Last night, a number of presidential candidates took part in a lengthy CNN town hall centered around LGBT issues. It should have been a safe event for the Democrats. Had they spent the evening shouting vapid slogans like “love is love” and “equality for all,” they would have come out looking enlightened in some people’s eyes and basically harmless to almost everyone else. Gay rights — if by that, we mean the right to get married — is (like it or not) now a politically winning issue for the Democratic Party. Polling consistently shows that an increasing majority of Americans have a generally positive attitude towards gay marriage and homosexuality. Politically speaking, the Democrats are in good shape when they stay in that lane. But last night, they veered far, far outside of it — eventually careening off the highway, over the guardrail, down an embankment, and into the river below.
Even on the issue of gay marriage, the Democrats found a way to turn a political winner into a political loser. Beto O’Rourke advocated using the IRS to punish schools and churches that maintain their belief in one-man/one-woman marriage. The carefully curated crowd of radical leftists responded to the illegal and bigoted proposal with uproarious applause. And of course the moderators, who displayed staggering levels of cowardice throughout the evening, did not follow up by asking the congressman whether this initiative would extend to mosques. Most Americans are on board with gay marriage, but they’re also on board with religious liberty. “Go after the churches” may be a rallying cry that earns you applause in a CNN town hall, but it won’t win you votes in Ohio.
The real trouble came when the discussion turned to transgenderism. All of the candidates tried their best to pretend that they actually believe in the radical Left’s various superstitions regarding sex and gender. I’m not sure if their performances were convincing to leftists, but from the perspective of sane and normal people, it teetered between awkward and downright horrifying. On the awkward side of things, Kamala Harris opened up by giving her preferred pronouns. This is a sacred ritual in gender studies lecture halls across the country, but everyone else just finds it ridiculous. Even Chris Cuomo couldn’t help but crack a joke. “Fredo” promptly apologized, but there’s a reason why he instinctively responded the way he did. Introducing yourself with your pronouns is objectively bizarre. Only those who have been thoroughly brainwashed ahead of time can manage to keep a straight face when confronted by such silliness.
On the horrifying end of the spectrum, Elizabeth Warren came out in favor of forcing taxpayers to fund genital mutilation procedures for incarcerated transgenders. This is a reversal of her position only a few years ago. Indeed, every single one of these candidates have undergone a sudden and dramatic transformation on the issue of sex and gender. They all spent almost their entire adult lives believing that sex is an immutable and biological characteristic. If you could go back in time to the year 2004 and ask any of them — Warren, Sanders, O’Rourke, whomever — whether men have penises, they would look at you with stunned bemusement and then say something like, “What? Yes, obviously.” They probably would have given you that answer in 2008, 2012, and maybe even 2016. It’s only in the last couple of years that all prominent Democrats in the country have decided that men can menstruate and woman can produce sperm.
This all raises a question: Why did they change their minds on this? What accounts for the weirdest and most dramatic flip flop in the history of politics? Well, I know the answer. So do you. But they won’t give that answer. I’d be curious to hear what answer they do give. And if we had an actual news media interested in holding liberal politicians accountable, we would all get a chance to hear it. In any case, however, they came to the conclusion that biological sex doesn’t exist — whether due to collective head injury, spiritual epiphany, vision, drug-induced hallucination, or cynical political calculation. It is doubtful that a majority of voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida agree with their current position.
Most horrifying of all was the nine-year-old “transgender” child whose abuse and exploitation was heartily endorsed by Elizabeth Warren and the audience. The poor child — a girl who thinks she’s a boy — read a question that had clearly been prepared by her mother, who was standing beside her beaming with pride. That mother apparently works with the militant leftist Human Rights Campaign. Funny, isn’t it? Radical leftist parents who subscribe to progressive gender theory are so often the ones who end up with “transgender” children. It’s almost like “transgenderism” in children is usually a product of conditioning. Parents intentionally foster gender confusion so that they can parade their kids around as fashion statements. “Hey, look at me! My kid is trans! Beat that, you woke posers!” It’s disgusting, evil, and tragic. And I am confident that most sane people recognize it as such. But the Democratic Party has no use for sane people, and is no longer trying to represent them.