Opinion: Reconstructing a compassionate us

I hope that Idaho will soon follow Florida and Alabama in passing laws that protect children from the traumatizing doctrines of gender-fluidity advocates. Those states' schools are now prohibited from indoctrinating innocents into the contemporary collective delusion that subjective assertions override objective reality.

Our free-thinking adult society has called into question the one constant that has heretofore united all human cultures everywhere; that men and women exist as complimentary and distinct types of people.

Compassion involves each of us having the humility to appreciate that we are not God. Other valid ways of being and living exist. Each one of us should be humane to those who are different from ourselves. However, forcing people to treat a man as if he is a woman is a form of oppression! It is wrong to force people to conform to the lies of the powerful or suffer punishment.

Worse than this is today's practice of warping the natural development of pre-sexual children and adolescents by sowing existential confusion and self-loathing in innocents. This is child abuse. Encouraging children and teens to alter their hormones or their organs through drugs or surgery is nothing less than inciting vulnerable people to engage in self-mutilation.

This attempt to define-away the existence of biological gender is new. There have always been individuals whose sexuality defied convention. However, no society but our own has tried to wish masculinity and femininity away in order to accommodate those who fit comfortably in neither category.

Despite what LBGTQ+ advocates say, this dispute is not about compassionately easing the pain of those whose sexuality is untypical or nontraditional. The argument that gender is a social construct that has little relation to biological sex comes straight out of the French Philosophical movement of post-modern deconstructivism.

Jacques Derrida established this school of thought as a reaction against the bloodshed of both World Wars and the Cold War. It was developed in France as a consequence of the agony of France's division, defeat and occupation by the Nazis between 1940 and 1944.

Post-modern deconstructivists assert that the West is too depraved to be allowed to continue. Since the West is rooted in objective rationalism, it can be de-constructed by breaking an individual's relationship to tradition, logic, rationality and our shared reality.

Language itself becomes useless as words no longer mean distinct things. Instead of being a code that makes common understanding possible between people, each collection of sounds instead reflects the unique inner life of each speaker. No human relationship can long withstand the un-learning of its shared language.

It is more than the West that is threatened by post-modern deconstructivism. When we destroy language, we threaten our own mind's ability to have a coherent internal monologue. Our very sentience is put at risk.

For this reason, it is imperative that people of good will from all points-of-view reject the equating of tolerance and compassion with post-modern deconstructivism. We can and should be a society that tolerates heterodox ways of being and living, but we must do so without giving up rationality, logic, language, civilization and our very humanity.

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In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western Civilization to high school students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in special education, public schools and charter schools, grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com