, such as siblings or half-siblings, a parent and offspring, or first and second cousins, who first meet as adults.

Mares said: ‘He is the love of my life and I don’t want to lose him. My kids love him, my whole family does. Nothing can come between us not courts, or jail, nothing.”

Love wins again! And it keeps on winning, as reader Robert tells us:

Another first in love winning: NPR [Southern California Public Radio, to be precise — RD] aired an uncritically sympathetic profile of an incestuous (brother-sister) couple this weekend. Pardon, apparently the term of art in cases like theirs is Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA).

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