Ann Coulter and Slate Should Embarrass Us All
The late great film critic Roger Ebert had a great line that he used for bad comedies: "You know you're in trouble when the objects of your satire are funnier than you." Somebody needs to email this line to the editors of The Onion, because the folks over there have been outdone this week by people who are absolutely serious.
First, Ann Coulter published a bizarre diatribe against soccer so hilariously bad that I had to double check that it was real. Coulter's collection of bullet points about soccer is like the Comstock Lode of logical fallacies. Coulter thinks the game is boring, lacks real achievement, etc. Ok, that's fair. I disagree but I suppose I can fathom why a nationally syndicated columnist and speaker would want America to know how put off she is by the sport she isn't watching.
But Coulter takes the silliness to another level:
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I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO's "Girls," light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is "catching on" is exceeded only by the ones pretending women's basketball is fascinating.
It's foreign. In fact, that's the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not "catching on" at all, is African-Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it.
Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it's European. Naturally, the metric system emerged from the French Revolution, during the brief intervals when they weren't committing mass murder by guillotine.
Compelling stuff, no? I do have a couple questions for Coulter though:
1) Who exactly is being "force-fed" soccer? I have a personal stake in this question, you see, because I don't have ESPN, which has exclusive broadcast rights to the World Cup. I also don't use one of the few cable companies that ESPN's online streaming service has entered into a partnership with, so I can't even watch the US team on my laptop. There are two kinds of people who should be happy about this arrangement: Those who hate soccer (since they can easily avoid it if they steer clear of ONE network), and the kind people at Buffalo Wild Wings who have profited from my uptick in patronage.
2) If I follow Coulter's logic, soccer is European and so is the metric system. Therefore, soccer=metric system=French Revolution. Got it. Would it change anything if I meekly pointed out that the origins of soccer can be traced to ancient Greece? Do we still have a liberal European conspiracy if the earliest known competitions happened in Asia?
Coulter has quite a bit more to share in the article, including a ponderous observation that soccer's prohibition of hands reduces us all to beastliness. As I said above, it's one thing to dislike soccer and complain about it. It's quite another to justify your taste using stupefying logic and allegations of conspiracy based on false information.
As the infomercial might say, "But wait! There's more!" Slate, not to be outdone in the Absurdity Olympics, has gone for gold with one of the most manipulative, blatantly fear-mongering pieces I can ever recall reading. Tantalizingly titled Don't Let the Doctor Do This to Your Newborn, the piece by Christin Scarlett Milloy is an incisive look at one of medicine's most nefarious practices: Infant gender assignment. No, it's not surgical re-assignment, but newborn gender declaration; you know, that part where the doctor says "Congratulations, you have a _______(son or daughter)."
You see, this is a vile practice by doctors that could very well doom your child to a life of depression, anger, and maybe worse:
We tell our children, "You can be anything you want to be." We say, "A girl can be a doctor, a boy can be a nurse," but why in the first place must this person be a boy and that person be a girl? Your infant is an infant. Your baby knows nothing of dresses and ties, of makeup and aftershave, of the contemporary social implications of pink and blue. As a newborn, your child's potential is limitless. The world is full of possibilities that every person deserves to be able to explore freely, receiving equal respect and human dignity while maximizing happiness through individual expression.
With infant gender assignment, in a single moment your baby's life is instantly and brutally reduced from such infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes, and any behavioral deviation from that will be severely punished-both intentionally through bigotry, and unintentionally through ignorance. That doctor (and the power structure behind him) plays a pivotal role in imposing those limits on helpless infants, without their consent, and without your informed consent as a parent.
This issue deserves serious consideration by every parent, because no matter what gender identity your child ultimately adopts, infant gender assignment has effects that will last through their whole life.
I didn't realize that having a gender was such a debilitating limitation on one's potential, but there you go. What makes this article inexcusable is the willfully misleading headline and opening paragraphs which pitch the story as a serious look at abusive hospital practices. In internet terminology, this is called "clickbait." Clickbaiting is bad enough, but Slate has set a new low by using children's health as a trigger to drive web traffic to a politically charged and logically imbalanced homily about transgenderism.
There is space for a healthy dialogue about gender and sexual identity. What there is not room for is the manipulative idea that doctors (or parents) that identify newborns as male or female are abusing them. As a Christian, I affirm that children do not receive gender identities from doctors or teachers but from God, and that human beings reflect that most sacred characteristic-the image of God-by being male and female. But it doesn't take a Christian worldview to see that this Slate article is poorly reasoned and deceptively worded.
I submit these two articles as examples of what happens when public discourse becomes less about the pursuit of truth and more about scoring points against those in "the other camp." I'm sure that Ann Coulter thought she was delivering a terrific broadside against progressivism. I'm confident that Christin Milloy is passionate about defeating traditional gender roles and sexual ethics. But both of these writers end up with absurdity that only serves to embarrass those on their respective ideological sides. At least, I hope we are all embarrassed. The future of our civilization might depend on that.
