Welcome to 2018, where normal is bigotry

This column is teetering on the brink of sanity from the very start. For it relies on a twice-divorced, pregnant-wife-cheating, proud hedonist president of the United States to define for an even crazier part of America that there are only two genders.

Yet here we are. Where we are supposed to #believewomen while not even being sure what a woman really is. Except when it is a middle-aged man whose spirit animal is the estrogen unicorn and then that is definitely a woman. Yet if you are a woman but are pro-life then you may as well not be a woman at all. Got it?

It’s only in such a self-hating place that a guy as fickle as Donald Trump is required to step in and play referee. Hate the game, not the player. And this game ssssuuuuuuuuuucccckkkkkssssss.

Obama is the one who started all this nonsense by declaring that the federal bureaucracy – because I guess it wasn’t already inefficient and agenda-driven enough – should allow people to declare their gender with the same freedom that comes with declaring your favorite color. All the Trump administration is doing, via the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is clarifying that “the sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

You know, science and stuff. Not to mention what your two-year-old intuitively understands better than most progressives.

But since we aren’t allowed to have nice things any more, the hill du jour that progressives are happy to die on just weeks before a national election is faux bigotry against those suffering from gender dysphoria. Because Elizabeth Warren’s fake ancestry apparently wasn’t enough to convince America that the Democrats have simply abandoned reality altogether.

Even a guy like Jonathan Haidt, whose sober-mindedness from the perspective of traditional liberalism has been invaluable in recent years when it comes to dispensing with juvenile tribalism, has fallen for this banana in the tailpipe on Twitter:

“The Trump admin gender definition strikes me as one of the most blatant attempts to mis-use science to support an ideological agenda that I have seen.”

Well, to quote Luke Skywalker in “The Last Jedi”: “Every word of what you just said was wrong.”

It’s not Trump’s definition. It’s God’s. It’s biology’s. It’s sanity’s. It’s not blatant misuse, unless you consider the correct answer on a middle school science test blatant misuse.

And it’s not an ideological agenda. Because Trump isn’t ideological; he just refuses to be as stupid as progressivism wants him to be, and that’s saying something right there.

Haidt has become semi-famous in political commentary circles in recent years by trying to encourage people on both sides of the political aisle to stopping hating each other, by genuinely attempting to understand each other’s worldview. So why then is he so systematically falling for one of the greatest pieces of cultural propaganda ever to have taken root in a culture?

I think it is because the definition of what a family looks like, with one man and one woman at its head, is the ground zero of our collective culture war. Which means that even among those on the Left who know something is fundamentally broken in our civic dialogue, this Book of Genesis-level diagnosing of the nature of our sins hits a little too close to home for those who aren’t really prepared to follow the truth wherever it leads.

That truth came out another way this week, which Haidt and people of goodwill should pay far more attention to than their Trump fetish. According to a new report put out by the United Nations of all places, nearly half of American children are now born to unmarried parents “with trends toward later marriage and more cohabitation, divorce and childbearing outside marriage” that are “partly due to changing religious ideas about marriage.”

I see your minuscule portion of transgender Americans and raise you the very linchpin of any culture worth having. For men, women, and their unity in marriage are the canary in the coal mine, not whether Bill can have the government pay for his sex change operation and become Betsy.

How do you know your culture is on life support? When in one generation you transition from "don't let bigotry be normalized" to "normal is bigotry."