Colin Quinn – a Life Form
Reflecting this morning on some interesting news out of Oregon; To wit,
An Oregon judge ruled Friday that a transgender person can legally change their sex to “non-binary” rather than male or female in what legal experts believe is a first in the United States. Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Amy Holmes Hehn legally changed 52-year-old Jamie Shupe‘s sex from “female” to non-binary.
Now, I really do not care what someone wants to call themselves. Dog, cat, vacuum cleaner, God, Jesus, non-binary, whatever. But what really bugs me is how the entirety of the nation’s basic systems must now be changed to accommodate this tiny little change. Think of what the driver’s license systems must undergo in order to list non-binary, or, in the words of Colin Quinn, simple “Life Forms.”
One person (probably a few more than one once this news gets out) was able to bring the system to its knees. Legions of bureaucrats will now marshal all available resources to make this tiny little change in thousands of systems. Think of what the new IRS Form 1040 will have to look like. Or for that matter the countless Medicaid forms in existence. And on and on. Mark my words: if the Oregon DMV doesn’t soon make the change, Jamie-Shupe-Life-Form will bring suit, the defense of which (shit, the basic filing of which) will cost thousands of dollars, if not millions.
This is tyranny of a kind of minority our Founding Life-Forms never expected. And if you don’t think that our national debt is comprised of the expense of bowing to such tyranny, you are nuts. The bureaucracies will undoubtedly go back to Congress and to state legislatures with requests for additional funding to make the thousands of tiny little changes. That money isn’t available (well, it is, but we’d have to stop making an aircraft carrier or two); instead, it will come out of deficit spending and that in turn, ramps up the national debt. Simple equation.
Tyranny of the Minority. I am reminded of this wonderful post several years back in Human Events (to whom I attribute ownership):
When the Founding Fathers created this nation, they designated it a republic rather than a democracy. They did so because a republic is fixed and tends toward stability over time, whereas a democracy, which is always in flux, is prone to violent dissolution at any moment. In fact, many of them referred to democracy as “mob rule,” and wanted to avoid it like the plague for fear that it could provide a faction the opportunity to access to the levers of political power and change the course of the nation for the worse in a relatively short period of time.
Although we have all but abolished the Constitution the Founders left us and moved closer to a democracy with each passing generation, we have still managed to remain a republic foundationally. Yet somewhere along the way, between 1776 and now, we opened the door to a rabid political correctness that has actually nurtured the very faction-like atmosphere which tends to undo a republic.
But it’s not the kind of faction our Founders feared: not one where a majority of voters unite for a cause and force their will upon the citizenry as a whole. Instead, it’s a perverted use of the court system and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that allow a person to claim that he’s been offended and then to levy the charge against those who gave offense in order to control their actions.
In other words, we’re not dealing with the tyranny of the majority, but the tyranny of the minority.
We have lost nativity scenes in cities across America because one citizen of one city doesn’t like Christmas. We have lost freedom of religious expression in our public school system because a student here or there is bothered when people pray. We have lost crosses on many of our war memorials because atheists want to shield their children from religious exposure. And we are poised to lose even more freedoms if we don’t stop this scourge before it sweeps across our land and our intellectual landscape completely.
As I am writing this, citizens in King, North Carolina are protesting the removal of a Christian flag from a war memorial in that city: a flag that was removed by order of the King City Council after one veteran who saw duty in Afghanistan filed a complaint with the ACLU.
In today’s usual cryptic fashion, the name of the offended party has not been released to the public, a withholding that reflects a degree of secrecy that could lead some to believe that the offended soldier is a Muslim, an atheist, or a figment of the ACLU’s imagination. Whatever the case may be, the complaint from this ghostlike citizen in King has proven sufficient to have a flag removed that had been proudly flying over the memorial for more than six years.
And in Oxford, Mississippi, where the Ole Miss Rebels have enjoyed the rich tradition of having a mascot named “Colonel Reb” roaming the football sidelines since 1979, politically correct tendencies led them to do away with the southern icon this season and to replace him with a black bear. That’s right: the new mascot is a black bear in a southern gentlemen’s suit, and his name is the “Rebel Black Bear.”
How out of whack do things have to get before we finally say enough is enough?
The majority are losing freedom after freedom and tradition after tradition to a wimpy, nameless, minority that hides behind groups like the ACLU and dumps shame on its opposition through words like ‘diversity’ and ‘fairness.’ But there is nothing diverse about a politically correct landscape, and the methods used to try to create one are clearly anything but fair.
Our Founders were wise enough to know that a tendency toward unchecked factions would devastate the country they sought to leave to posterity. Surely we must be brave enough to take their fears into account and fight against the one person here or the two people there who are actively using the court system to rip us away from our moorings.
The tyranny of the minority is tyrannical indeed.
Couldn’t the Oregonian Life Form simply have let sleeping dogs lie and picked a gender closest to his-her-it perceived category? Wouldn’t that have been the polite thing to do? It’s not like s/he is experiencing any sort of tyranny. We are talking about a tiny little thing here, folks.
