LGBT

Darwin, Sex, and Rationality: Yuval Noah Harari’s Self-Defeating Worldview

/ Apologetics, Ethics, Philosophy / 2 Comments

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian, bestselling author, public intellectual, and secular prophet (or ‘futurist’ as they prefer to be called). Speaking out of his Darwinian naturalist worldview, Harari recently offered this message on “International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia”:

Here’s a transcript of the video clip, in which Harari draws a connection between Darwinism and “sexual liberation”:

Darwin is the kind of prophet of sexual liberation. If I think about the liberation of gay people, of LGBTQ people, then if you dig underneath, you eventually find Darwin. For centuries upon centuries, gay people were persecuted and oppressed because of this mythological idea about sex: that sex was created by God for the purpose of procreation, and if you use sex for anything else, you’re sinning against the purpose of the thing, so you must be punished. And then Darwin came, and Darwin said: in biology there are no purposes. Nothing has any purpose in biology. In biology there are only causes.

Where does this go wrong? Let me count the ways. Well, let me count three at least.

1. If Harari thinks “this mythological idea about sex” comes from Christianity, he’s mistaken. Christianity does indeed teach that sex was created by God for the purpose of procreation (Gen. 1:28), but it doesn’t follow that procreation is the only purpose of sex. In 1 Corinthians 7, the apostle Paul implies that sex within the bond of marriage is legitimate for the proper satisfaction of sexual desire. He makes no reference to procreation in that context. The Song of Solomon celebrates sexual intimacy and joy within marriage, again without reference to the purpose of procreation. Even if procreation is the primary purpose of sex, that wouldn’t make it the exclusive purpose. Just as eating food is both for nutrition and for pleasure, so marital sex is both for procreation and for pleasure. …

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Botching Bostock

/ Apologetics, Culture, Ethics / 12 Comments

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, ruled in a 6-3 decision that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against their employees on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Neil GorsuchThe Court’s opinion was written by Justice Gorsuch and joined by Justices Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Justice Alito wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Thomas. A second dissenting opinion was given by Justice Kavanaugh. All three opinions can be read in full here.

The relevant statute of Title VII reads as follows:

It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer … to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin…

The Court argued, in effect, that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity necessarily involves discrimination based on sex (properly understood as biological sex: male or female) and thus is prohibited by Title VII.

I’m neither a lawyer nor the son of a lawyer, but I know a thing or two about logic and argumentation, so I want to explain, as clearly and concisely as I can, why I think the Court’s central argument is horribly confused and specious.

If we’re going to criticize the Court’s opinion, however, it’s important to recognize how the Court argued. Some commentators have objected to the ruling on the basis of the harmful consequences it will have (undermining protections for women using bathrooms and locker rooms, destroying women’s sports, etc.) but that misses the proper role of the Court. The Court’s task is to interpret the law; in this case, the relevant clause of Title VII. If it turns out that the law has unforeseen or unintended consequences — harmful consequences — surely that’s a fault with the law, to be remedied by the legislative branch, not a fault with the judicial ruling.

Other commentators have argued that the original legislators couldn’t plausibly have understood Title VII to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, nor could they have foreseen that it would be applied in that way. However, Gorsuch directly addresses that objection in the opinion. His contention is that it’s a logical implication of the text of the statute, regardless of whether anyone at the time recognized it. His argument is simply that the text as it was written, reasonably interpreted according to standard dictionary definitions, protects against SOGI discrimination precisely because it protects against sexual discrimination. The latter logically demands the former, so he maintains. The complaint that no one in 1964 would have acknowledged such an implication is legally irrelevant. What’s relevant is that it is in fact an implication of the statute. (Gorsuch cites various precedents where a statute is later applied beyond its originally intended scope on the basis of its implications.)

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LGBs Are Kissing T Goodbye

/ Culture, Ethics

A few months back I wrote on the incoherence of LGBT where I argued the following:

Either (1) ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are tied to physical form, in which case the concept of sexual orientation (LGB) is intelligible but the ideology of transgenderism (T) is indefensible, or (2) ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are not tied to physical form, in which case the concept of sexual orientation (LGB) is no longer intelligible. […]

So it seems to me that those who embrace the term LGBT face a formidable challenge: provide definitions of L, G, B, and T that both (1) satisfy the demands of transgender ideology and (2) comport with the conventional meanings of L, G, and B.

Daniel Moody drew my attention this week to an article in Quillette by a gay author, Brad Polumbo, suggesting that it’s time for ‘LGB’ and ‘T’ to go their separate ways:

The growing rift between increasingly radicalized transgender-rights activists and the lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) communities has finally come out into the open. This week, Europe’s biggest LGBT-rights organization, the London-based Stonewall charity, was publicly accused of subordinating LGB rights to the group’s increasingly single-minded goal of replacing sex with gender as a marker of identity. As Helen Joyce recently wrote in Standpoint, “Stonewall went all in for gender self-ID. Its online glossary now describes biological sex as ‘assigned at birth’ (presumably by a midwife with a Hogwarts-style Sorting Hat). ‘Gay’ and ‘lesbian’ now mean same-gender, not same-sex, attraction. ‘Transphobia’ is the ‘fear or dislike of someone based on the fact that they are trans, including the denial/refusal to accept their gender identity.’ At a stroke, anyone who declares themselves exclusively attracted to people of the same sex has become a bigot.”

As a gay man who lives in the United States, I have no direct stake in Britain’s intra-LGBT politics. (“LGB/T” might now be a more apt term.) But I am surprised that it has taken this long for such a formal breach to occur. The same pressures have been building everywhere, and it was only a matter of time before someone acted on them.

His argument is very similar to mine (bold added):

Gays, lesbians and bisexuals all have something obvious in common: same-sex attraction. This is an alternative sexual orientation that, to some extent at least, shapes our experiences and alters our life outcomes. We typically identify with our biological sex—and in fact, sometimes have spent many years feeling trapped by it. To be gay is to understand that sex is set at birth. My sexual attraction, likewise, is based on hard-wired factors beyond my control.

Transgenderism is a separate concept. While homosexuality leads to obvious differences in real-life behavior, transgenderism offers a categorial [sic] redefinition of what it means to be a man or a woman. As Joyce describes it, a “gender identity” is a quasi-spiritual concept—almost like a soul—that is “something between an internal essence, knowable only to its possessor, and stereotypically masculine or feminine appearance and behavior.”

(See also Daniel Moody’s much earlier observations about the fundamental incompatibility of LGB and T.)

The British author Douglas Murray — also a gay man — makes essentially the same argument as Polumbo in his new book The Madness of Crowds (surely one of the most important books published this year). Murray contends that “the LGBT community” is mostly a fictional construct, and necessarily so. (In fact, Murray suggests it’s an exaggeration even to speak of an LGB community.) Perhaps we’re witnessing the beginning of the end of the so-called LGBT movement. Certainly we’re going to see this LGB-vs-T argument articulated more frequently as ‘traditionalist’ LGBs try to cut themselves loose from the cultural suicide-bombers of the transgender movement.

To my mind, the interesting question isn’t why LGB and T are initiating divorce proceedings. That’s easily answered. The real puzzle is why they ever got hitched in the first place.

No less perplexing is that fact that some quarters of evangelicalism are caving into LGBT ideology just as it’s beginning to break apart. (The same can be said of those evangelicals who are currently pleading with us to make our peace with Darwinism.) William Ralph Inge surely had it right: “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.”

Wen Ya Gotta Go, Ya Gotta Go

/ Culture, Ethics

A while back I wrote about the collision between feminism and transgenderism on the field of so-called abortion rights. Well, here’s an interesting update. Initial reports suggest that Leana Wen, who was removed this week from her position as president of Planned Parenthood after less than a year in the post, may be one of the high-profile casualties in this clash of progressive ideologies.

According to a BuzzFeed News article (HT: Steve Hays):

Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen, the first physician to head the women’s health care group in 50 years, said she was removed from her position by the organization’s board “at a secret meeting,” capping months of internal concerns over her management style and a perceived shift away from the group’s political work.

Wen attributed her departure to “philosophical differences over the direction and future of Planned Parenthood,” she said in a tweet on Tuesday.

You're Fired!

Various reasons for Wen’s abrupt exit are noted, including the following:

Two sources told BuzzFeed News that Wen also refused to use “trans-inclusive” language, for example saying “people” instead of “women” and telling staff that she believed talking about transgender issues would “isolate people in the Midwest.” For a period of a few months, Wen sometimes went through Planned Parenthood’s press releases and documents, deleting the word “sexual” from the phrase “sexual and reproductive health,” the source said.

I suppose that’s the downside of hiring a physician, trained in human anatomy and physiology, to be the spokeswoman (sorry, spokesperson — or should it now be ‘wokesperson’?) for an organization that wants to ride the LGBTQ wave. The cognitive dissonance can be too much to handle. Even so, Wen must have known what she was getting into. Couldn’t she tell which way the wind was blowing?

The Incoherence of LGBT

/ Culture, Ethics

The argument I’m going to make here isn’t a new one, but it’s important enough to be restated and recirculated.

I’m not all that old, but I’m still old enough to remember when the acronym was just LGB. From a Christian perspective, the LGB movement was misguided, but at least it was conceptually coherent. Even if you disagreed with LGB advocates, at least you understood what you were disagreeing with. I don’t know when the T became a permanent addition (this Google Ngram suggests the mid-90s), but whenever it was, that was the point the acronym became an unstable compound.

Here’s why. L, G, and B were originally understood in terms of the natural (and normative) sexual categories of male and female. L refers to women who are sexually attracted to women. G refers to men who are sexually attracted to men. B refers to people who are sexually attracted to both men and women. (Remember that ‘bi’ means two; ‘bisexual’ presupposes a binary sexual categorization.) Those definitions are intelligible even to those who hold to traditional sexual norms.

But T subverts all that by demanding that we detach those sexual categories from physical (anatomical) realities. According to transgender ideology, the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are to be understood in terms of gender identity (which is non-physical) rather than biological sex (which is physical). Yet the moment we do that, the L, G, and B become meaningless.

The Gender Unicorn

By way of illustration, consider the widely-discussed Gender Unicorn developed by an organization known as Trans Student Educational Resources. (The following critique can be just as well applied to the Genderbread Person; I leave that as an exercise for the reader.) The Gender Unicorn is a visual aid that is supposed to help us understand and navigate the complex and pitfall-laden terrain of modern sexuality and gender identity. According to the Unicorn, we need to distinguish five dimensions: (1) gender identity, (2) gender expression, (3) sex assigned at birth, (4) physical attraction, and (5) emotional attraction. Now consider the first and fourth of these. One’s gender identity can be ‘man’ or ‘woman’ (alongside other options) but these have nothing to do with one’s anatomy (note how the rainbow icon appears in a thought bubble; it’s a matter of internal self-perception). At the same time, one’s physical attraction, the Unicorn tells us, can be toward ‘men’ or ‘women’ (again, alongside other options). Yet one can only have a physical attraction toward that which is physical. So the meanings of ‘men’ and ‘women’ on the axis of physical attraction must be defined with reference to anatomy.

Hence the incoherence: T (which is concerned with gender identity) requires us to define ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in non-physical terms, but L, G, and B (which are concerned at least partly with physical attraction) require us to define ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in physical terms.

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When Progressive Ideologies Collide

/ Apologetics, Culture, Ethics

Can a man have an abortion?

I imagine most of my readers will think that question has a very obvious answer, so obvious that the question is merely rhetorical. Even so, it may turn out to be the rock upon which progressivism dashes itself to pieces. Indeed, it could become as troublesome for progressives as the question “Is the pope Catholic?” has now become for Roman Catholics.

Planned Parenthood CampaignersThe central plank of the present-day defense of abortion is that it’s simply a matter of women’s rights. Such is the feminist argument: women should have the same rights and privileges as men when it comes to medical treatments and control over their own bodies. As a representative example, consider this recent opinion piece by Moira Donegan from the US edition of The Guardian. Excerpts, with my emphasis added:

Abortion rights did not fare well in the midterm elections. Alabama voters approved a measure that will grant full legal personhood to fertilized eggs, a move that will massively restrict the rights of pregnant and fertile women and ban all abortions in the state after the fall of Roe v Wade.

Women’s rights groups such as Planned Parenthood and Naral threw their weight behind the effort during the midterm election cycle, choosing candidates committed to ending Hyde for their coveted endorsements.

The argument [for keeping the Hyde amendment] conveniently ignores, too, that women who seek abortions are taxpayers themselves, and the Hyde amendment imposes on them an unequal protection from the state. Since there is no male medical procedure that is banned from federal funding the way that abortion is, men who use Medicaid receive a full range of coverage; women do not. They pay just as much in taxes as their male counterparts, but they do not receive equal benefits.

The argument is simple, even if perverse: the Hyde amendment unjustly discriminates against women because it prevents them from having the same degree of access to tax-funded medical procedures as men. Men receive “a full range of coverage,” but because federal funding for abortions is prohibited, women do not receive “a full range of coverage.”

But note the assumption: only women need abortions. After all, abortion is not a “male medical procedure.”

Is that true? Not if you accept transgenderism, for on that view one’s biological sex is not determinative of one’s gender identity. The fact that you have a uterus and the capacity to bear children doesn’t entail that you are a woman. Consider, for example, this recent story about a “pregnant Kiwi dad-to-be.” (Just do a web search for “pregnant man” — if you dare — for numerous other examples.)

Although the opinion piece above describes Planned Parenthood as a “women’s rights group,” apparently some branches of PP are more ‘woke’ than others:

Some Men Have a Uterus

Think this through. If some men have a uterus, then some men can become pregnant and bear children, in which case some men can have abortions. And if that’s the case — if the core claims of transgenderism are embraced — then abortion can’t be matter of women’s rights after all. Put in the language of the truly woke: the claim that abortion is about women’s rights is cisnormative and thus implicitly transphobic.

One cannot consistently make the feminist argument that abortion rights are fundamentally women’s rights while also conceding the transgender argument that a person’s physiology doesn’t determine whether that person is a man or a woman.

Feminism versus Transgenderism. Who will win?

Hard to say, but it’s going to be a fascinating battle for the rest of us to watch.

Postscript: The fight is turning physical.