Morten Tyldum’s film The Imitation Game has just been released in cinemas in Great Britain. The film features the story of Alan Turing, considered to be one of the finest minds of the last century. The Cambridge mathematician’s ability to break the German naval code Enigma may even have won the war for the Allies. As if this was not a big enough contribution to society, Turing laid the philosophical foundations of computing and artificial intelligence.
His country was grossly ungrateful. Turing was arrested and tried under the 1885 law which had criminalised homosexual behaviour. To be able to continue his research, Turing acquiesced to undergo chemically induced castration. He could not cope with the treatment and the humiliation. At the age of 41 Turing committed suicide.
The world Turing lived in was a horrible one. Tens of thousands of homosexuals were similarly degraded and punished. That is a world I do not wish to live in.
However, there are other kinds of worlds in which I feel uneasy.
In August of last year, the US tabloid New York Post had this screaming headline: “I’m a Guy Again!” The first sentence of the report says it all: “He thought he was a woman trapped in a man’s body – but it turns out he’s ‘just another boring straight guy’.”
The paper said that in May, Don Ennis strolled into its newsroom wearing a black dress and a wig, telling everyone that he split with his wife as he was a woman. He asked his colleagues to call him Dawn. Three months later, he had his Damascene moment, realised that he had misdiagnosed himself and returned to being Dan.
Turing’s world was bad as it turned things upside down: it castigated his fundamental dignity because of his gender orientation. Don’s (aka Dawn) contemporary society is also turning things upside down: it denies the natural basis of our sexuality by propagating the belief that it is simply a socio-cultural construct, quoting marriage between man and woman as an example. The arbitrariness of a world wherein one can be a man one day, a woman a while later, be an I-don’t-know-what-I-am some other day and return to be a man within a short period of time does not make sense.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI denounced the “profound falsehood” of this gender theory during an address on the occasion of Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia in December 2012. Benedict warned that “when freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God.”
Undoubtedly, he was routinely crucified in the secular press and not only. The state has not only the right but also the duty to safeguard the rights of all, particularly the vulnerable. Their rights should be a topmost priority and one recognises that in the area of sexuality, for example gender identity, there are still several vulnerabilities which cry for a credible defence which truly respects the needs of the individual, the rights of the community and the nature of things.
But when these solutions are politicised or are imposed because of a warped ideology, such as the gender theory, they could create worse problems instead of just solving old ones. According to Pope Francis, this is what happens when, for example, the concept of the family is politicised or qualified in ideological concepts. “Family is family,” said Pope Francis adding that is made up of a father, a mother and children. Needless to say, the liberal press was silent. When you don’t march to the beat of their drum, the liberals either freeze you out or attack you like a pack of rabid dogs.
An important question that should be levelled at the Gender Identity Bill that is being proposed by government is whether its aim is in the best interests of transgendered people or the imposition on our culture of the gender theory referred to above.
In one of the very few comments about the Bill, former European Court of Human Rights judge Giovanni Bonello said that although he subscribed to the values promoted by the Bill, he saw it as “a giant step towards the unexplored”. He noted that it looks more like an in-house experiment than a Bill that draws, as it sensibly and prudently should, on the acquired experience of other established legal systems.
The authoritarian Left has become everything it claims to hate, even imitating the rigid mindset of the religious fundamental Right
Is this being done so that government can boast that it is more avant-garde than other European nations? The Bill, as is, does not reasonably balance the inviolable rights of the individual with the interests of other individuals and of the community as a whole. It not only states that one can change one’s gender by a mere declaration to a public notary but does not even make a limit to the number of times that one can change and change again. The Bill is a case where fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
There was hardly any real public discussion of the Bill. It could be that the shenanigans of several ministers struck the public fancy more than the Bill. Besides, past experience particularly during the same-sex marriage Act in all but name, shows that government is not really interested in the opinions of others on such subjects.
Moreover, there could be those who feel intimidated by different lobbies among us that push the new dogmas of the so-called liberal agenda and woe to those who dare to disagree. Such bullying tactics are not only the prerogative of this benighted country of ours. For example, Oxford University students recently shut down a debate on abortion because they objected to the participation of a pro-life debater. In Germany, a parent was jailed because his daughter refused to attend a two-hour lesson on sex education that focused on gender ideology. In France, parents are up in arms for explicit pictorial sex education for primary school children.
Barilla’s chief, Guido Barilla, was made to apologise profusely, even grovel for his remarks that he will never feature same-sex families in his ads, not through “lack of respect” but because “we don’t agree with them”.
The new Inquisition is very actively suppressing contrary opinions in the name of freedom. People should be courageous enough to show that they are not deterred.
The authoritarian Left has become everything it claims to hate, even imitating the rigid mindset of the religious fundamental Right and in the process redefining the parameters of free speech, in essence eradicating it.
When the day arrives that they too will be muzzled for their views contrary to my own, I will be there to defend their right to say it. Expecting the same from them seems, for now, pie in the sky.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt