Democratic presidential candidates have lurched so far into crazyville on all matters related to sex and gender that even a badly tarnished President Trump might be able to win reelection against them on those grounds alone.
My colleague Brad Polumbo rightly calls it “insane” that at least three of the candidates want to decriminalize the nondisclosure of known HIV infection to sexual partners. If anything, he understates the case. The proposal is a moral monstrosity. It would allow one person to knowingly subject another to what could be a deadly poison, without the other’s knowledge or consent. That’s depraved.
Yet that’s hardly the only example of bizarrely counter-cultural positions on sexuality that these candidates push. Take Elizabeth Warren. At an Oct. 10 town hall, the Massachusetts senator said that prison inmates who say they are transgender are “entitled” to gender reassignment surgery with taxpayers footing the bill. Such surgery, she said, is “medical care that they need.”
This is wrongheaded on multiple levels. First, it is misguided ever to use earnings confiscated from taxpayers to finance a purely elective surgery, much less surgery to which many might object for religious reasons. And, no matter what the new avatars of sexuality say, gender reassignment surgery is elective. It is not a physical necessity for health. Human beings have walked the Earth for hundreds of millennia without ever “needing” to have private parts re-fashioned.
It is also wrongheaded because it continues a morally confused trend of treating prisoners as victims of fate. They are not. They are criminals. They were imprisoned because they preyed upon the property, the persons, or the rights of fellow citizens. In doing so, they forfeited many privileges and some rights otherwise pertaining to free men. They deserved to forfeit them. They brought it upon themselves through their own choices.
In such circumstances, they certainly have no “right” to elective gender reassignment surgery while imprisoned that they had not bothered to secure while they walked free. This is just commonsense, of the sort no amount of political correctness can overcome. Try saying otherwise to residents of “Middle America” — try telling them that they must pay to turn the guy who burgled their neighbor into a gal — and watch how fast they vote against you.
Warren also has pronounced herself “open” to legalizing prostitution. As plenty of rational libertarians believe the same, this isn’t as obviously nonsensical as the other two stances highlighted here. Still, it’s problematic. There are good reasons why almost every civilization in human history has criminalized prostitution. The degradation, potential (even when regulated) for disease transmission, likelihood of physical abuse, and prevalence of human trafficking: All probably would rise if the practice is decriminalized.
In all this, there’s a broader point to make. The Left’s assault on traditional mores regarding sex and gender originally may have been rooted in compassion and human decency, but it has now gone way too far. The new sexual leftism tries to frame sex as the dominant force controlling humans rather than as something subject to human will. At the same time, though, the Left seeks to make sexual behavior almost entirely transactional, wanting to subject it to ever-increasing levels of formally enforceable rules and laws, without allowing for gray areas, much less any sense of wonder or serendipity.
Middle America won’t verbalize all this. But it will recoil at what amounts to an assault on human nature itself. Today’s Democratic candidates are in the vanguard of the assault, and will likely bear the brunt, at the ballot box, of the rightfully furious defenses they will engender.
