Tea at Trianon: Male and Female

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Male and Female

From Return to Order:

The New York City Council recently passed a bill that allows New Yorkers to designate an “X” for their sex on their birth certificates if they don’t identify as either male or female. Additionally, a parent can do the same thing for their newborn children. The measure was passed by a vote of 41-6. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson justified the action saying: “There are plenty of New Yorkers who don’t identify as either male or female. Gender is a spectrum for many folks, and it’s not a fixed thing. So for New Yorkers who are transgender, who are gender non-conforming, who are non-binary, to have an option to better self-identify on such an important document, their birth certificate, unlocks all sorts of things for them.”

Similar actions were taken by the States of Washington, Vermont, California, and Oregon, as well as the District of Columbia. The language of the Washington State directive is eye-popping, “a gender that is not exclusively male or female, including, but not limited to, intersex, agender, amalgagender, androgynous, bigender, demigender, female-to-male, genderfluid, genderqueer, male-to-female, neutrois, nonbinary, pangender, third sex, transgender, transsexual, Two Spirit, and unspecified.”1

The list is chilling, indicating just how far the revolutionaries are willing to go to remove any sense of limits. The enlightened will accept the changes. Only the dark reactionaries will reject them. Although the temptation is real, these new classifications cannot be rejected as “just plain silly.” Nor can one take the libertarian attitude, claiming that government has no business telling people how they may define themselves. This thinking requires a response. The purpose of this article is to define five responses – legal, historical, scriptural, societal, and moral. The legal response is the most complicated. Those who advocate these changes claim that it is a mere substitution of one word for another. This is a typical radical tactic; present a massive change as though it is trivial. (Read more.)