Readers of this blog know that I have been very interested in the ways that Political Correctness distorts critical thinking and impairs reality testing. Yesterday, La Shawn Barber raised an interesting question about abortion which suggested another potential contradiction in PC. She suggested a thought experiment regarding future genetic research. Taking her point from an article about parents choosing to abort pregnancies where the fetus had genetic damage, she wondered:
Not mentioned in the article, but an obvious cause of controversy, is that “undesirable” human beings will be killed. My questions to liberal homosexual and non-homosexual abortion supporters are these:
If a significant number of women begin choosing to abort their babies because doctors discovered a “gay gene,” would your stance on the “right to choose” change or shift in any way? Would the number of women killing these “defective” babies make a difference? Is one potentially gay dead baby one too many?
I would suggest that this is not as much of an issue as La Shawn might expect.
In the world of PC, all groups are valued in relation to their degree of victimhood. Homosexuals are ranked very high as victims. Pro-choice women are also victims but the moment a pro-choice woman decided to abort a pregnancy because of a "gay" gene, she would lose her status as a victim, becoming a homophobe and therefore an oppressor. Her rights to an abortion could then be abrogated without much concern.
A more fundamental point is that PC is prepared to accommodate this kind of question by virtue of its closer resemblance to Theology than political philosophy. PC is based on faith and therefore is untroubled by contradictions. If anything, the theoreticians of PC simply ignore the inherent contradictions in their belief system.
Six months ago I wrote a post on Political Religion, in which I examined some of the cognitive dissonance evoked by Larry Summers when he made the unforgivable sin of questioning a PC belief. He had suggested that innate differences between men and women might be involved in the observation that there are many more men in Academic science than women.
I pointed out that he had fallen into a contradiction at the core of PC. The homosexual rights proponents demand an acceptance of the idea that homosexuality is genetic, (ie, presumably caused by a "gay" gene), while the feminists insist that gender is a social construct, (ie, not genetic), as part of their denial of differences between men and women. These points are not testable and in our great liberal Universitariat, those who question this (revealed) truth are committing academic suicidal. I suggested:
When people refuse to even allow a question to be asked, they are no longer in the realm of reason but have entered the halls of religion.
In effect, the meme suggests that there are no inherent differences (Nature) between men and women and all differences in outcome can be attributed to social influences (Nurture). If you have any doubts that this is a religious belief rather than a fact based opinion, do the following thought experiment. Imagine yourself in a room full of Homosexual activists. Imagine yourself giving a talk in which you suggest that Homosexuality is the outcome of a complex interaction between a child's inherent constitutional make up (Nature), including the structure of his brain, and his emotional development in relation to his early childhood and parenting experiences (Nurture). The idea that Homosexuality is genetic (any time you read that something is "genetic" take it with a large grain of salt; as I once read, genes encode for proteins, not behavior) is a "given", scarcely more open to discussion than the idea that women and men are not equal.
I would suggest that a great many of the core beliefs of the Liberals and the Left are no longer supported by the data available to us in laboratories or in nature (history). Liberalism has become a religious philosophy.
It sometimes seems in the blogosphere that PC is finally being confronted and beginning to lose its power, yet Summers just caved and has committed Harvard to spend $50 million to increase diversity in the sciences (as if they are not already scouring the country for suitable members of victim classes who have some facility in science.) The battle against this mutant offspring of collectivism will be a long one, I'm afraid.
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