Mary KennyMove singles ‘a failure of the Left’
One of the aspects of contemporary life that older people sometimes find bewildering is the contemporary political obsession with sexual identity and sexual orientation.
I daresay Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton is acting from the best of motives with her Gender Recognition Bill, which will allow a ‘transgender’ person (an individual who has changed sex, or who was possibly wrongly assigned at birth) to apply for a new birth certificate that recognises his or her acquired gender – at the age of 16.
Some people challanege the entire agenda of voluntarily changing sex, including some biological scientists, who argue that your sex is encoded in your chromosomes and human chromosomes cannot be changed. Therefore to have your birth sex altered on an official document is a scientific falsehood.
Most of us do not have the specialist knowledge to argue for one side of the other; most of us would simply reflect that it must be a sad afflecition to be possessed by the feeling that you have been born into the wrong sex. And in some cases there are tragic outcomes to a sex change – a Belgian citizen recently sought, and was granted, assisted suicide because, having changed from female to male, she/he felt that the enterprise had been botched, both psychologically and clinically.
Transgender
Yet the transgender individual is, surely, a rare occurance in nature itself. Let those who need help and support in this situation receive whatever assistance – and sympathetic counselling – that they require, but the question hardly needs to be within the mainstream of political or public life.
And a French intellectual has just enlightened me as to why ‘gender’ issues have become such a hot topic across the Western world. According to Luc Ferry, philosopher and former French Minister of Education, the answer lies in the failure of the Left in virtually all its economic nostrums and policies.
Equality
Prof. Ferry described what he calls the “ABCD of equality” in modern politics: gender equality, abortion rights, euthanasia and assisted suicide. These values are now obligatory among the ‘political classes’, notably those on the Left. But this, he says, is because they have lost every basic ‘value’ that was once the proud province of the Left: the importance of trade unions (which have been disempowered or withered on the vine): the advancement of economic socialism – even the Nordic countries are moving away from economic equality: the catastrophic inability to deal with unemployment, especially youth unemployment, in so many of the European countries. And the loss of a sense of ‘solidarity’ among the working class.
Secular humanism
Ferry, who is a champion of secular humanism – and far from being in that despised category of ‘right-wing Catholic’ – claims that the Left has completely lost its moorings and its purpose. So it has turned to ‘identity politics’, and that ‘ABCD’ as a displacement activity. The Left has had to find new ground on which to fight because it has lost so much ground in its traditional territory.
What would James Connolly think of the issue of transgender rights? I daresay he would be compassionate, but I imagine he would scarcely think of it as the greatest banner for working-class advancement.
Divided loyalites
There are definite parallels between the relationship of the Ukraine to Russia, and the relationship between Ireland and England a century ago.
Russia is the dominant power, and there has been an intermingling of history between the Ukraine and Russia, yet most of Ukraine wants independence from its bigger neighbour.
But there are Ukrainians, notably in the East, whose allegiance is to Russia, who share an ethnicity, and a religious affiliation, with the Russian Orthodox Church (as opposed to the Ukrainian Uniate Church, which is in communion with Rome): just as in Ireland there were Southern Unionists and Anglo-Irish gentry who felt an attachment to the Crown, had a sense of a British identity, and were Anglican in religion.
Divided loyalties are always awkward. But partition of an old country often creates a new bitterness. Where the Churches can preach reconciliation, they should – and do.
During the bloody scenes in Kiev last week, Ukrainian priests stepped forward and tried to maintain a ‘peace line’ between warring factions, and that, I thought, was admirable.
Remaining ‘susceptible to belief’
John Lennonís Imagine is regarded as ëthe atheistís anthemí and forms the title of a new book about atheism published in America. (Imagine Thereís No Heaven by Mitchell Stephens).
But the book discloses that Lennon found atheism very difficult to sustain, and "remained intermittently susceptible to belief". He followed the I Ching, astrology, and "whatever superstition had most recently tickled his fancy, or his wifeís fancy".
Ah, G.K. Chestertonís prophesy fulfilled: when men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing – they believe in anything!