Lamenting a World Gone Mad

Christians privately express dismay at the culture, but fear speaking publicly against it for fear of being thought ‘negative’

News of a fatal accident involving a Tesla that smashed into a tree with no one at the wheel raises a question.

Why do these swanky electric vehicles have a ‘full self-driving’ feature if they don’t fully drive themselves?

There is now a criminal investigation in America over the company’s self-driving car claims following more than a dozen crashes that occurred while the self-driving feature was activated.

If I sold your mother-in-law a car and said it was self-driving, only for your mother-in-law to die after the car hit a tree and exploded into flames while operating in full self-driving mode, wouldn’t you be furious?

Well, okay, imagine it was someone other than your mother-in-law.

Wouldn’t you complain that a full self-driving car in which the driver had to sit in the driver’s seat with hands fully on the wheel and eyes fully on the road isn’t really a full self-driving car at all?

Wouldn’t you say, “This car is not self-driving because it doesn’t drive itself. It’s just a normal car being sold at an exorbitant price. How can my friend get one for his mother-in-law?”

If a man puts on a dress and wears make-up, do you call him a woman and insist he should be allowed to play women’s rugby?

Or do you say …

“That’s not a woman. It’s a man playing dress-ups. And there’s no way I’m letting him tackle my daughter.”

And what if he was driving a Tesla?

Would you say …

“Look there goes a woman in a self-driving car” as it careered straight off the road into a tree?”

Of course not.

Wouldn’t he just be a strangely dressed man found in the passenger seat of the burnt-out wreckage of an exorbitantly priced Tesla, leaving the women’s rugby team short a player, but not a female player?

Or what if there was a medical procedure that removed the perfectly healthy breasts from a perfectly healthy female so that her chest was flat like a man’s?

Would you say …

“Look how gender-affirming top surgery has wonderfully enhanced that man…’ Or would you say, ‘That woman’s body has been mutilated, and it’s wrong!”

And if the gender-affirming doctor arrived at his gender clinic in a self-driving EV, would you say …

“Look! It’s the gender-affirming doctor in his amazing self-driving car.”

Or would you say …

“Look! It’s the doctor involved in a multimillion-dollar industry that surgically disfigures vulnerable young people arriving in his very expensive EV purchased from the proceeds of highly questionable medical practices…”

And if that doctor protested that men could have periods, become pregnant, and give birth because ‘trans women are women’, would you agree?

Or would you ask him whether he also believes that a self-driving EV that requires him to sit in the driver’s seat holding the steering wheel and watching the road is really driving itself?

Or what about this…

If you discovered our taxpayer-funded broadcaster was failing to report both sides of the argument on trans ideology and had, the entire time, been signed up by a lobby group to promote LGBTQ+ inclusion and diversity, would you call that media network fair and balanced?

Would you say it was impartial?

Or would you say …

“The ABC is an out-of-control EV that keeps careering off the road!’ And demand to know, ‘Who the hell is driving this thing?”

And what if Australia had a political class who were too afraid to say what a woman was?

And what if the Secretary of the Health Department could not tell you what a woman was without first seeking leave to get advice?

And what if government departments and corporations started referring to women as ‘birthing parents’ and ‘chest feeders’ and ‘people who bleed’?

Would you say, our country was headed in the right direction?

Or would you say …

“Put me in the passenger seat of a full self-driving EV, because I like my chances better!”

I happen to know that a woman is an adult female. And these days, that makes me a veritable genius.

I acquired this special knowledge, now hidden from progressive elites, in primary school where a mystic – in those times known simply as a biology teacher – explained that females were distinguished by their XX chromosomes and their ability to give birth.

They also have distinctive genitalia.

If only Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee had access to these secrets when asked at her confirmation hearing to define the term ‘woman’.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson complained …

Can I provide a definition? I can’t. I’m not a biologist.”

Ms Jackson is not a meteorologist either, but I bet she could tell you when it’s raining.

And despite not being a vet, I guarantee she’d know a cow if she saw one.

I’m not a psychiatrist but I’m pretty certain Ms Jackson is an idiot.

But as for what a woman is? Let he who is a biologist say what defines a woman, for it is otherwise mysterious and difficult to ascertain.

It was a remarkable moment.

A woman who had given birth to two daughters and who was nominated to the Supreme Court, in part because she was a woman, couldn’t say for sure what a woman was.

In just four years, the US Supreme Court nomination hearings had gone from ‘Believe all women!’ to ‘What’s a woman?’ …. accompanied by the sound of crickets.

The level of absurdity was mind-boggling.

One thing is for sure, Harvard graduates aren’t what they used to be!

But Ms Jackson is not the only substantial woman unable (or unwilling) to substantiate what a woman is.

Forty-four years after the Commodores famously sang ‘you’re once, twice, three times a lady’ British Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper three times refused to say what a lady was.

She insisted she would “not go down that rabbit hole” when repeatedly asked in a Times Radio interview last year.

Ms Cooper, who released a book in 2019 entitled She Speaks: The Power of Women’s Voices now doesn’t want to be asked what a woman is because it’s all just too ‘tangled’.

As Commodores lead singer Lionel Richie might have crooned:

Thanks for the times you have given me

“The memories are all in my mind

“And now that we’ve come to the end of our rainbow

“There’s something I must say out loud

“You’re once, twice, three times someone only a qualified biologist could possibly call a lady though it’s really not a rabbit hole I want to go down.”

Cooper said that rather than try to define what a woman was, she would prefer to focus on preventing violence against women … if only she knew what one was.

Cooper’s Parliamentary colleague, Labour’s equalities spokeswoman Anneliese Dodds, was wholly unhelpful.

Dodds told BBC Radio that the definition of ‘woman’ depended entirely on who was asking.

‘It does depend on what the context is, surely?’ she said. 

Are our political and cultural elites cowards, or are they just plain stupid?

It does depend on what the context is, surely!

Having spent forty years insisting there is no difference between men and women, our political and cultural betters now have no response when trans activists take them at their word.

The definition of woman has been reduced to a feeling that can be appropriated by men at will. 

And now no one can object to men exposing their penises in the women’s change rooms since who can say for sure that he is not a woman?

And as for minimally talented biological men dominating women’s sports, well it’s all “contextual”, I suppose!

Maybe Judge Jackson and her political contemporaries are not stupid. Maybe they are just scared of being cancelled by the same woke club they belong to.

They don’t know enough biology to define a woman. Or to find their own backbone.

Meanwhile, the British Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who in 2021 rebuked a woman for saying ‘only women have a cervix’, has had a go at defining women.

“A woman is a female adult and, in addition to that, trans women are women,” he said.

This, of course, continued a long and proud tradition of men telling women what they are, and how they should think about their bodies.

He helpfully added …

“That is not just my view. That is the law.”

Right. 

So if lawmakers decide that donkeys are women, will the alternate British Prime Minister insist that ‘a woman is a female adult and, in addition to that, trans women are women, and donkeys are women’?

Or would the law be an ass?

Not even the then conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson could bring himself to properly define women.

He told Parliament …

“I think when it comes to distinguishing between a man and a woman, that the basic facts of biology remain overwhelmingly important.”

He thinks?

The implications are staggering.

The same politicians who insist on a woman’s right to choose, cannot – or will not – say what a woman is. 

How can people, unable to point to any objective difference between the sexes, rile against sexism?

And of what value are gender quotas if the ratios can be changed by a man choosing to identify as a woman and so being counted as one?

‘There’s no such thing as a woman. AND women need more rights!’

 It takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to be a progressive politician.

When Judge Jackson was asked to define the term ‘woman’ she was really being asked, ‘What do you believe about the nature of human beings, and what sort of judge will you be?’

‘Do you believe in absolute truth. Or do you believe reality, and indeed people themselves, can be manipulated like plasticine to suit the whimsies of the day?’

Obviously, Judge Jackson recognises ‘woman’ is a biological term and not a social construct.

But if she is unable to speak truth in the face of leftist dogma, she will likely be prejudiced by leftist dogma rather than by facts when it comes to her Supreme Court rulings.

If you’re not smart enough to know what a woman is, you’re not smart enough to be on the Supreme Court.

And if you’re too afraid to say what a woman is, you’re too lily-livered to lead the country.

Gender is so deeply ingrained in our biology that they can dig up a human being buried 10,000 years ago and determine from the skeleton whether the remains are from a man or from a woman.

When they dig us up 10,000 years from now, they will easily determine our gender, but they will never in a million years understand just how stupid we had become.

Who would ever have imagined that Genesis 1v28 would become the most controversial sentence in literature!

“God created them in his image … male and female he created them.”

The controversial bit is not the existence of God. Western Culture decided in the 60s that God did not exist.

Time Magazine famously asked on the cover of its April 8, 1966 issue: “Is God Dead?”

And four weeks later John Lennon triumphantly declared that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus.

No, the controversy over Genesis 1v28 is not the existence of God but the existence of women.

And as mad as this seems, it was entirely predictable.

If God doesn’t exist, can anything really exist?

Or to put it another way, without God there is no objective truth and so everything – even the existence of women – is up for grabs. And so, in the words of that great cultural commentator The Apostle Paul – professing to be wise, they became fools.

Speaking of which, it was only last year that Australia’s chief medical bureaucrat Professor Brendon Murphy was asked in a Senate Estimates Hearing to define a woman.

And do you remember his reply? After much shifting nervously in his seat and shuffling of papers on his desk, he replied that he would need to seek advice from his department.

The Australian Newspaper reported recently that, according to official Medicare records, 55 Australian men gave birth to babies in 2014.

Here’s what I’ve been trying to figure out …

Why has this become such a big issue? The trans thing I mean.

Why is our culture suddenly so fixated on this one issue? Why has, of all things THIS, become the defining issue of our time?

Why is our culture so committed to this one point – that you cannot know for sure what a woman is – that we are willing to sacrifice even our children in order to make it.

At the exact moment totalitarian regimes - Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran - are threatening global peace and stability, the Western World is locked in a heated debate about how to define women.

The debate about trans rights is not really an argument about trans rights, it’s an argument about truth.

When you understand this, you understand why transgenderism has become the dominant issue in the culture wars, despite gender dysphoria affecting only a tiny number of people.

If we cannot say for sure what a woman is, how can we say for sure what anything is?

And if we cannot say what anything is, then how can we say that anything is wrong?

Transgenderism makes everything relative. That is its appeal.

If I say I am a man trapped in a woman’s body because that is how I feel, then that is the truth. Or at least, that is my truth. And who are you to disagree?

There is no objective truth left to which one can appeal. We denied God long ago. Now we deny even our own biology. Who and what is left to answer to?

If you cannot trust your lying eyes when looking down in the shower, what can you trust?

Unshackled from the burden of reality, we are now free to think with our emotions and to reason with our feelings.

If French philosopher Rene Descartes was alive today, he would not have said “I think, therefore I am” but, rather, “I feel, therefore I am”.

I cannot be true to truth since there is no such thing. I can only be true to my feelings since my feelings are the only truth I acknowledge. Furthermore, they are my feelings, so I can never be wrong.

I am my authentic self when I am doing as I please, since doing as I please pleases me. Anything else would be living a lie.

If you disagree with my feelings, then you are denying my existence since my feelings are the only reality I acknowledge.

That’s why it’s not enough for you to merely accept me, you must affirm me. And by affirm “me”, I mean affirm my feelings.

This is why popular culture now insists governments must permit me to change sex on my birth certificate, every 12 months if I wish. If my birth certificate does not reflect my feelings, then in what sense is it accurate?

And it is not in the least bit ironic that I can claim to be my “authentic self” after having a vagina constructed where my penis and testicles used to be.

If my body does not reflect my feelings, then my own body is a lie, and to remain in it is to be living a lie in a very literal sense.

The difficulty in sustaining all of this is that objective truth has an annoying habit of reasserting itself.

For example, men cannot become pregnant and give birth to babies. We know this, but we must not admit this since it undermines all that we have worked so hard to accomplish.

Problems (they used to be called truths) like this must be supressed - not so much because they upset trans people but because they reveal that objective truth continues to exist despite our attempts to destroy it.

So our culture will insist that men can get pregnant. 

And our culture will insist that Medicare record men giving birth to babies. 

And our culture will demonise anyone who says anything to the contrary, since saying anything to the contrary is hurtful by which I mean it hurts our ability to create a world in which our feelings are the only reality we answer to.

As an aside, you should now be starting to understand why our culture insists it is so important that we take every opportunity to have children interact with Drag Queens so that they become LGBTQ allies, if not gays or queers or - even better - trans themselves.

What is tolerance and inclusivity training in schools if it is not an attempt to bury the idea of objective truth so deep in the next generation’s consciousness that there is next to no chance of it ever re-emerging?

Our culture has decided it will teach the next generation to be so open-minded that their brains fall out.

Our culture will convince our children that nothing exists outside of their feelings. And we will put a device in their hands 24/7 specifically to manipulate and massage their feelings, even as it saps whatever residual power of thought they might have had left.

Popular culture regards family is a problem, of course, since parents tend to feel a sense of responsibility for their offspring.

And Christian families are the worst because those kinds of people cling to ancient ideas like objective truth and reality which they attempt to inculcate in their children.

For this reason our culture must discourage judgment of any kind and against anyone or anything except the Christian church.

The Christian church must be attacked at every opportunity since it is the last baston of objective truth.

By Christian church I do not, of course, mean those churches that have embraced the Left’s unholy trinity of tolerance and inclusion and diversity. 

Popular culture, by which I mean the ABC, will champion those churches.

And they don’t have to be churches proudly displaying the rainbow flag (however desirable that is) where the cross once was.

Churches that stick to the nice bits of their Bible and agree to go quiet on the objectionable stuff are quite fine.

Infact, they are more than fine. Popular culture regards them as quite useful since their singular message of love and acceptance can be leveraged to promote love and acceptance of everything accept objective truth.

But those Christians and churches that insist reality exists quite apart from feelings will be de-friend, de-platformed and destroyed.

They will be pushed to the fringes – demonised as bigots and as haters - until one way or other they disappear forever.

Then, and only then, will our culture be free to say that good is evil and that evil is good without having to worry that truth might resurface in the form of someone pointing out that this culture’s feet are firmly planted in mid-air, or that the emperor is wearing no clothes, or that in professing to be wise the Western World has become a collection of fools.

The response of the church has largely been glib, naïve and insipid.

Our reason for not engaging in the culture wars – even as we are pushed further and further into a corner is:

“We don’t want to be known for what we are against, we want to be known for what we are for!”

I’ve heard this expression used numerous times as a reason for people to stay silent in the face of evil.

I’ve heard preachers say it from pulpits, and receive applause as if they have just said something profound.

I’ve heard friends say it over coffee, and then pause as if it was a drop-the-mic moment.

Good people will privately express dismay at what is being done to the culture, but they will never speak publicly against it for fear of being thought ‘negative’.

“We don’t want to be known for what we are against,” is their defence for remaining mute as the culture is trashed all around them. 

“We want to be known for what we are for.”

It sounds virtuous. It is not.

It is worse than disingenuous — it is an inversion of the truth.

The left don’t promote a ‘positive vision’ of the future. Far from it.

The entire progressive project is rooted in rebellion against what the left sees as the oppression of the natural order.

Their love of everything from open borders, sexual license and gender fluidity to collectivism is not an optimistic vision for the future — it is a violent insurrection against order.

The left’s aspiration is for the destruction of all norms. I don’t think that’s a positive.

In fact, it is historically proven to result in a negative, because of its hatred for the individual.

It is impossible to match the left’s supposed utopian vision, because that utopian vision is operating outside of the bounds of what is possible.

You cannot have a gender-fluid world, because God created us as male or female. No other world exists.

You cannot have a world in which drag queens are held up as role models for children, at least not unless you intend to completely destroy the innocence of childhood and with it the family.

The truth is that the messaging of the left is unmatchable.

The left promise an infinite money supply and freedom from all norms and boundaries, while pointing at everyone else as ‘the party of no’.

The left promise unreality, and paint anyone who dares to point this out as being ‘negative’.

To agree to be painted into such a corner is not noble. It is intellectual stupidity and moral cowardice.

It’s like lamemtimg that Sir Winston Churchill had no positive vision beyond stopping Hitler.

It’s like someone warning Churchill in 1939 that he ran the risk of being seen as negative unless he began talking about something other than the Nazis.

Opposing the left’s assault on the culture may be viewed as a negative, but it is in defence of a deeper positive — protection for families, communities, human rights and faith, in the face of political and cultural chaos.

Go ahead and berate those who oppose the left for being reactionaries. Do you chide the guy who tries to put out the arsonist’s fire for being ‘reactionary’?

Those opposing the licentiousness of our times are not the initiators of the cultural revolution. They are simply responding. And when they do, the left censure them for not bending over and taking it.

The biggest lie the left are selling today is not relativism; it is the lie that the insane are visionaries, while anyone sane enough to point out their foolishness is just ‘against everything’.

When leaders proclaim that they don’t want to be known for what they are against, they are not saying anything profound or virtuous. They are just parroting a lie that allows those who hate reality to continue trashing it.

In June 2021, a female patron of Korea Town’s Wi Spa in Los Angeles was shocked to find a naked man in the changeroom.

She promptly complained to staff but was told the man had a right to be there because he identified as a woman.

In a video of the altercation that went viral, the female customer can be heard protesting:

“I see a dick! It lets me know he's a man! He is a man. He is not a female!"

Her argument is well thought-out and eloquently presented. Allow me to summarise it for you:

1. Men have dicks.

2. A person in the female change room has a dick.

3. Therefore, there is a man in the female change room.

But staff at the Wi Spa were unimpressed and unmoved. They continued to insist that they could not ask the person with the dick to leave the female locker room since that would be discrimination and therefore, unlawful.

The offended woman continued arguing: "It's OK for a man to go into the women's section, show his penis around the other women — young little girls, underage? ... Wi Spa condones that — is that what you're saying?”

The video shows a male patron of the spa approaching the woman and asking if she was talking about a transgendered person.

“There’s no such thing as transgender. He has a dick,” she retorted.

The Christian Post reported this incident as "highlighting the brewing tension between single-sex spaces and gender identity non-discrimination policies".

They should consider renaming their publication The Christian sit on the Fence Post.

The incident in the Wi Spa does not “highlight tension between single-sex spaces and gender identity non-discrimination policies”.

Rather, it highlights the brewing tension between sanity and insanity; between normal people trying to go about their lives and the weirdly abnormal people who have turned the whole world into a woke spa where the only thing being massaged is your brain.

Normal people understand that a man walking around with his penis hanging out is a man.

Normal people also understand that even though a man might wish to be a woman, his wishes do not change the physical reality of his situation, which is that he is a man … with his penis hanging out … in the women’s change room.

So why did a video of a woman doing nothing more than observing reality - and reacting as a normal person would react - go viral? Why did so many people find it fascinating to watch?

Could it be that we have now reached a point in Western culture where simply being normal is seen as an act of bravery, even heroism?

Have we now arrived at a stage in history where courage is required simply to say what normal people would say and to react the way normal people would react in any given situation?

It should not require courage to explain that men have a penis. But so many normal people have gone quiet - hiding their common sense and keeping their normality to themselves - that normal people are now regarded as a curiosity.

Where once history was decided by a clash of religions or by a clash of political ideologies, the history of our age has come down to a clash between the normal and the abnormal; the sane and the insane.

The only way to prevent Australia being transformed into a dangerous Woketopia is for normal people to point out the obvious, to laugh at the ridiculous and to speak the truth.

All that is required is courage, and a keen sense of humor.