By Bruce Logan
Identity? The progressive says it’s chosen and the conservative says it’s given. Consequently “What is a woman?” is the most revealing question you can ask a current or aspiring MP. Why? The answer will expose their grasp of human nature, their understanding of scientific method and how intellectually independent they are. Just how far they are in thrall to the failing overarching imposition of multiculturalism and its doctrine of diversity, inclusion and equity. (DIE)
What it means to be human, intrinsic to the question above, is the moral, cultural, and political issue of our time. Transgenderism is the steady creep of a subjugating “Sexual Revolution” that proclaims the moral autonomy of the individual. There should be no limitation on human sexual activity other than consent. Sex, and consequently morality, is to be controlled only by a politically correct invention of identity.
The Revolution would abolish marriage and family, the nest and shield of Edmund Burke’s “small platoons” of civil society. It completely ignores the belief that we’ve had for nearly 2 millennia that the human being is a unity of body and spirit. It fails to comprehend that how we treat our bodies has far-reaching spiritual, familiar and material consequences. To declare the human creature mere matter will always dehumanise.
The fantasy of dementia has overtaken the cultural controllers. They are, in a rush of pious blood to the head, quite sure that human meaning and identity is a matter of personal choice. I feel therefore I am. The unbeliever must be silenced and re-educated.
Increasingly, many educators, seduced by DIE’s would be cultural gatekeepers, permit or even encourage sex change while denying parents the right to know if their child identifies as a member of the opposite sex.
Indeed it is a denial of any rational understanding of the essential coherence of relational identity and parental responsibility.
“Who am I?” is most readily answered by one’s response to the embrace of the family into which one is born. Family based relational identity is the seed of good mental health.
How one might feel is a matter of interest but not one of permanent truth. To declare feeling ultimately authoritative in an ordered world is a childish attempt to make ideology shape reality rather than permitting reality to test ideology.
The feelers avant-garde, those who insist that there is an operating difference between an individual’s sex and the ambiguous neologism “gender” do not understand that they are actually undermining the dignity of every woman. They are not, as they frequently claim, merely resisting the stereotyping of women in society. They are simply replacing one stereotype for another which is more malignant than the first.
The acceptance of new meanings to old words or new words, such as “gender” or “cisgender” reinforces the feeler’s narcissism and places the power to determine human meaning in the hands of a self-appointed elite.
So, the answer to the question,” what is a woman?” reveals where an MP stands in subjection or resistance to the overpowering cultural controllers. The answer is a revelation of character and maturity; of the MP’s spiritual and cultural imagination that has, until very recently, been informed by a respect for tradition.
It is also an indication of the MP’s understanding of history as the source of scientific method, rejected by the cultural controllers, now infiltrating our education system and much government policy. It will be a clue revealing what the MP thinks about how children should learn, the family and even civil society and probably critical race theory.
The MP who cannot answer the question, what is a woman? will not know what it means to be human. There will be scant appreciation of freedom of religious belief and expression or free speech embedded in the dignity given to us by the Transcendent.
That the world is an ordered place is one of the great discoveries of Western civilisation. We are here to appreciate that order, to observe it and adapt to it. It is the imagination of the child to think we can alter it on the basis of what we feel about ourselves.
That is not to say that feelings are not important; they are essential to our understanding of who we are and indeed to our happiness. They are however an inadequate foundation. The soft head, the soft and sovereign heart that would insist on the primacy of political identity is a deadly combination which must nurture a swelling totalitarianism.
Bruce Logan is a board member of Family First NZ
