OPINION:
Newly seated Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wasted no time making his presence felt.
Announcing a new website, “Protecting Women and Children,” Mr. Kennedy declared that “The prior administration’s policy of trying to engineer gender ideology into every aspect of public life is over.”
And you thought he cared only about food additives, vaccines, and Big Pharma.
“This administration is bringing back common sense and restoring biological truth to the federal government,” Mr. Kennedy said.
The usual suspects — media, academics, Democrats — went wild, saying this was an “attack” on transgender people. On Thursday, nine LGBTQ groups filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn President Trump’s directives ending diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
The pushback actually began after Mr. Trump signed on his first day an executive order, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
The title alone is enough to set your hair on fire if you’re a connoisseur of sexual confusion.
“Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being,” the order says. “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”
Mr. Trump followed that up seven days later with an order reversing the Biden administration’s bizarre gender policies in the nation’s armed forces. Recruiting has since skyrocketed.
Last week, The Washington Post ran several one-sided articles, including this one: “Trump’s ‘two sexes’ directive gets it wrong, experts say.”
Somehow, leftist media never fail to find credentialed people who spout nonsense. If Mr. Trump had declared that the Earth was round, the media would trot out flat-earther quacks. They would insist our planet would be as round as a beach ball except for human-caused global warming.
When they can, they disallow any meaningful dissent. We saw what that looked like during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Scientists are in wide agreement that biological sex in humans as well as the rest of life on earth is much more complicated than a simple binary,” University of Iowa professor Maurine Neiman told The Post. “The executive order demands that we fit a spectrum into a nonexistent binary box.”
You know, like having single-sex restrooms, locker rooms and sports leagues. It means that NFL teams will not soon be forced to have female offensive “linepersons” to meet DEI quotas.
Boston University professor Michael Ulrich said, “They want to try to present it as this extremely simple issue as if it’s just one or the other: You’re male or female.”
Brand-new parents had better think twice about buying anything pink or blue that will reveal how close-minded they are.
I didn’t attend Boston U, so I must have missed a first-class education. I cling to the notion that cows give milk and bulls don’t.
Various media interviewed many more experts who said that because there are exceptions to the norm, we have to throw out the obvious, two-sex reality recognized the world over by billions of people for thousands of years.
This logical fallacy falls under “the exception that proves the rule.” Just because a black swan turns up now and then doesn’t mean that nearly all swans aren’t white. This is why we call exceptional occurrences “black swan events.”
Roman philosopher and lawyer Cicero, in 56 BC, put it this way: “The exception proves the existence of a rule in cases not excepted.” In other words, the very acknowledgment of an exception reveals that there is a general rule or norm.
Some people are born with uncertain genitalia and even chromosomal oddities. That does not mean that it is discriminatory or simplistic to have sex-based, commonsense policies, especially those that protect girls and women.
Along with ruinous inflation, the transgender insanity, enforcement of DEI, pronoun edicts and other woke policies are why Democrats lost in November. These things symbolized not only moral confusion but also government overreach.
The Biden administration’s obsession with all things drag was more damaging than Democrats care to acknowledge. People don’t like being forced to lie. And the woke politicians still don’t get it.
For instance, Democrats have consistently opposed any federal or state laws protecting sexually confused minors from ghastly medical experiments.
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that would prohibit giving minors cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, or surgically removing healthy organs.
This past week, the Republican-controlled Legislature voted 31-9 in the Senate and 85-34 in the House to override her. Kansas thus became the 27th state to ban this mad science.
This is in line with Mr. Trump’s executive order on Jan. 28, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” which ends federal support for gender transitioning treatments for those younger than 19.
Naturally, the American Civil Liberties Union shopped for a sympathetic court. They found one in Baltimore, where U.S. District Judge Brendan Hurson slapped a two-week injunction on the order on Feb. 13.
This is just the sort of thing that a judge appointed by President Biden would do on the eve of Valentine’s Day, which is named for the martyr who performed Christian weddings in defiance of pagan Roman authorities.
Let’s see if the appellate courts are ready to restore sanity.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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