The Price of Lies

We learned the math when we were very young

Lies are toxic and destroy what they touch. Sometimes they grow like kudzu and hit like a tidal wave that sweeps along, tearing down all of the structures in the path, and sometimes they are like mold, a damp rot shooting out tendrils in the darkness, gutting a person or institution from within. They always do damage. Most of us carry some scars.

It seems like we once understood this. The price of lies was understood and cautionary tales were told to us as children. Drilled into us. George Washington and the cherry tree. The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Pinocchio. The Emperor’s New Clothes. Today, it often feels like the expedient lie is acceptable, even expected. We are encouraged to deceive ourselves and the world.

We all winked at “medical marijuana”. Sure, it probably helps a handful of people undergoing chemotherapy or suffering from chronic pain, but c’mon man. Agree or disagree, the point was always to get weed legalized, and this was understood by all sides. I thought of this yesterday when I heard a radio ad for an outfit that will provide a medical marijuana ID for a fee after a five minute conversation with an MD over the telephone. That is something, but it ain’t medicine. I have no beef with weed or people who choose to smoke it. My point here is only that we all accepted the ruse, the lie, that medical marijuana was exclusively for medical purposes, even though we all knew the truth. If it poses such a small danger it takes five minutes on the phone to be cleared for take off, then it should be legal. If it is a dangerous drug, as the US government argued for many, many decades, calling it medicine doesn’t change that. It was a mistake to accept the lie to avoid the actual debate.

There is a meme floating about that purports to regard Abraham Lincoln.

“How many legs would a dog have if we call the tail a ‘leg’.” Lincoln asked a student.

“Five,” the student replied.

“No,” Lincoln explained. “The dog would still have only four legs, and a tail we called a ‘leg’. Changing the name of something does not change what the thing actually is.”

Biologically, at the genetic level, men are men and women are women. Women have the XX chromosome, men have the XY. This is not a societal construct. It is not open for debate. Here, the science actually is settled.

Some men choose to live their lives as if they are women. Some women choose to live as men. I’m perfectly okay with this. These individuals are also children of God and deserve all of the respect granted anyone else. I’ll even treat them as they wish to be treated and extend all of the manners and societal norms reserved to the gender of their choosing.

What I won’t do, and where I draw the line, is pretend that their desires and choices have altered biology. If some future archaeologists find Caitlyn Jenner’s bones in the year 2522 and test the DNA, they will conclude that the specimen is a well developed male adult. Because that is, biologically, what Jenner is. That Jenner chooses to live as a woman is fine. She can have all of trappings that involves, including the pronoun ‘she’. If, however, she gets into a fistfight with another 71 year old woman, who is biologically a female, over a handbag at Nordstrom’s? Let’s not pretend it would be a fair fight.

But, that’s where identity politics has brought us. Biological men are dominating competitions previously reserved for biological women. How can this surprise anyone? The logical conclusion, if men and women are just the same, is to just make all sports gender neutral. A woman wants to box? She can take her changes against Tyson Fury. Want to play basketball? Guard LeBron.

Or, if there are differences between the sexes, admit it and draw the line: Women’s sports means biological women only—individuals in possession of actual vaginas, a uterus, and ovaries. Accept no substitutes. Otherwise, “Women’s Sports” will become the dominion of 2nd rate male athletes who have chosen to live their lives as women.

Identity politics—the claim that immutable traits (race, gender, sexual orientation, height, hair color, whatever) define us and matter—may be the most toxic deception afoot today.

A few years ago a friend and fellow food geek recommended I visit a new bakery. “It’s a black-owned business,” she said.

“Is it good?”

“I haven’t been,” she said, “but it is black-owned.”

“Okay,” I said, but I was thinking that she was about a third as bright as I’d previously assumed. Why would the color of a baker’s skin matter at all? All I cared about was the quality of the baking. What sort of baking did they do, and were they good at it? “Black-owned” told me nothing. I didn’t want to engage in a batshit crazy debate, so I dropped it, but I was left wondering if she made all of her choices this way. When she was knee deep in dirty water and looking for a plumber, was melanin her first consideration? If her daughter required life-saving surgery, would the color of the surgeon’s skin be her highest priority?

I thought about this in December when Biden announced he’d be choosing a black woman for the Supreme Court. “What is the point?”, I wondered. Would it not be smarter, if one really wanted to make such a racist and sexist choice, to simply announce he intended to nominate the most gifted and qualified individual, and then nominate a black woman? Wouldn’t that tell the world that yep, he’d searched high and low for the single most qualified individual and voila! It happens the most gifted and talented happens to be black and a woman. Look at that. Announcing his racist and sexist parameters up front invited doubt. It was the announcement that suggested that if one did search only for the incredibly qualified, there might not be any black women among the group.

But if black women are exactly as capable of judicial wisdom as anyone else (and I can think of no reason that they are not) just pick the best qualified candidate and let the chips fall.

Thinking this, I am told, is white privilege.

Last night the talking heads informed me that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is being mistreated during the Senate hearings because she is being questioned about theories she believes and sentences she has imposed.

“Wake me up if the conservatives accuse her of rape,” I said, “or if they ask if she likes beer.” (Both happened to Kavanaugh).

My friend (and those who think nominating a black woman for being a woman and black is at all important) are lost in a maze of lies that begins with identity politics.

Kids are smart. They understand all of this at a gut level. I now this because I was a kid, once, too, and I remember understanding these things. We were all children once, and we all remember understanding these things. It took a shitload of really lousy education and propaganda to get us this confused.

But we are remembering. More and more, people are coming out of their dazed state and saying, “Hold on a minute...I think that’s bullshit.” It is happening, more and more, every day, all around us.

When it reaches critical mass (and we’re close) those who have crafted and profited by these delusions are not going to know what hit them. Suddenly, in a flash, all of the street cred they’ve amassed will be worthless and no one will give a rat’s ass what they say.

That’s the price of lies in the end. It always has been. I know this because my mom told me so.