The United States Senate held hearings this week on what post-Roe America will look like. The hearings were clearly designed as political theatre and they certainly didn’t disappoint. The absolute highlight, or lowlight, was the testimony of University of California, Berkeley law professor Khiara M. Bridges. She is clearly a highly educated woman, with a J.D. and Ph.D from Columbia University. But she said utterly non-sensical things before the Senate this week.
After her testimony (you can read it here), Missouri senator Josh Hawley asked the professor what she meant when she referred multiple times throughout her testimony to “people with the capacity for pregnancy.” Did she mean women? It is a straightforward question and one of fundamental simplicity. What does what she said, repeatedly, even mean?
The good professor responded with absolute, but perfectly scripted, gender ideology gobbledygook. Frankly, there is no other way to describe her answer. Another commentator correctly referred to it as hokum. In response to the simple and justified question, professor Bridges told Senator Hawley,
Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are also capable of pregnancy, as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy.
The nonsense of her statement is that there is no such thing as “cis woman,” “trans men,” or “non-binary people” in nature. No one should use those words as if they actually refer to something real. They do not.
These things are purely gender ideology constructs, recently made-up terms based purely on individual self-understanding and personal declaration. They “exist” simply because certain people with very radical ideas assert their existence. That is the game being played here and no one should fall for it. Professor Bridges is one of these people and she played this game in an official hearing of the Senate of the United States of America.
Senator Hawley then asked, based on the professor’s comments, whether abortion is not really “a women’s right issue” even though we have systematically been told so by abortion activists for decades. Professor Bridges, laughing slightly in her response, said, “We can recognize this impacts women while also recognizing it impact other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive Senator Hawley.”
She seemed very confident in her answer what a woman was here, which is a trademark of gender rhetoric. Sometimes “woman” means what it has always meant. Other times it includes male-bodied individuals. The confusion is a deliberate feature and not a bug of gender ideology. Things really took off with Hawley’s next question.
He asked her, “So your view is, the core of this issue [abortion] is about what?”
The senator just wanted to know what she was talking about with all her gender ideology newspeak like “people with the capacity for pregnancy.” Professor Bridges responded directly with a thoroughly vicious accusation,
So, I wanna recognize that your line of questioning, um, is transphobic. [laughter] and it opens up trans people to violence.
Let that claim sink in for a moment and we see how legitimately crazy the rhetoric of the left and gender politics has become.
Senator Hawley is simply trying to determine whether it is women who are most deeply impacted by abortion. And of course, “a woman’s right to choose” has been pushed down all of our children’s throats ever since Roe was decided. The right certainly did not make up that talking point.
But now such talk is no long progressive. Nor is it simply regressive. Its violence!!
Yes, those on the woke left are changing the rules, meaning, and terms of the debate at will and this is a classic example. There is no better definition of collective madness than this. And no one should feel forced to play along with it. Senator Hawley certainly didn’t. He responded,
Wow, you’re saying I’m opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who [experience] pregnancy.
Professor Bridges then regurgitated a litany of tired talking points about trans suicide like a wind-up doll. These talking points are famously false but are regularly uttered with little push-back. On this, The Atlantic Monthly recently published this chart in a major article about dramatically decreasing mental well-being among youth at the very time that celebrating all things gay and trans is skyrocketing to unseen heights.
The professor continues with the big, manipulative guns, breathlessly asserting, “denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist is dangerous.” The senator was simply asking about women.
She then asks a sitting senator, with all seriousness, if he thinks men can get pregnant. Of course, Senator Hawley answers properly and truthfully.
Note this as a very clear sign of the times.
A group of liberal senators invited professor Bridges to testify before this committee because they clearly thought she had important insights the U.S. Senate needed to hear in their important deliberations. But she said that anyone who claims only women can get pregnant are “transphobic” and directly responsible for the deaths of people.
It is literally unhinged from any reality and it took place in a Senate hearing.
This is baseless, ideological demagoguery masquerading as intelligence and compassion, plain and simple. As Michael Brendan Dougherty proclaimed over at National Review, “It is on this ground that we must fight back.” Why?
Gender ideology was born out of academic wordplay. And academics such as Professor Bridges have become bodyguards for a buccaneering, barely regulated gender-therapy industry, filled with pill-pushers and demented surgeons who leave their patients miserable and more desirous of ending their lives. We can’t just ask clever questions and hope for these people to embarrass themselves. We have to confront them for what they are: a cult that seduces people and leads them to bodily harm, and, in many cases, self-destruction.
Dougherty is precisely right. Time for niceness is gone. As Romans 12:9 says, “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” And denying what male and female are is the highest evil because it fundamentally questions the very image of God in creation.
Even evolutionary biologists are decrying this madness. Colin Wright, a scholar who carefully tracks the insanity of gender ideology, says the work of resisting and rebutting this madness is “reality’s last stand.”
Professor Bridges testimony this week in the Senate has demonstrated just how true this is. You can watch Professor Bridges’ exchange with Senator Hawley here,
A law professor from Cal-Berkeley says @HawleyMO is being transphobic for saying only women can get pregnant. Watch this exchange. These men can get pregnant people are crazy: pic.twitter.com/YxOd9kaXFh
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) July 12, 2022
Photo from CSPAN.
The post Berkeley Professor Leaves Senators Speechless with Absolutely Senseless Statements About Humanity appeared first on Daily Citizen.
Daily Citizen