The Left wants to divide people into favored and disfavored castes, granting special favors to the former while excluding the latter from civil rights and professional protections. The aim is to dragoon our society and make its members obey a range of ideas incompatible with the founding principles of the nation.
Here are a few examples: Racial minorities applying to college are a favored caste given easier access unless they are Asian — in which case they are disfavored and their path to success made more difficult. In the area of sexual offenses, women are the favored caste, and society is instructed that men, the disfavored group, should be denied due process. Ironically, women become the disfavored group when pitted against men suffering from gender dysphoria, who are given preference if they claim to be female and demand entry into women’s sports, which they can unfairly dominate.
Ideological incoherence and institutional favoritism are everywhere. They seek to suppress some groups and reward others according to fashion. The intention is to punish those who won’t conform to the reigning ideology, no matter how outlandish. The out-people are excoriated for who they are rather than what they do.
This is, in one sense, not new. Many civilizations display a similar pattern of bigotry. In 13th-century England, to take a particularly egregious example, Jews weren’t allowed to own land or inherit their parents’ wealth. Their exclusion from the benefits of society reached its logical conclusion in 1290, when all Jews were banished from the country entirely.
A more trivial but nevertheless repressive example comes from 17th-century Japan, where upstarts from the merchant class were punished and had their property confiscated if they had the social temerity to dress in sumptuous clothing traditionally worn by the upper classes.
The common feature is that people were kept ruthlessly in the place that a rigid hierarchy ascribed to them. Laws and customs were developed to fix the pecking order or expel especially disfavored people altogether. In other words, there has always been what today, in an already shop-word phrase, we call “cancel culture.”
But one does not have to scour remote history to find a coercive central power trying to marginalize and exclude those who do not toe the line. Not too long ago, the Obama administration tried to force religious organizations to cover the cost of contraceptives in their healthcare plans, even if doing so violated their convictions. When certain religious groups resisted, leftist government officials, including current Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, responded by trying to litigate them into submission.
Fast forward to the present, and President Joe Biden has taken things a step further by moving to scrap conscience rights for medical professionals altogether so that if they wish to stay in their respected profession, they may not refuse to participate in procedures they find morally abhorrent.
The federal government intends to dictate that abortions, for example, and surgical mutilation of confused people with gender dysphoria are morally compelling work, even though the first has, for most of our history, been regarded as unjustifiable homicide at best, and the latter is a recent fad inflicting irreparable damage on people who are emotionally and psychologically unwell.
No one will, of course, be forced to apply the vacuum or scalpel. But if they choose not to, their alternative will be to leave their chosen careers as doctors and nurses. As in the historical examples cited, an identifiable group of out-people is being attacked and excluded from the full participation in our society that is properly theirs.
It will be argued casuistically that the administration is making a general rule that applies to everyone and that it is the refuseniks who separate themselves from the herd for slaughter. That is false. It is not neutral to impose a blanket rule that proscribes beliefs that almost everybody (of most religions and none) have believed since the dawn of our civilization in pre-Christian Greece. It is a piece of vindictive targeting to shove people with traditional values beyond the toleration of polite society.
Public opinion is sharply divided on abortion, gender transitioning surgery, and several other matters central to today’s cultural debates. Intelligent people can in good conscience disagree about them.
But your conscience is no longer your own. It now belongs to the federal government. The conscience rule for medical professionals was adumbrated in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump but blocked in 2019 by a court that did not fault its substance but rather ruled, as other courts have done on other issues, that the Trump administration failed to follow proper procedures when putting its policies into place.
Although the rule has been in abeyance, however, it has been assumed until now, as it should have been, that it would eventually come into force after procedural corrections so people using a traditional moral compass to navigate deep issues could do what they think right without forfeiting their livelihoods.
Now an administration is moving to cull ideological stragglers at the behest of a limitlessly intolerant Left.
