Playing Pretend

Vincent J. Curtis

26 Feb 16

After Bruce Jenner became “Caitlyn”, it hit me: playing-pretend.

Bruce Jenner was a great Olympic athlete, the gold medal winner of the decathlon in the 1976 Montreal Games.  Then the news came out that he was becoming a woman. (Biologically, how is that possible?)

Jenner had breast implants, took female hormones, and had his picture taken in a merry widow corset by photographer Annie Leibowitz.  He called himself “Caitlyn”, and it became avant garde to play-pretend with the farce.  Bruce Jenner became “Caitlyn” Jenner, even though he still possessed the – ahem – equipment of a man.  We were all supposed to play-pretend because we mustn’t hurt feelings.  He was only mutilating himself, after all, though with great earnestness.

Fine, Bruce needed to be called “Caitlyn” - to his face. But it became de rigueur to refer to him as “Caitlyn” everywhere else.  Playing-pretend with Bruce was one thing, but why the playing-pretend when he’s not around?  When could we drop the pretence, the lie, and relax again?  A farce earnestly performed is not the reality it pretends to be; not being that reality is why it is a farce.

Play-Pretend and Transgender

That there are some psychologically disturbed and confused people, there is no doubt.  But it is a wonder how, from “Caitlyn”, concern for the so-called transgendered engulfed the school systems of North America and society as a whole.  For the sake of ‘inclusiveness,’ actual women are going to have to allow physiological males who pretend to be women to use their bathrooms.  Women are going to have to share bathrooms with men who have sex issues.  It only has to be said to be laughed at, but this is the public policy being forced on society by the avant garde who earnestly believe that playing-pretend is the correct way of dealing with these disturbed individuals.  And woe betide anyone who says that there is something wrong with being disturbed in a transgendered way!  By extension, the way of dealing with a schizophrenic is play along and tell him that his demons are real.

Play-Pretend on Abortion

It is the law of the land to play-pretend about abortion.  We are supposed to play pretend that a pre-born baby is not really a baby, a real human being.  It is incoherent to think that a pre-born is not a biological life separate from the mother.  No atheist can explain coherently how a clump of cells developed continuously into the human being that he now is and that he once was a single cell without admitting that that single cell he once was was human life from the beginning.  So, we play pretend around the reality of pre-born human life so that the morality of it does not have to be faced.

Play-Pretend and “Gay” Marriage

Playing-pretend with Bruce and his fantasy of being a woman made obvious another occasion of playing-pretend.  I mean “gay” marriage.  Accurately, the gay mockery of marriage.  Marriage is a state of affairs between a man and a woman.  Not between two men; not between two women.  Oh, there are such pairings, but to equate homosexual pairings with husband and wife in marriage is to engage in the grossest of reductionism.  That is not to say that such intellectual grossness is not possible.  This gross reductionism actually became the law of the land in Canada and the United States.  Who would have guessed that the 14^th Amendment of the United States, that was passed in 1868 to guarantee equal treatment of the freed slaves, also meant reductionism of marriage – reducing in law the meaning of marriage to between any two pairings whatsoever?  Certainly not those who drafted the Amendment!

Playing-pretend became the law of the land in respect of marriage.  It would hurt feelings to observe in the presence of a gay pair that their relationship was not specifically the same as the one between a husband and a wife.  Yet, to pretend that it was is neither intellectually honest nor intellectually sustainable.  No matter how earnestly you want it to be, you can’t make it so.  The big lie, told often enough, might become equivalent to the truth, but it can never be the truth.  Truth is one with reality, while a lie is the absence of reality and relies on the human imagination for what little reality it has.  That is why facts are stubborn things, and the fact is that “gay” marriage is a mockery of the real thing.

It was a generational struggle by the so-called LGBTQ community (or LGTBQWERTY as Mark Steyn refers to it, for inclusiveness) to gain respect for their peculiarities and proclivities.  They attacked with the tenacity of suicide bombers.  Often, LGBTQ have no children and no concern for the afterlife, so they could devote their entire being to the cause.  This amounts to a powerful force.  When one has nothing else to live for except the cause of personal validation, routine politics and routine legal processes fall easily before the co-ordinated onslaught of seemingly independent drives towards the same goal.  Collapse of resistance is especially easy in a society conditioned to live and let live, to appease grievances, and otherwise to be intellectually lazy.  (Maybe old St. Paul was too tough on sodomy….)

Fantasy meets Realism

With success comes corruption.  It was one thing to have the legal impediments to openly homosexual relationships removed; but mere tolerance was not sufficient.  Live and let live was not enough, because homosexual pairings were still different – as they must be if one is intellectually honest.  And so the drive turned from tolerance to acceptance, meaning the complete rejection of obvious facts.

Anyone who dared deviate from complete acceptance had to be taught a lesson. People’s lives and careers were destroyed, people’s savings were filched, by harassment of all sorts.  Canadian and American societies were going to accept LGBTQ behaviors as being perfectly normal, and if we didn’t go along with their game of play-pretend that community was going to burn society down.

Canadian politicians were first to duck out of the line of fire.  Canada “legalized” gay marriages, whatever that means.  As a practical matter, it does mean is that it is simpler to harass and destroy those who, based on certain core principles - often Christian principles, won’t play-pretend the complete normalcy of LGBTQ behaviors.  The Catholic Church, for one, will be made to eat dirt, or be destroyed.

The Supreme Court of the United States infamously voided all state constitutions and laws which held that marriage was between one man and one woman, on the grounds of the 14^th Amendment and the invented-for-the-occasion constitutional doctrine of dignity.  The intellectual emptiness of that ruling was exposed in the dissents of Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas.

The unrelenting hand of the LGTBQ community and their even stranger avant garde allies in the progressivist-modernist movement are behind this bizarre state of affairs in public policy.

The Cruelty of Play-Pretend

The French have a saying, “Drive off nature and she returns at a gallop.”  Who knows when this bizarre world of playing-pretend, of living lies, will collapse?  Sooner or later, Toto will pull back the curtain and Dorothy will see the reality of the Wizard of Oz.  Reality is what it is regardless of what we think of it.  No playing pretend can change the reality that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer name things that deviate from a norm.  LGBTQ are not a norm.  “Gay” marriage is a mockery of the real thing, and has no reality of its own.  By his chromosomes, Bruce is a man.  That pre-born really is a human being.

As a child, I played children’s games.  As an adult, I am disinclined to play-pretend, a child’s game.  Like “Caitlyn”, I have feelings too, and they are offended when I am being lied to my face.  My feelings are offended when I am instructed to play pretend – or else!  I think it is cruel to play-pretend with a psychotic and tell him that the demons he sees are real.

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