"Gender affirming care" and "flattening the curve"

The religious energy of progressivism requires that it never be satisfied

From Matt Walsh yesterday:

Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog

Drop the “gender affirming care” euphemism and ask people how they feel about the sterilization and chemical castration of children, then come back and let us know the results https://t.co/6A0GNYidyU

Ari Drennen @AriDrennen

New poll shows that the majority of US adults oppose legislative bans on gender affirming care for trans youth https://t.co/Tm1UDjL6bC

I say this regularly, but it continues to amaze how rapidly we went from “look, what does it affect your life if two consenting adults want to…?” to now the main focus being on serving harmful medical procedures to confused children. (As Nancy Pelosi said recently, in a set of comments which seemed to also imply that the most progressive city in the United States now has an epidemic of “trans youth” on the streets because their parents threw them out, “Right now, our challenge are trans kids”.)

But this is the same strategy employed with “two weeks to flatten the curve”. Many of our Christian institutions played along with COVID control measures for months or years. But, even as weak and confused as many of them are, if you had told them up front “this is what we want you to do, and we want you to still be doing it months from now”, they would have actually found it quite easy to say “well in that case, no thanks bub”. But that isn’t what they were asked for, instead they were asked for this relatively little thing, which served as the hook to drag them along, and along, and along…

LGBTism is the same. You know I still have relatively libertarian politics, ergo an argument that “look, mainly these people just want to be left alone by the state to make their own decisions”, is going to have an appeal to people like me, whereas the situation that it has now devolved into has, of course, no appeal whatsoever.

This is connected to the fact that, as Adrian Vermeule identified back in 2017, it is central to the religious energy of progressivism that whatever we are doing is not enough.

Liberalism needs an enemy to maintain its sacramental dynamism. It can never rest in calm waters, basking in the day of victory; it is essential that at any given moment there should be a new battle to be fought. The good liberal should always be able to say, “We have made progress, but there is still much to do.” This is why the triumph of same-sex marriage actually happened too suddenly and too completely. Something else was needed to animate liberalism, and transgenderism has quickly filled the gap, defining new forces of reaction and thus enabling new iterations and celebrations of the Festival.

Ergo, should these folks gain victory in whatever it is they now want for “trans kids”, they aren’t going to stop there, they’re just going to find something even worse to demand that will provoke a brand new outraged reaction. Their religion needs that outrage, needs that enemy to triumph over again.

This phenomenon is perhaps even more obvious in environmentalism. The folks that suddenly, and in lockstep, decided that the absurdly-clean-burning fuel known as “natural gas” is a big environmental problem would not stop and be satisfied even if they were able to entirely ban it. No, they would just find some new thing and decide that it also was actually a huge problem and go about banning that too. Their religion requires that such efforts never end. Rick DeVos this morning:

Rick DeVos @RickDeVos

Life under a theocracy. Your life must be made more and more hot, expensive, joyless, dull, ugly, and materially worse as sacrifices to please the priesthood’s foreign gods.

foxnews.comBiden admin cracks down on air conditioners as war on appliances continuesThe Department of Energy revealed new actions targeting consumer air conditioners in an effort to reduce pollution, curb climate change and save consumers money.

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