You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose...

The old joke ends,"But Dr. we really need the eggs."

Fellow Diners,

Well, it may finally be time to send for the guys with the white coats to wrap me up and cart me off. (I know, I know...)

It had been a while. Probably a month or so since I'd last visited the Diner, and that's just wrong. Not only did it feel good to get back in here, in a way it is good, for the body and the soul. In the same way our immune system needs exposure to pathogens to generate and maintain resistance, so our value system requires the occasional irritation or poke in order to remain strong and vigilant. But this didn't strike me as right.

The service is normally superb here. They bring you anything you want, and I mean anything. Don't misunderstand; the staff here knows the meaning of suggestive selling. In fact, they invented it. This time was different, though.

I ordered the chicken. So you would expect, they bring me the chicken, right? The waitress smiles, calls me "Hon'", refills my drink, and unveils a plate full of...roast beef!? Not wanting to be rude, I say this must be a mistake, I ordered the chicken. And what do you think she tells me? Most minimum wage servers working for a big tip would be right on that one, whipping the incorrect meal back to the kitchen, returning with the right vittles and an apology for the inconvenience. So imagine my surprise.

"No, that's right sir. I know it looks like roast beef. But the chef really wanted it to be chicken. In fact, the whole time he was cooking it, he kept thinking that it was chicken. So now, it must be chicken."

Hmmm. Times they are a changin'.

___________________________

It used to be, in the old days, that the biggest decision new parents had to make was the name of their baby. The one thing they didn’t have to decide was the kid’s sex—that decision had been made for them, all they have to do is take a peek. That would be that.

Well, not any more, at least not in New York City. You see, under a proposed Board of Health rule, “people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates.” They would need only to provide “affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex.” They would also have to promise that “their proposed change would be permanent.”

The proposed rule isn’t aimed at people who have had “sex-change surgery.” They are already permitted to do this. Instead, it’s directed at people who “had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years . . . ”

Read those words carefully: adopted and especially gender, instead of sex. It is a big hint that there’s some major postmodern mischief at work here. “Sex” is what scientists call “binary”: You either have an XX (that is, female) or an XY (that is, male) chromosome.

But, if nature can’t be twisted and shaped to suit our ideological predilections, words, especially in the hands of postmodern vandals, can be. If the goal is to separate anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, then the use of the word gender is a must.

You see, transgender activists can get away with saying that gender is just “socially constructed” and more than “the sum of one’s physical parts” because gender is a word that most people don’t regularly use. Substituting an obscure word, in this case, gender, for the more common one, sex, is intended to confuse and obscure. It’s the kind of verbal tactic George Orwell would be proud of, akin to a squid squirting ink to confuse its predators.

Of course, what makes this squirting necessary is the denial of the obvious: “Living as a woman,” whatever that means, no more makes you a woman than hiding a pot of gold makes you a leprechaun.

These verbal parlor games may wow them in the faculty lounge or the counter seat at the Diner, but nature is unimpressed. They remind me of the hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal. He submitted a paper to a leading postmodern journal filled with postmodern gibberish like “physical ‘reality’ and physics. . . is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”

After the paper was published, he revealed the hoax, that it was all gibberish, adding that those who believe that physics really is a “social construct” should test their beliefs from his twenty-first floor window.

Christians should not be shocked at any of this. Romans 1 tells us that God’s truth is made plain in creation, and to deny this truth—in this case, “male and female created He them”—is to exchange the truth for lie, which Paul illustrates by an example of men lying with men, in other words, rejecting their God-given gender, which is a challenge to God’s created order. Well, today we have renewed that old lie—that we can create ourselves the way we want, and peeking doesn’t make any difference.

I don't know what I just ordered. Do you?

Your Friendly Neighborhood, Puzzled, Still Hungry but Willing to Give Them Another Chance, Because I'll be Hungry again, Maybe I Should Just Shut Up and Eat What They Give Me, Apatheist,

~Bill

The NY Times covered this all very well Nov. 7, 2006.