Why the story about the big-breasted tranny teacher matters

This is a follow-up to "Who's teaching YOUR kids?" (WWW, 21/9/22). Many of you will have been amused [perhaps even titillated, Ed.] by the video of the self-described transgendered teacher trying to keep her/his/its gynormous boobs our of the bandsaw. But the truth is there's not something but everything wrong with that picture. 

You may think such nonsense could only happen in Just In Trudeau's Canada, the wokest country on earth. Wrong. Such things happen all the time in the Progressive States of America. If you haven't seen photos like the one at left in your local news media, you haven't been watching.

The students of Oakville Trafalgar High School know that having such a whack-job teaching them is wrong. Not normal. They and their parents demonstrated in front of the school yesterday demanding that the teacher be fired. Yet their rulers -- the school board, the provincial government, the federal government, even the United Nations -- tell them the poor persecuted tranny has rights too.

Apparently the right to be queer trumps the right to not have propaganda for pro-queer wokeism shoved down their throats (or other orifices) in schools in which they are supposed to be learning how to live as normal people in a normal society. The trouble is that there is no normal society any more. Western society and its values have been turned upside down. 

David Brooks wrote about the diabolical disorientation of modern times in Bobos in Paradise, Simon & Schuster, 2000. Although leavened with loads of humour and peppered with scores of guffaw-inducing examples, Bobos in Paradise is actually a work of profound social criticism. Here are two excerpts, even more pertinent now than they were two decades ago. 

(p. 196) By the 1970s...people no longer knew where to draw the line between decency and indecency or whether there should be a line at all. The forces of emancipation recorded triumph after triumph. In some places children were encouraged to explore their sexuality as a means of self-discovery. 

Old taboos were falling. Old family structures began to seem passé. Old systems of etiquette seemed positively Neanderthal. Reticence seemed like hypocrisy. Sexual freedom, at least in the realm of public discourse, was on the march. 

In 1995 George Gilder wrote, "Bohemian values have come to prevail over bourgeois virtue in sexual morals and family roles, arts and letters, bureaucracies and universities, popular culture and public life. As a result, culture and family life are widely in chaos, cities seethe with venereal plagues, schools and colleges fall to obscurantism and propaganda, the courts are a carnival of pettifoggery.

In 1996 Robert Bork's bestseller, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, argued that the forces of the sixties have spread cultural rot across mainstream America. In 1999 William Bennett argued, "Our culture celebrates self-gratification, the crossing of all moral barriers, and now the breaking of all social taboos."

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(p. 227) If you look around at the educated class today, you see a recognition that freedom and choice aren't everything. Free spirituality can lead to lazy spirituality, religiosity masquerading as religion, and finally to the narcissism of the New Age movement. The toppling of old authorities has not led to a glorious new dawn but instead to an alarming loss of faith in institutions and to spiritual confusion and social breakdown.

David Brooks wrote that in Y2K. He was still mildly optimistic, then, that educated Americans -- the "bobos" (bohemian bourgeoisie) to whom the title refers -- would pull back from the brink of madness, and use the new enlightenment and new freedoms to build a better society. I wonder what he thinks now. 

Further reading: The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, by Philip K. Howard. Warner Books, 1994. Available in like new condition from our sponsor.