I never intended to make this a series, but public officials keep behaving like utter morons, and it is instructive to see what they believe.
Last night’s edition was simply about officials’ obsession with nonsense, which is mostly harmless. Today’s edition is deadly serious since thousands of lives will be ruined by sheer insanity.
Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s newly reelected Lieutenant Governor, spoke at a press conference about the importance of Minnesota becoming a “sanctuary state” for non-custodial parents who kidnap their children in order to sterilize and mutilate them through “gender-affirming care.”
Minnesota is aping California in this policy, although if anything it is worse here because the governor didn’t even bother to wait for a law to be passed enacting this. He simply issued an executive order, claiming that there was a public “emergency” requiring the measure. So not only is the administration promoting an unconstitutional measure, endorsing parental kidnapping, and violating the “Full Faith and Credit” clause of the Constitution, but they are doing it without even the fig leaf of legislative endorsement.
Flanagan explained the importance of this at the press conference, and her explanation was particularly idiotic.
“Mom, I’m a failure.”
“That’s right, son!” https://t.co/NncjhatGfo
— Tim Meads (@TimMeadsUSA) March 16, 2023
This is, perhaps, one of the stupidest things I have heard out of a politician’s mouth. She is not only wrong, she is spectacularly wrong. Wrong in every possible way.
But for the fact that Flanagan has children I would have assumed she never met one. Children are wrong all the time, and Democrats remind us of this fact all the time when it suits them.
How many times have you heard a Democrat excuse the actions of violent criminals because their brains are not fully developed? A hundred? A thousand? It is a common refrain whenever the Democrats argue for leniency against the most horrific crimes.
But an infant, a toddler, a pre-teen, or a teen can make life-altering decisions in which they are permanently sterilized and mutilated based upon having a difficult time at one point in their childhood.
The very concept of “being born in the wrong body” is absurd on its face, because it ignores that our personhood itself is bound to being embodied. It makes as much sense as claiming to be born as the wrong species. You are what you are. Imagining something or wanting to be something doesn’t make it so.
But forget that for a moment. The process of maturation is the process of becoming who you are; if we believed that a person’s self-image or “identity” was fixed at birth then the whole idea of parenthood is moot. Children are not little adults; they are, if anything, unformed barbarians in need of molding.
Which is why culture matters. This, too, is something liberals tell us all the time. We cannot judge people from other cultures because their upbringing was a decisive factor in shaping who they are. So we understand them and their character in terms of their culture. The claim that we live in a White Supremacist culture, making all White people racist is based upon that very idea. The identity of a White person, according to the Left, is fixed by birth.
It is utterly incoherent and absolutely wrong. We may have a personality when we are children–that is clear–but we don’t have a fixed identity. The Left invests a lot of time and energy shaping the attitudes and behaviors of children precisely because they know that children’s attitudes and behavior are not fixed at birth–they spend a lot of time attacking the moral education of children based upon this knowledge.
Does Flanagan believe this tripe? She may think she does because the only way to justify her ideological commitment is to adopt a cognitive dissonance. But as a parent, she cannot but praise or scold the behaviors, attitudes, and personality expressions of her children in order to mold them into something that fits her values.
Kids try on identities throughout maturation. Nobody is born a goth, a stoner, or a drag queen. Or the opposite sex. Telling kids otherwise makes you a clown.
Yet this clown governs my state.
UPDATE: I clarified the second to the last paragraph.
