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Feb. 26, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:36
Facts Don’t Care About Your Pronouns | Ep. 1204
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Democrats pass the Equality Act in the House, and Rand Paul grills a Biden nominee about whether governments can overrule parents seeking to prevent their kids from transitioning.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben will get to all the news of the day with regard to the Equality Act and the transgender propaganda that is now being put forth.
You are just expected to buy into the overt lie that men and women are exactly the same in every way and that men and women are terms of art and that subjective self Assessment as to your own sex actually matters more than, you know, actual biological reality.
We'll get to all that in just a second because what we are living through is something that is completely upside down.
It's bizarre.
It's upside down.
It's ridiculous.
Even the very notion that the people who are being imposed upon here are members of the trans community as opposed to, you know, religious institutions, everyday Americans who would like to operate their businesses as they see fit.
All of this is completely upside down.
We're going to get to that in just one second.
First, the breaking news at this hour is that the United States has now bombed Syrian facilities used by an Iranian-backed militia.
These would be the first airstrikes under Biden.
So quick note, bombing Syria is good again.
Remember, if Trump does it, it's very, very bad.
And if Trump knocks out Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian terror regime, that is super bad.
But if Joe Biden fires a missile at an empty structure in Syria and hits a camel in the ass, that is absolutely wonderful.
It is good and it is useful.
The same people in the administration, by the way, Jen Psaki, who today will be out there defending this activity, was sending tweets just a couple of years ago talking about how Trump didn't have any sort of congressional authority to fire anything at anything in Syria, right?
Syria was a sovereign country, according to Jen Psaki.
Apparently, when a Democrat is president, all you have to do is slap a Black Lives Matter label on a missile, and suddenly the missile is good.
That's basically the way this works.
All you have to do According to USA Today, U.S.
Trans Lives Matter on the front of a bomb, and you can drop it wherever you want.
And that's how it was during the Obama administration, right?
You just put a bunch of progressive slogans on the drones and everything is fine.
So we are back to that, which is a lot of fun.
According to USA Today, US airstrikes targeted bases in Syria used by Iranian militant groups suspected of attacking American and allied forces in Northern Iraq last week.
The Pentagon announced late Thursday.
Now, as we talked about last week, it was pretty obvious.
I mean, remember, it is now Friday.
So this means it's been over a week since that original attack that happened in Iraq, right?
Iraq, Syria and Iraq, different countries you may have noticed.
But the Biden administration said literally nothing about that attack on an American facility in Iraq.
Why?
Because they were deeply afraid that if they mentioned this, that it might drive a wedge between the United States government and the Iranian government.
They were afraid that if they said, hey, look, the Iranians are active in Iraq and they are pursuing terror against Americans in Iraq, then that might end all of this Iran nuclear deal bullcrap, because it is top priority for the Biden administration to reenter the horrible and ridiculous Iranian nuclear deal, which basically gives Iran a pathway to a nuclear bomb within 10 years, so long as they pledge They will absolutely give their Boy Scout pledge that they are not going to develop nuclear weapons for the next 10 years and we will hand them a bunch of money they can then use for ballistic missile development and terrorism.
So this had made, the Iran deal had made the Obama administration essentially the PR wing of the Iranian government.
Every time Iran did something bad, Obama and team would be out there downplaying it, pretending it had nothing to do with the Iranian regime.
Well, now they're doing the same thing.
So there's an attack on American troops in Iraq by the Iranians.
And their reaction is to hit an Iranian backed militia in Syria.
Why?
In order to obscure the fact that really it is Iran behind all of this stuff in the first place.
So what exactly did they do?
Apparently, the strikes hit multiple targets used by the militias the Pentagon blames for rocket attacks on a base in northern Iraq that killed a contractor and wounded a U.S.
ally- U.S.
and allied troop.
They wouldn't hit Iran, and they wouldn't hit anything inside Iraq.
They went to this country on the other side of Iraq, not Iran, and they decided they were gonna hit a camel in the butt.
According to Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, the operation sends an unambiguous message.
President Biden will act to protect American and coalition personnel.
At the same time, we've acted in a deliberate manner that aims to deescalate the overall situation in both Eastern Syria and Iraq.
So basically, we are just going to signal that we are a little mad, but not too mad.
I'm confident in the target we went after.
We know what we hit, said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
He said, we're confident the target was being used by the same Shia militants that conducted the strikes in the first place.
So, Republicans are largely backing the strikes because Republicans are fine with terror outposts being hit.
And that's fine.
I don't have a problem with the terror outposts being hit either.
All I'm pointing out is that they are hitting the wrong targets.
Okay, they are hitting bases in Syria when the real problem is in Iraq and the real problem is in Iran.
And they are doing so in order to obscure the connection between what is happening in Syria and the Iranian bosses with whom they are negotiating.
Because it's very difficult to make the case to the American public that we need to be fighting the Iranians who are attempting to kill American troops at the same time that we're giving them a pathway to a nuclear weapon and funding their terror program.
So instead, Biden's going to obscure that by doing what Democrats very often do, which is fire a missile pinpoint strike, right?
The way a pinprick strike, the way that Barack Obama did, and then claim that you're being muscular in your own defense of your country.
Alrighty, so that is the Biden foreign policy in a nutshell.
Meanwhile, in bigger news for the United States, the House has voted to pass the Equality Act.
Okay, the Equality Act is one of the most egregiously misnamed or welling in acts in modern American history.
It is not about equality.
It is about imposition on Americans of a standard that is unreasonable.
It is about ensuring that religious Americans are not allowed to practice their religion.
It is about ensuring that non-religious Americans who believe in a differentiation between men and women are completely silenced under American law.
That is what Equality Act is about.
The way it is proposed, of course, is as an anti-discrimination law.
Now, there are already anti-discrimination laws that exist on the basis of sexual orientation and sex.
This would add gender identity and gender orientation and a wide variety of other pregnancy.
It would add all of these to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
That all sounds fine because, of course, nobody wants people unduly discriminated against.
When I say unduly, I mean it is not discrimination to tell a man that he should be using a man's bathroom.
That is not undue discrimination.
That is discriminating in the sense that I discriminate every time I go out to dinner as to what I would like to eat.
Active discrimination would be saying that a black person cannot go into a white person bathroom.
That is active discrimination.
Saying that a man should go to a man's bathroom and should not go into a woman's bathroom, that's not discrimination.
That's called being reasonable.
In fact, it was precisely this objection that originally sunk the proposed constitutional amendment, the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment.
There were people on the right who said this is going to lead directly to the end of men's and women's bathrooms.
And people who were promoting the ERA at the time were like, no, we'll never do that.
Well, we're here again.
That's where we are.
The House passed this bill.
The bill will be blocked by the Senate, undoubtedly, because you can't pass this thing through reconciliation, so it's going nowhere.
It is likely also unconstitutional because it doesn't make any sort of religious carve-outs, but the truth is that it should be unconstitutional because it violates freedom of association.
You should be allowed to associate with people you want to associate with.
This is a core freedom, and I may not like how you use that freedom, but I'm in favor of freedoms even if I don't like how you use them.
I'm in favor of freedom of speech, even if you are saying bad things without freedom of speech, with which I do not agree.
I'm in favor of freedom of the press, even for places like CNN and MSNBC.
But this is the difference between people on the right and people on the left.
I like rights, even when people I don't like are exercising those rights in ways I do not like.
If you are on the left, everything is either banned or mandatory.
There is no middle category.
Good things are mandatory and bad things are banned, according to the left.
And they have determined that it is very bad to say that men are men and women are women, And we must train every institutional gun in America on anybody who would note this basic biological fact that men exist, and women exist, and human beings, being a mammalian species, are dichotomous in their sex.
That there are men and there are women.
And the proof of this is that the procreation of the human species relies upon the differences, the biological differences, not the subjective self-assessment differences, the biological differences between men and women.
We're going to ignore all of that and pass what is a truly egregious and authoritarian act.
The Equality Act is an authoritarian bit of legislation.
I'm gonna get to all the flaws with the Equality Act in one second.
Because, of course, Democrats propose every bit of authoritarianism under the guise of tolerance.
It's tolerance and diversity for their point of view.
It is shut the hell up or we will prosecute you and or fine you if you have a differing point of view.
We'll get to what the Equality Act actually does in just one second.
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Okay, so what does the Equality Act actually do?
So, Ryan Anderson, who has been basically book-burned by Amazon.
They took down his book, When Harry Became Sally, even though it is a well-written, concise, and yes, tolerant book about transgenderism.
He says over and over and over that people who suffer from gender dysphoria should be treated with the greatest of care.
Which is absolutely true.
It is a semblance of how idiotic our society has become that we now say that a man with a mental disorder, namely gender dysphoria, is a woman.
That is not how that works.
And yes, it is a mental disorder according to the DSM-IV.
Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder according to the DSM-V, by the way.
It used to be called Gender Identity Disorder, then they renamed it Gender Dysphoria because they added a requirement in the DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-5, that it's not just that you identify as a member of the opposite sex, it's that it causes you depression, which is the dumbest standard for diagnosing a mental illness ever.
A mental disorder ever.
By that standard, if you walk around saying that you are Jesus Christ today, you are not suffering from any sort of mental disorder unless it also causes you distress to say that.
Okay, that's a ridiculous standard.
It doesn't hold by virtually any other definition of a mental disorder, but that is what the pseudoscientists over at the American Psychological Association have to say about all this.
In any case, what exactly does the Equality Act do?
So, Ryan Anderson writes about this.
The Act updates the law Congress passed primarily to combat racism, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and adds sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes akin to race.
So if you have any reservations about gender ideology, as even many progressives do, you'd now be the legal equivalent of Bull Connor, right?
To say that men and women exist and that they are separate, and that a man who believes he is a woman is not actually a woman, and that a man who enters a women's locker room Okay, now, to suggest that the differences between black people and white people are anywhere akin to the differences between men and women is patently crazy.
The differences between black people and white people do not matter.
They're essentially skin deep.
That is the whole point.
The difference between men and women is a lot more than skin deep.
It affects nearly every area of intersexual relationships.
It affects how men and women develop physically.
It affects how men and women develop mentally.
There are significant differences in mental development between men and women.
Women have advantages in some areas, men have advantages in some areas, but there are major differences.
This is all well-established science.
There is not a single thing I am saying right now that is conjecture.
What is conjecture is the suggestion that sex is completely malleable.
What the left has done here is they play a game.
Here's how the game works.
They accept, supposedly, that sex is non-malleable.
Then they say gender is different from sex.
So what is gender?
Gender is a collection of stereotypes about femininity and masculinity.
Okay, but now that they're stereotypes, you're saying that they're arbitrary, right?
Because they're stereotypes.
They're not connected to any sort of underlying biological reality.
And yet you say that gender is so important and so real that those stereotypes actually make you a man or a woman.
So now sex doesn't matter.
Right, so sex, which is the only thing that we can objectively tell, that doesn't matter.
Because gender identity, which a second ago was a set of stereotypes that were supposedly foisted upon you by an intolerant society, those are the only things that matter.
So, if a man cross-dresses and dresses up as a woman, then this makes him transgender-interested, perhaps.
Right?
Maybe he's actually a girl.
But it depends on his self-definition.
If he's a man who just likes wearing a dress, then for sure he's just a man.
But if he's a man who likes wearing a dress and also thinks he's a woman, then he is a transgender person.
If none of this makes any scientific sense to you, that's because it has nothing to do with science.
It is, in fact, an ideology.
It is not, in fact, scientifically rooted.
It is based entirely on the fallacy that biological sex and gender characteristics are completely different, and yet gender characteristics matter more than biological sex.
And then what you will see is the final move, which is, well, actually, we're gonna go back to that whole thing about sexual dichotomy.
It doesn't exist.
So you'll see this from the left a lot.
You see, there are people who have XX chromosomes or XY chromosomes and who manifest as a member of the other sex because of a developmental disorder.
Yes, it's called a developmental disorder.
If I say that human beings walk upright, that is a true statement.
Now, are there certain human beings who are born with a disability and cannot walk upright?
Yes.
Does that mean that as a class of human beings, human beings do not walk upright?
No.
It means that some people have disorders.
That does not mean that you redefine that exact term.
What people on the left like to do is take edge cases.
They like to take genetic anomalies and then treat those as though this creates entire new classes of human beings.
This is incorrect.
It is not right.
It's all ridiculous, but this has become the new normal.
So now they're trying to enshrine this into law.
And this has some pretty dire ramifications for your freedoms.
Everything from freedom of association, to freedom of religion, to freedom of the press, to freedom of speech, all of it is gonna be ground down under the boot heel of an authoritarian left that decides that basic truth should be verboten.
It is a basic truth that men and women exist and exist on the basis of biological characteristics that are objectively verifiable.
That is a simple reality.
If you die today, there will be people a hundred years from now who will be able to look at your DNA and they will be able to tell whether you're a man or a woman and your subjective self-identification will matter not one whit because all you will be at that point is bones.
We will be able to know whether you are in fact a man or a woman simply by looking at your bone structure.
We do this right now in archaeology.
We can tell what sex your baby is before they are born.
According to the left, by the way, you can't tell somebody's actual gender until they die.
And even then you can't use their biology because your gender could switch any minute.
There are people who are 45 years old who have been a man all their life and have sired seven children.
And if they decide they're a woman, they were not only are they a woman, they were always a woman.
Because not only does transgender ideology violate the boundaries of biology, it violates the boundaries of physics.
It's incredible.
It's a time machine.
You have to erase every vestige of the idea that this person was ever a man.
It's not just that Bruce Jenner changed his name and became Caitlyn Jenner and had some surgeries.
That is not what happened.
Bruce Jenner was always Caitlyn Jenner.
Bruce Jenner was always a woman, you see, while winning medals at the Olympics, which makes him the most accomplished female athlete ever, by the way.
So it turns out that biological men are even the best female athletes.
It's incredible.
But now this is gonna be written into law and you're going to be cuddled with it and your children will be cuddled with it.
Let's not pretend that this is anything but what it is.
It's an authoritarian move by the left to cudgel everyone into line.
It's an exercise of absolute raw power.
That is the attempt right here.
Okay, we'll get to what this actually means on a practical level in just one second.
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Okay, so as Ryan Anderson writes, Rather than finding common-sense, narrowly tailored ways to shield LGBT-identifying Americans from truly unjust discrimination, the bill would act as a sword to persecute those who don't embrace newfangled gender ideologies.
It would vitiate a sex binary that is quite literally written into our genetic code and is fundamental to many of our laws, not least laws protecting the equality, safety, and privacy of women.
And one of the self-defeating notions of the transgender movement and the combination, which is really bizarre, between LGB and T, T is not like those others.
The others are sexual orientations.
T is a gender identity.
It's a different thing.
And not only is it a different thing, it militates directly against the notion that men and women are different, which is one of the bases of LGB thinking, right?
Because you have decided that you are not sexually attracted to one sex, you are sexually attracted to another sex.
Or you have been, or you are oriented that way by your genetic code.
Whatever it is.
Okay, but that relies on the idea that men and women are different.
Feminism relies on the idea that men and women are different.
T relies on the idea that men and women are precisely and absolutely the same in every single way.
It's just all in your head.
This is why you end up with these bizarre articles every so often from the left-wing press in which there will be a transgender woman, meaning a biological man, calling a man who does not want to have sex with a biological man a person who is not straight because this biological man now identifies as a woman.
You're not truly straight unless you want to have sex with a transgender woman who has a penis.
If this sounds confusing, it's because it's asinine.
It makes no sense at all.
It is completely and utterly ridiculous.
It's not just a pretzeling of logic.
It is a twisting of logic into a Gordian knot that even Alexander couldn't cut.
And so what does Ryan Anderson says?
He says the Equality Act would sacrifice the hard-won rights of women while privileging men who identify as women.
If it becomes law, such men would have the right to spend the night in battered women's shelters, which sounds great.
Perfect.
Just awesome.
Disrobe in women's locker rooms and compete on women's sports teams, even at K through 12 schools.
Don't believe me?
Here's the text.
Quote, an individual shall not be denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room that is in accordance with the individual's gender identity.
So, you can keep separate facilities for men and women, but you have to redefine what men and women are.
And again, if somebody says that they are a member of the opposite sex, you just have to take their word for it, because there is no objectively verifiable standard to tell.
Right?
They've removed all objectivity.
It's all subjectivity, all the way down.
The Act would massively expand the government's regulatory reach.
The Equality Act would coerce any establishment that provides a good service or program, including a store, shopping center, online retailer, or service provider, salon, bank, gas station, food bank, service or care center, shelter, travel agency, or funeral parlor, or establishment that provides healthcare, accounting, or legal services, along with any organization that receives any federal funding, and religious institutions are included.
Under the Equality Act, religious schools, adoption agencies, and other charities would face federal sanction for upholding the teachings of mainstream biology and the Bible, modern genetics, and Genesis when it comes to sex and marriage.
Which means that your church could see its non-profit status removed, or it could be hit with a bunch of fines.
Because your church refuses to say that a man is a woman and a woman is a man.
And teach its kids at religious schools, right?
My kid goes to a religious day school.
I'm not gonna send my kids to a school where they teach my kindergartner that a man is a woman and a woman is a man.
Because not only is it biologically false, it confuses children and it makes them unhappy.
That is, teaching kids lies and confusing them about their own biology is not just idiocy, it is dangerous idiocy.
Outrageously, the Equality Act explicitly exempts itself from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Pope Francis would be treated as the legal equivalent of Jim Crow segregationist.
And it gets worse.
According to Ryan Anderson, medical doctors, secular and religious, whose expert judgment is that sex reassignment procedures are misguided, would now run afoul of civil rights law.
If you perform a mastectomy for breast cancer, now you would be forced, by federal law, to perform a mastectomy for a 15-year-old girl who wants to be a boy.
All in the name of equality.
And the act treats any refusal to offer abortion as pregnancy discrimination.
Decades of conscience protections against abortion extremism would be undermined.
So if you're a doctor and you say, I don't perform abortions, they say, you're discriminating on the basis of pregnancy.
This is madness.
And this is what Democrats are pushing forward and calling inequality in the process.
In a second, I'm going to get to what is the ideological basis for this?
Where is this coming from?
Because there are some deep ideological roots here.
And then we'll see how it manifests, which is totally crazy.
Okay, so here is where all of this comes from.
Over the course of the last century and a half, there has been a shift.
in terms of how people view themselves.
There's a point made by a philosopher named Robert Bella.
The basic idea is that it used to be the Enlightenment idea of Enlightenment liberalism is that individuals mattered.
Before that, you were just seen as a member of a community only.
If you go back to Aristotle, and Aristotle would talk about you as a member of the polis, right?
That your value was in your value to the political community that surrounded you.
And in religious communities, there was some of this as well, right?
Your value is as a member of the tribe, so to speak.
Enlightenment liberalism fixated on a couple of things.
They said, number one, you have the individual ability to reason.
Your reason is supposed to pursue virtue, right?
This is a very Greek idea.
At the same time, the Bible says that every individual is created in the image of God.
This creates individual rights.
So Enlightenment liberalism was predicated on the notion that government should treat you as an individual and you should be treated as an individual, right?
This is the basis for all of our politics now.
But there is an unspoken assumption, which is that in treating you as an individual, your job, your duty, right, the other side of the right, the other side of the rights that adhered to you by dint of the laws of nature and nature's God, is that you would use that liberty to pursue virtue.
You would use your reason in order to pursue virtue and be a better person.
And this is why removing the Judeo-Christian roots of the Enlightenment ends up with radicalism.
Because when we remove the duty to be a good person or a virtuous person, when you remove all of that, all you end up with is just your belief that as an individual, you're entitled to define the world in any way you want.
And you see this in language from people like Justice Anthony Kennedy, who suggested in an abortion case, right?
Planned Parenthood versus Casey.
He suggested that you have a right to define the universe and the meaning of life in any way that you want.
Okay, well, that is all fun and games, up until the point where you demand that I accept and tolerate your meaning of life, right?
That I accept your version of reality.
This is what Robert Bella talked about.
He called it expressive individualism.
There's a difference between enlightenment individualism, which recognizes that, yes, you have rights as an individual, but you ought to use those rights in order to exercise your reason and pursue virtue, typically in a Judeo-Christian sense, And expressive individualism.
Expressive individualism completely disconnects you from the community at large.
It creates you as an atomic individual.
You're an atomistic individual, rather.
You're a separate individual from the rest of the community.
And the only thing that matters is how you define the world.
Expressive individualism is the basic idea that the goal of life and of government ought to be ensuring the ability of individuals to explore their own perception of the good life and to express it as they see fit in any way.
Enlightenment liberalism, as I say, was built atop a basis of notions about Greek virtue and Judeo-Christian decency.
Okay, but that was removed over the course of time.
Expressive individualism obliterates those limits.
So, if you find meaning in avoiding responsibility and living as basically a teenager your entire life, that is just fine and no one can judge you for it.
If you find meaning in ignoring your kids, Nobody can really judge you for that because, after all, you don't have a duty.
Duties don't accrue.
Duties are an element of virtue.
If you find meaning in defining yourself in a way that is directly contrary to either reality or decency, that is also liberty.
So if you decide that you are a man when you are a woman, or that you are a woman when you are a man, that is just you defining reality for yourself.
It's expressive individualism.
Because the goal of life is to express yourself.
It's all about authenticity.
It is not about duty.
It is not about decency.
It is not about reason.
It's about finding your authentic self.
And here's the thing, there's a corollary, okay?
Anybody who stops you from expressing yourself this way is an obstacle.
Anybody who stops you from expressing yourself this way is a problem.
And we don't even mean rules that stop you from acting the way we want.
We mean anybody who refuses to acknowledge your reality as reality writ large is a problem for you.
O. Carter Sneed, philosophy professor at University of Notre Dame says, That according to philosopher Charles Taylor, individualism, expressive individualism, requires the approval of others.
Taylor identified a new category of harm that emerges in a culture of expressive individualism, namely the failure to receive, accept, and appreciate the expression of others' inner depths.
To fail to recognize the expression of other selves is a violation and a harm to them.
Because after all, your deepest belief system is what we all seek in life.
And if people refuse to acknowledge that your belief system is reality, then this means they have infringed upon you.
So, if you choose to use the pronoun, G, and I say, nope, you're a dude, then I have infringed upon you.
I've infringed upon you in such an egregious way that the federal government should step in and regulate it.
Now, as you may notice, expressive individualism neglects a simple fact, which is that many people define reality in a different way.
In a libertarian universe, We would be able to acknowledge that some people define reality in a certain way, but I don't have a responsibility to accept that in my life.
I don't have a responsibility to accept unreality as reality.
But the left wing believes that only secular expressive individualism matters, which is why religious conscience protections can be overwritten, which is why basic biology can be overwritten, because all that matters is what is in the heart of the individual.
And if you refuse to accept their reality, you are imposing on them, right?
This is the completely backwards world in which we live.
There's only one group here who's pointing the government gun at somebody, and it is the advocates of the Equality Act.
People on the right are not pointing the government gun at anybody.
It is people on the left who are demanding that you acquiesce to a biological unreality, that you acquiesce to an ideological ridiculous notion, an ideologically silly notion, a self-contradictory notion, by the way, and that if you do not, they will point the government gun at you and then say that you are the intolerant, non-accepting one.
The answer to all of this should be no.
But you'll see how this plays out.
And it does play out this way.
You'll see who gets shellacked in public life for saying true things and who gets rewarded for saying false things.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, we have now made it to Friday.
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Okay, so again, there are foundational legal problems with the Equality Act.
It is outside the scope of typical non-discrimination law.
It is a deliberate attempt to shut down all debate on an issue where the facts do not side with the left.
And people, this is authoritarian stuff, it truly is.
So for example, When asked whether there should be a religious exemption, whether religious people should be able to teach their children that men and women are different, people who are advocates of this bill say, nope, absolutely not.
We want to teach your children.
We must teach your children, in fact.
Not only that, we must make your church do what we want your church to do.
We must make you, as a religious person, abandon your religious principles.
By the way, if you actually want things to get incredibly ugly in this country, start seriously infringing religious liberty rights.
Religious people have a very, very long history of resisting government intervention into their religious lives.
and they happen to be right.
Okay, the reality is that if you have a deeply held belief about God and the nature of decency, and then you have people who are insisting that they cram down their version of decency on your children, you're gonna run into some resistance there, and you ought to, because this is authoritarian bull crap.
And here is an LGBTQ plus reporter from the 19th, Kate Sosin, talking about religious exemptions.
The Equality Act tries to insert protections for LGBTQ people into the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
So, you know, people are protected on the basis of race.
You can't turn away a black person from a restaurant.
And the same thing will be true for a gay person.
If you put religious exemptions into that bill, You're opening up a can of worms, right?
So, this is going to be the sticking point.
Oh, it's a can of worms, is it?
See, religious liberty and freedom of association and freedom of speech, by the way, all of this is just a can of worms.
No, you know what opens up the can of worms?
Trying to cram down a one-size-anti-reality-fits-all rule on every American.
Because, by the way, this has free speech ramifications, too.
We've already seen this in like the New York City Human Rights Council has suggested that if you misgender somebody, they are going to fine you.
So in other words, if I call somebody by their biological pronouns, just like humans have done throughout nearly all of human history, then this means that I have actively discriminated against you for saying a true thing.
Now, by the way, people have asked me about this all the time.
Do you use transgender pronouns?
Do you use what they call preferred pronouns?
Which is not preferred, right?
It's I require you to use it.
It's mandatory pronouns.
Is it because they're not preferred?
You don't make the preference.
It is that you require somebody else to use it.
I have a preference to do X. If I have a preference that you do X, that is now a requirement upon you.
That is the lie about the term preferred pronouns.
It's not that I prefer that you use this pronoun.
It's if you don't use this pronoun, you're a discriminatory tool bag.
It's a requirement that I do something.
All of this is euphemistic garbage.
In any case, The basic idea here, people have asked about using these sorts of pronouns, and here's what I've said.
If I'm at dinner with a transgender person, I'll call them whatever they want.
I don't care, because that's just being polite.
But when I discuss, this is my basic rule, when I discuss people in general, You know, when I'm speaking about them on a broad level, when I'm speaking about politics, I refuse to use pronouns that do not apply to the biological sex.
I will not do that because words have meaning.
I'm not just going to not use words that have meaning on the basis that somebody's feelings might be hurt.
Because guess what?
That is public policy, and that is politics, and that is reality.
Sometimes the facts don't jibe with your feelings.
Sometimes the facts are just what the facts are.
And I'm happy to be polite and treat you with the utmost courtesy when we are in a personal situation.
I've gone out to dinner with transgender people to make sure that they are doing okay after a lecture of mine, for example.
This happened when I was in Canada.
Had breakfast with a transgender person who was unhappy with how an exchange went the previous night at a particular speech.
Got together with this person.
Used whatever pronouns this person wanted.
But when it comes to, is that person a man or a woman?
That person is their biological sex.
End of story.
Okay, but this makes you bad.
Because again, you are violating somebody else's expressive individualism.
So, Marjorie Taylor Greene right now is the person who is getting shellacked over all this.
Now, as you know, I'm not a Marjorie Taylor Greene fan.
I've spoken out against her.
I've suggested that censure might be appropriate for some of the comments that she has made in the past, including about Jewish space lasers, okay?
But she happened not to have started this entire exchange over transgenderism.
So what happened is that there's a congresswoman named Marie Newman.
And Marie Newman gave a speech on the House floor in which she talked about her transgender daughter, meaning her biological son, And suggested that because she has a biological son who believes that he is a woman, this means that we ought to mandate all across the land that everybody simply overthrow basic notions of human biology and sexual dichotomy.
This is what she had to say on the floor of the house.
And again, I feel bad for her as a mother.
I feel bad for her son as a son.
You can have enormous sympathy for people who are suffering with gender dysphoria, and you should have sympathy for them.
You should treat them decently.
That is not the same thing as mandating that hundreds of millions of Americans buy into the overt lie that men are women and women are men, and it is all just a matter of self-assessment.
You take a little quiz every day and determine whether you're a man or a woman.
That's absurd.
In any case, here was Congresswoman Marie Newman.
I rise today on behalf of the millions of Americans who continue to be denied housing, education, public services, and much, much more because they identify as members of the LGBTQ community.
Americans like my own daughter, who years ago bravely came out to her parents as transgender.
I knew from that day on, my daughter would be living in a nation where most of its states she could be discriminated against merely because of who she is.
And yet, it was still the happiest day of my life.
Okay, so in any case, this is what she said, and you have to have sympathy for her and have sympathy for her son.
And again, you shouldn't mistreat people based on the fact that they suffer from gender dysphoria, of course.
Okay, all of that is perfectly clear.
And by the way, there would be a tailored way to do some of these things, but they're not interested in doing this in a tailored way, obviously.
Okay, so, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted out, and this happens to be correct.
As much as broken clocks can be right, people I don't like can be right, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted out, Alright, that seems like a perfectly fine tweet.
children, but your biological son does not belong in my daughter's bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams." All right, that seems like a perfectly fine tweet.
Frankly, I don't disagree with any element of that.
That is a perfectly decent tweet.
We are talking about public policy here.
When it comes to shaping law, you have to have in mind what the actual legal standard is going to be.
Okay, well this resulted in Congresswoman Marie Newman just posturing for the camera.
So she decides that she is going to take a transgender flag and walk over to Marjorie Taylor Greene's office, which is across the hall, and plant the transgender flag outside Marjorie Taylor Greene's office.
Right so she she posted transgender flag right outside her own office, right?
Thank you.
And so Marjorie Taylor Greene goes outside her office and she posts a sign that says, there are two genders, male and female.
Trust the science.
Okay, so the clapback is where people are getting angry.
Of course, because you see, when you impose on somebody else a biological falsehood, this is not considered an imposition.
This is considered expressive individualism.
If you say biology exists, this is considered an imposition.
Marjorie Taylor Greene did not start that particular exchange on social media.
It was Congresswoman Marie Newman who did.
But the villain today, of course in the media, is Marjorie Taylor Greene.
There are plenty of reasons why people don't like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
This is not one of them.
This is not one of them.
In a second, we're gonna get to the most absurd exchange over all of this.
The villain of the day now is Rand Paul.
Okay, I'll explain why this is just not only Not only screwed up to make Rand Paul the villain in this particular situation, but our society has a deep and serious illness if it believes that Rand Paul is the bad guy in this particular situation.
We'll get to this in just one second.
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Alrighty, in just a second, we'll get to Rand Paul having an exchange that just exposes how our society, honestly, we may be irrevocable, Irrevocably broken.
We may be irrevocably broken.
First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout-out to a Daily Wire member.
Today, it is Fry Saucy on Twitter who perfectly sums up our newest colleague's last few weeks.
In the picture, actress Gina Carano's action figure from The Mandalorian stands confidently on top of the world's greatest beverage vessel.
The caption reads, Gina as Cara Dune on her supply of hashtag leftist tears.
At Ben Shapiro, hashtag leftist tears tumbler.
In a follow-up tweet, Fry Saucy writes, my husband asked me to tweet it because he's anti-Twitter.
Your husband is right.
Twitter is indeed a hellscape.
That picture was worth a tweet.
Thanks for the shout out and for being a Dailyware member.
By the way, tens of thousands of people joining like pretty much every single week here at Dailyware become one of them.
We're launching a new show exclusively for Dailyware members.
This is so cool.
Okay, so there's a simple, highly effective rule for making a good argument.
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All righty, so the latest example of authoritarians treating non-authoritarians as the villain is this exchange between Rand Paul and Rachel Levine.
So Rachel Levine is most famous for being the transgender former head of the health services in Pennsylvania.
And as former head of the health services in Pennsylvania, Dr. Levine took this person's mother, Out of a nursing home while simultaneously shipping COVID positive people back into nursing homes.
This person has no qualifications whatsoever.
I mean truly no qual- This is the thing that this person is most famous for.
Other than being a transgender person.
Right, upon the announcement of Rachel Levine as a undersecretary nominee, a deputy secretary nominee, all of the press releases were like, transgender doctor nominated.
Okay, last I checked, I don't care whether a doctor is trans or not.
I care whether that doctor is capable of providing the care that is necessary.
In any case, Rand Paul asked this person who wants to be the Biden nominee for undersecretary of health and human services, deputy secretary of health and human services, asked a very simple question.
As secretary of health and human services, are you in favor of Using the government to force parents to ignore when their children are undergoing hormone treatment or gender disfiguring surgery.
I mean, that seems like a pretty easy answer there, right?
And so here is Rand Paul questioning Dr. Rachel Levine.
And of course, this makes Rand Paul the villain, you see, because Rand Paul is considered transphobic for saying that perhaps, you know, like 11-year-olds should not be given hormone treatments in the absence of parental approval This makes Rand Paul a transphobe.
If folks on the authoritarian left say they're not coming for the kids, this is a pretty good example of how they are perfectly well coming for the kids, and if you question them about it, then they get very upset.
Dr. Levine, do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life-changing decision as changing one's sex?
Well, Senator, thank you for your interest in this question.
Transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field with robust research and standards of care that have been developed.
Will you make a more firm decision on whether or not minors should be involved in these decisions?
Senator, transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field.
Let it go into the record that the witness refused to answer the question.
Okay, and that is a very simple question, right?
Your kid comes home and says that he is a girl.
And you say, okay, well, I want to do watchful waiting, which is the proper response, right?
Because the vast majority of kids don't end up actually suffering from gender dysphoria.
The vast majority of kids are confused.
Some of them end up being gay, right?
I mean, they end up having a different sexual orientation, but that doesn't manifest As they are a member of the opposite sex, or think they are a member of the opposite sex.
There's pretty solid evidence to this proposal.
In any case, here's a thing that should never happen in any free society.
People who are under the age of 18 can't get a Tylenol from the school nurse, but now you're saying that a boy can walk into the school nurse and the government should just give that kid an estrogen pill, or go further and allow transgender surgery for that kid, or take the kid away from the parents if the parents refuse to go along with that kind of stuff.
Okay, so that's what Rand Paul is asking Rachel Levine about.
And Rachel Levine's response is, I'm not gonna answer that question.
That's an insane answer.
An insane answer.
It's child abuse.
What we are talking about is government-sponsored child abuse.
Government-mandated child abuse.
Right, Rand Paul began questioning Levine about genital mutilation of minors, which, by the way, these surgeries are.
Okay, you can say that the surgeries are something that a person of majority status might want, It's a free country.
You can do that.
But to determine anything other than genital mutilation, to remove the actual genitals of a man, and then carve out of that man a fake vagina, there's no other way to characterize that other than genital mutilation.
That's what it is.
Now, again, should adults be able to do that if they want to do that?
I'm a libertarian.
Do what you want.
I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a, the evidence that this has a particularly salutary effect on your future is extraordinarily scanty.
If I were a doctor, I would not perform these sorts of surgeries because of that lack of evidence.
I think these surgeries are immoral.
But adults are free to do what adults do.
But if you're talking about doing that to a child?
You're talking about doing that to a child?
I mean, I don't understand how Rand Paul talking about genital mutilation of a child makes Rand Paul the bad guy.
Paul said genital mutilation has been universally condemned.
Genital mutilation is considered particularly egregious because, as the WHO notes, it is nearly always carried out on minors and is a violation of the rights of children.
He said American culture is now normalizing the idea that minors can be given hormones to prevent biological development of their secondary sexual characteristics.
That'd be puberty blockers.
By the way, this is now being treated as standard of care by the left, not watchful waiting.
If you say, listen, kids should be able to grow into their puberty and they should become adults before they make these decisions, this apparently is a massive imposition on an 11 year old who knows nothing about puberty, who knows nothing about sexual orientation, who knows nothing about what it is like to develop as a man or a woman.
So watchful waiting is out the window.
Instead, what we ought to be pursuing is active puberty blockers.
We have no idea what the long-term effects of these things are.
They're off-label, as Rand Paul points out.
This makes Rand Paul a bad guy.
He said, Dr. Levine, you have supported both allowing minors to be given hormone blockers to prevent them from going through puberty, as well as surgical destruction of a minor's genitalia.
Okay, and this apparently makes him bad.
This makes him super bad.
Okay, it's just, it's incredible.
So, when you ask about authoritarianism here, who's the authoritarian?
The guy who says we should not overrule parents and allow the government to force parents to let children mutilate their own genitals or have puberty blockers?
We don't know the long-term side effects?
Or do any, the government should step in and do it themselves?
Who's the authoritarian here?
In a society that values expressive individualism above basic human decency, The person who is striving for basic human decency is now seen as indecent.
That is why things are completely and utterly upside down.
All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show.
First, you cannot forget to end your week by checking out The Andrew Klavan Show.
Drew is back every Friday.
He's got an exciting night planned for you.
So head on over to dailywire.com this evening at 7 p.m.
Eastern and tune in.
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