Anyone can play the game
Katha Pollitt on “blasphemy” complaints in higher education:
Have we really reached the stage where accusations of blasphemy can get a professor fired? Seriously, blasphemy? In a secular college? In the United States? What century is this? When it comes to being offended on religious grounds, anyone can play the game. A Catholic student can accuse his history professor of bigotry for speaking with insufficient respect for the doctrine of papal infallibility. A fundamentalist Protestant can insist that a biology professor accept an exam answer claiming that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. A Jewish foreign-relations student can insist on an A for a paper claiming that God gave Jews the land of Israel. Left meets right; deference to religion meets the cult of My Feelings.
And, of course, a man who claims to be a woman can accuse his history professor of “transphobia” for any number of ludicrous reasons.
Speaking of critical thinking, can we stop applying the word “Islamophobia” indiscriminately? “Phobia” is a psychological term that means irrational fear. If you think a Muslim family moving into your neighborhood means tomorrow you’ll be living under sharia law, that’s Islamophobia. Back in 2015, a Texas high school had 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed arrested as a bomb maker after he proudly showed his teacher a clock he’d made out of a pencil case. That was Islamophobia. It is not Islamophobic to publicly doubt that Muhammad flew to heaven and back on a magical horselike creature or to conclude that the Quran is the work of human beings, not the direct word of God. The same thought process applies to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Greek myth. Islam is a religion like other religions, and as such should be open to critique and dispute. It’s hardly racist or bigoted to believe we have the right not to live according to religious beliefs we don’t share.
Indeed, and, again, also applies to the religion of Magic Gender Identity.
If only we could convince everyone that Magic Gender is, in fact, a religious belief. Unfortunately, one of the religion’s tenets is that it’s not a religious belief, so we’re spreading heresy.
It’s not explicitly a tenet though. I wonder if there’s a chink in the armor there…
Is it not? I’ve always gotten the impression that mid-20th century sexology is their mythic analogue to the stories of Abraham, Moses, and the like. God revealed himself to the prophets, and gender identity was discovered by the psychologists.
Right, the impression, but impression=not explicit.
Fair enough. This raises an interesting question. If we reduce the faith to its core, what are its explicit, nonnegotiable dogmas and doctrines? I don’t think I’ve ever thought exactly along those lines.
That magical horselike creature (it’s called a buraq, in case anyone is wondering) is pretty sweet, though . . .
NiV@5,
Men can do what they like. Of course they’d never actually come out and say that, but that’s what it boils down to.
That “people are what they say they are” – except of course that they don’t mean it, but they don’t admit they don’t mean it. What they mean is that trans people are what they say they are and everyone else has to check with trans people first.
That “trans rights are human rights” – but the hidden clause is that those rights must never be spelled out.
That “identity” is all-important while biology is mere superstructure.
That trans people are the most persecuted abused vulnerable Minority on the planet.
That trans people are better than everyone else.
Trans people have exclusive license to determine everyone else’s gender, whether they have one or not. They’re the Sorting Hat of Gender.