Hypocrisy Alert: Bruce Springsteen, call your record label.

Excuse me while I extract myself from the saccharine self-righteousness of the stories I've been reading about businesses and celebrities who are boycotting North Carolina and Mississippi for their Political Incorrectness.

In addition to the hypocrisy of punishing people they disagree with under the label of tolerance and diversity, they have added another level of insincerity to their hypocrisy portfolio by boycotting whole states that engage in discriminatory behavior--or what passes for discriminatory behavior among the fevered ideologues who have taken over the culture.

Here's Brandon Morse at RedState on the sad condition of the liberal cultural schoolmarms now wagging their fingers at other people for violating the new moralistic tolerance standards:

PayPal decided they weren’t going to build a global HQ there, even though they have HQ’s in places like Singapore, which arrest gays on site just for being gay.

And then there's the Boss, who has willingly let himself be Blinded by the PC Light:

Bruce operates under the Sony label, who does business in countries where you can be jailed, or even killed for being gay. Is Bruce going to drop Sony in solidarity with the freedom fighters? If he’s that into moral grandstanding, then that would be his next logical move, right?

But moral posturing doesn't really involve any logic. It's just a cheap way to make yourself feel like you have really struck a blow for some revolutionary progressivist principle. It doesn't cost them a thing and it gets you applause among your progressivist friends.

Bruce Jenner and the Emotive Theory of Gender

If you tried your hardest you could not make up the farcical drama we have seen played out on the national stage over the last two weeks in regard to Bruce Jenner (now calling himself "Caitlyn"), who has convinced a credulous national media that he has been able to change his sex by the simple expedient of a little cosmetic surgery and the donning of a corset for a national magazine.

The whole XY chromosome thing that we were all told in high school science class was the way to determine gender in human beings is now a victim of political fashion. Now, in a move hard to justify as an actual scientific improvement, gender is determined by feelings.

You are a man if you feel you are a man. You are a woman if you feel you are a woman. The actual biology is now incidental. Let's call it the "Emotive Theory" of gender determination, on contrast to the "Biological Theory" of gender. And of course the move to the Emotive Theory doesn't clarify anything; in fact, it makes things a lot more confusing, partly because, unlike the Biological Theory, where there are hard and fast rules, under the Emotional Theory of gender determination, anything goes.

One chapter in the historical chronicles of the early 21st century will be about why, in a time when science is worshiped with more reverence than any god, scientific principles got thrown to the wind when it came to anything having to do with sex.

It wasn't too long ago that Paul Gross and Normal Levitt could write a book like Higher Superstitions: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, about the political distortions of even basic science. It was greeted with accolades by the hard-nosed scientific community at the time. Today the academic and popular left has become so predominant in academia and the media that Gross and Levitt would be thought old-fashioned, and scientists expected to tow the party line.

In 1996 Alan Sokol took the criticism of postmodernist thought to new and hilarious heights when he wrote a paper filled with deliberate nonsense and submitted to Social Text, a prominent postmodernist academic journal. The editors published it, making themselves a laughing stock among their academic colleagues and attracting the derision even of the public that had never heard of Social Text.

Again, here we are in 2015 living in a time when what Sokal wrote in his paper is no more nonsensical than what you hear on E! television, or the View, or CNN. The heights of nonsense have been scaled and conquered.

Some day history is going have a good laugh at the expense of our generation, which has managed to confuse itself so badly about gender that it has literally rendered itself incapable of making sense of the common, everyday world. And not only that but they are even more confused about the reality they have created for themselves.

Their ideology makes them scratch their head about the world, so they create another one for their own political convenience that ends up making them scratch their heads even harder.

I would say that the Emotive Theory of Gender awaits its Alan Sokal, but in reality I don't think there is anything more nonsensical than what the media feeds us on a daily basis. You could try to make up something more ludicrous than what we are now seeing with the Bruce Jenner story, but you just wouldn't be able to do it.

Not only are the doctrines of the Emotive Theory nonsensical in themselves, but they blatantly contradict themselves.

How many times have we been told that our distinctions between the masculine and feminine are arbitrary and socially constructed. But right on the tails of that lecture, we watch Anderson Cooper's interview last week with Buzz Bissinger, where he solemnly asks,

AC: You've spent hundreds of hours with Bruce Jenner, a lot of time with Kaitlyn, are they different? Do they seem different? You know obviously their appearance obviously ... 

Buzz: Yes they're very different, very different in appearance obviously. 

And they blather on about this, making no sense at all, going so far as to refer to the "soul of Bruce" being replaced by the "soul of Caitlyn."  It's amazing what reconstructive surgery can do nowadays.

For one thing, how can Bruce become a woman if he has already been one from the beginning, which is what he claims? If he is simply bringing his body into alignment with his soul, then why are we all gushing about him "becoming" Caitlyn and the "soul of Bruce" leaving (and by the way, were exactly did it go?), and the "soul of Caitlyn" inhabiting this highly trafficked body?

And for another, are there now really two Jenner selves--one inhabiting the body before the transformation and another entering it and taking over after the transformation? And when did this transformation occur? When he started taking estrogen? When he shaved his legs? When he put on the corset? Is the seat of the soul now the breasts, of which Bruce got a brand new and significantly larger set?

What happened to masculinity and femininity being arbitrary social constructs? If they are arbitrary and don't reflect reality then how can Bruce be said to be different from Caitlyn?

We now live in a society that believes that men and women are not fundamentally different from one another unless they have been first switched through reconstructive surgery.

You just can't make this stuff up.

CNN's Chris Cuomo criticizes Fox's Duggar interview, in denial about Bruce Jenner's deadbeat dad past

CNN's Chris Cuomo criticizes Fox's Duggar interview for being a "conversation among friends." That's nothin'. He should check out his own network's treatment of deadbeat dad Bruce Jenner, who hurt his children far worse--and while they were wide awake, no less.

In fact, the double standards and self-righteousness have reached fever pitch at CNN over the Duggar interview. Armies of psychologists have been enlisted in the campaign to lecture the Duggars about whether they did enough to protect their daughters from a brother who groped them in their sleep (as opposed to humiliating them fully conscious before the public, which is what CNN has done).

We have yet to hear words of advice and reproval about what Bruce Jenner did to his children, who, by the way, are still dealing with what he did to them--as opposed to the Duggar children, who are over what Josh did to them and are now dealing with what CNN is doing to them.

Where are the calls, like those CNN has been issuing for the Duggars, for Bruce to undergo treatment to come fully to terms with his deadbeat past (not to mention is self-indulgent present)?

No. They are too busy rubbing the noses of the victims in what their brother did to them.

These people are a menace to society.

CNN lectures Duggars, excuses Jenner's abandonment of his children

The children Bruce Jenner abandoned when they were young.

So on CNN tonight, multiple psychological professionals joined Don Lemon to wag their fingers at the Duggar family and give them preachy sermons on being self-righteous, all apparently unaware of how self-righteous they looked doing it, as well as lecturing them on how they could have been better parents.

Several of these "professionals" on the program suggested that the entire family--Josh and the sisters he victimized when he was a minor (who have been victimized even worse by CNN publicizing what happened to them despite the fact that their records were supposed to be sealed--all of whom just want to be left alone, get treatment.

Meanwhile, back at Kaitlyn Jenner Central, amidst the blanket adulation of Kaitlyn Jenner--who abandoned his four children and refused to pay child support for ten years when he was an adult, and who is now free of his third wife--no moralistic lectures have been administered about all the things he could have done to be a better father and husband and no treatment has been suggested concerning his confused belief that he is really a woman and how this is connected with this selfish life leading up to now.

Funny how these things work.

All Together Now: Let's all pretend that the whole Bruce Jenner affair makes perfect sense

I have a longer post going up in the next day or two about the whole Bruce Jenner affair, but what has been so surprising about the whole surreal moral meltdown it represents is how so-called "conservatives," having laid aside whatever critical faculties they had (and, let's face it, it does vary), have surrendered to the mindless nonsense of postmodern gender ideology.

When Jenner came out and announced that he was morphing into a woman, I expected the Anderson Coopers and Rachel Maddows of the world to sing their hosannahs, but last night on Fox News, it was a veritable love-fest in response to the Vanity Fair cover showing Jenner, newly-dubbed "Kaitlyn," in a corset.

First off there was Meghan Kelly, who, having just finished bragging about how firmly she was going to deal with the Duggars because, you know, that's just the way she is with everyone, couldn't contain her admiration for Jenner.

Then, just about 30 minutes later, Kelly appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show, where Bill asked her what she thought about Jenner's supposed gender change. But the patented Meghan Kelly tough girl act she likes to brag about was nowhere to be seen. "I give him a lot of credit," said Kelly. "I think he's courageous."

Whut?

I'm trying to imagine all the suffering and embarrassment that must be involved in being featured in a glowing cover story in a major pop culture magazine and having virtually everyone in the media, whatever their politics, fawning, if not outright salivating, all over you.

Courageous? Really?

Of course, there are some of us out there (called "males," a term used for humans with XY chromosomes before this system of gender determination became politically unpopular) who actually would be embarrassed to appear in a corset--on a magazine cover or anywhere else. But we are hard to find now, except at Nascar tracks and bowling alleys.

At what point is this absurd "courage" meme going to be seen for what it is? When will we acknowledge that when gays or people who claim to be transgender "come out," it isn't to angry crowds, but to a sycophantic popular media?

How long do we have to keep pretending that gays are really persecuted?

But O'Reilly's response to Kelly's silly remarks was even more interesting. I mean, surely Bill, the impresario of the "No Spin Zone," would press Kelly on such a blitheringly nonsensical statement. Even O'Reilly--Bill the tough guy--caved without a fight. "Well, people can do what they want," he said. "This is America and nobody should comment on it."

In other words, don't dare question the fact that a person can change his gender through the power of sheer emotion with a little assistance from a cosmetic surgeon. Don't even think about it.

Thank you Fox News, for the advice. You just go on pretending this all makes sense while a few of the rest of us who think feelings can't change the nature of reality practice a little common sense.

In fact, surprisingly, the most sensible coverage of the issue came on some CNN show (the one on late that features the male and female co-anchors with the British accents), who interviewed a transgender man critical of the whole Jenner affair, who pointed out (and you can only say this if you are transgender) that you can't change your gender.

But back on Fox News is was all postmodern fluff.

Sheez.

House Democratic leaders holding Student Privacy Act

Yesterday's Family Foundation press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MARCH 9, 2015

LEXINGTON, KY – The Family Foundation said today that Democratic leaders in the State House who are now holding the bill should stop blocking SB 76, the Student Privacy Act. “There seems to be widespread support for this bill.” said Martin Cothran. “For House Democratic leaders to block it will be a disservice to students—and it won’t do much for their own political fortunes either to oppose such a popular measure.”

“Two of our Facebook posts on this bill have reached over 55,000 people, indicating there is huge interest in this bill,” said Cothran, a spokesman for The Family Foundation. “There is more interest in this one piece of legislation than anything we have supported since the Marriage Protection Amendment in 2004.”

Cothran pointed to news reports quoting House Speaker Greg Stumbo (D-Prestonsburg) as saying the House would not deal with the bill. “The Speaker has indicated he doesn’t think student privacy is an important issue. We think many Kentuckians would beg to differ.”

SB 76 would ensure the privacy of students by preventing students of one biological gender from using the bathroom, locker room, and shower facilities of the other while still allowing local school administrators to accommodate transgender students.  It would also provide a safer environment for transgender students.