By DONALD DeMARCO
Michel de Nostradamus, peering into the events of 2016, would shake his head in disbelief. He would witness the incredible spectacle of a war on the state of North Carolina because its democratic legislature saw fit to ban men from using the women’s washroom in the interest of protecting girls from male predators. “This cannot be so,” the great predictor of future events would say, “I must get myself a new ‘black mirror’.”
But it is so. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the National Basketball League, has seen fit to punish the state of North Carolina because of its washroom policy. The punishment comes in the form of the 2017 All-Star Game’s venue being shifted from Charlotte, N.C., to a different location, thereby costing the city approximately $100 million in lost revenue. The decision was supported by two of its sport broadcasters, Turner Sports and ESPN.
Also joining the financial assault on the state of North Carolina is PayPal, which has withdrawn 400 jobs from the state and an additional 130 businesses that have threatened the state with economic sanctions. Various artists have decided to cancel future engagements in North Carolina. The New York Times has called the collective punitive action “a death blow to the economy and prestige of North Carolina.”
In response to the commissioner’s action, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory denounced the move, stating that “the sports and entertainment elite misrepresented our laws and maligned the people of North Carolina simply because most people believe boys and girls should be able to use school bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers without the opposite sex present.”
The governor went on to say that “American families should be on notice that the selective corporate elite are imposing their political will on communities in which they do business, thus bypassing the democratic legal process.”
The governor’s reference to bypassing the democratic process is both accurate and disturbing. If laws are not passed through a democratic legislature, then how are they to be passed? Through bullying from the outside? And why is the bathroom issue, which hardly deserves to be an issue at all, suddenly so volatile?
The NBA, with regard to basketball operations, is cordially engaged with China, a country whose human rights record is abominable. Is the North Carolina bathroom policy more heinous than what is going on in China, including forced abortions and the forcible harvesting of vital organs from religious minorities? The U.S. State Department’s annual Report on Human Rights classifies the People’s Republic of China as “an authoritarian state” in which “repression and coercion markedly increased” in 2015, including the oppression of racial minorities, Christians, and dissidents of all varieties. One is hard pressed to fathom what kind of moral priorities Adam Silver and his supporters have adopted.
Pope Francis, while speaking in Krakow, Poland, for World Youth Day, had strong words to say about the process of indoctrinating students against the biblical notion that “God made them male and female.”
“Today, in schools, they are teaching this to children — to children! — that everyone can choose their gender,” said the Holy Father, adding that this is “terrible.” He was reiterating what he said the previous year in a speech in Italy, namely, that “gender theory is an error of the human mind that leads to so much confusion. So the family is under attack.”
As America loses its Christian values, a moral void is created. This void is now being filled in by what amounts to sheer nonsense, delivered to people in the form of bullying. It is not discriminatory to have separate washrooms for men and woman. It is reasonable. But society finds that virtually every distinction is tantamount to an act of discrimination. Someone has stated that even “burial is a form of age discrimination.”
What is being threatened, apart from the North Carolina economy, is the welfare of children, the integrity of marriage and the family, democracy, and reason itself. As democracy is being demolished, the civilized citizen is transformed into a barbaric bully. Democracy yields to bullyocracy, while reason gives way to insanity.
David Lilienthal (1899-1981), the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and author of an important work on democracy, understood well what lies at the root of democracy:
“The essential ingredient of democracy is not doctrine but intelligence, not authority but reason, not cynicism but faith in man, faith in God. Our strength lies in the fearless pursuit of truth by the minds of men who are free.”
As reason is eclipsed, democracy wanes, and the welfare of man is placed in jeopardy.
Truth is the factor that complements intelligence and reason. Without truth, neither intelligence nor reason has a hitching post. The truth of the present situation is rather bleak. The distinguished literary critic, Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003), might not be a modern-day Nostradamus. Nonetheless, he believed strongly that his “assignment is what every writer’s assignment is: to tell the truth.”
He saw the deception in assuming that all change is progress, that self-indulgence is freedom, and that novelty is originality. His own prophecy sounds more like an epitaph on the human race:
“Western man has decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down. Having convinced himself that he is too numerous, he labors with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer, thereby delivering himself the sooner into the hands of his enemies. At last, having educated himself into imbecility and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a weary, battered old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct.”
One may well wonder what amount of time separates madness from extinction.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com.)
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