the changing times

Tea at Trianon links to this article (Claremont review of books) about the demise of the blue state church: where people were preached at on what to believe via TV and radio.

and the Jordan Peterson phenomenum is just one symptom of it's decline.

The ascendant digital media, unlike television, are dynamic, decentralized, and interactive. Their veneer of anonymity encourages disdain for traditional authority. Television had been the preeminent pulpit of the Blue Church liberal establishment, which includes much of the Republican Party’s country-club wing. Donald Trump and his supporters represent a red-state insurgency that uses digital media—and more haphazardly, the powers of the White House—to try to overthrow the old establishment, including the administrative state.

“The old weapons have no more sting,” Greenhall writes. “The collapse of the Blue Church is going to lead to a level of ‘cultural flux’ that will make the 1960s look like the Eisenhower administration.”

but this collapse of institutions could lead to chaos, or even civil war:

Jordan Peterson, however, is deeply worried. “There’s a reasonable possibility that things are going to go very wrong, very soon...for all of us,” he remarked in one video interview. “We’re playing with fire.” With the centrist accord on what constitutes respectable opinion falling apart—especially on the most sensitive issues of race and sex—political extremists at both poles are rushing to stake new claims.

The “alt-right” sees itself as a new counterculture, gleefully embracing a shock-and-awe strategy to leverage digital vulgarity. Meanwhile, the zealous Left on and off campus has beaten the plowshares of postmodern views on identity and social construction into swords for tribal warfare.

there is a lot more in the article, not just the usual culture war memes, so read the whole thing.

And TeaAtTrianon also links to a wsj article on weaponizing language, as in pronouns.

 If you want to control people’s thoughts, begin by commandeering their words. Taking this Orwellian lesson to heart, Virginia’s Fairfax County public school system recently stripped the phrase “biological gender” from its family life curriculum, replacing it with “sex assigned at birth.” Without permitting parents to opt out, public schools across the country are teaching children that “gender” is neither binary nor biological. It’s closer to a mental state: a question of how girllike or boylike you feel. ... 

scientific nonsense, of course.

but only Jordan Peterson seems to have enough guts to question this. Oh yes: The pope also has criticized this, but didn't get a lot of publicity when he did it, because it went against the MSM meme he is a political leftist who agrees with their radical agenda.

but the "gender police" not only deny science, but are on a collision course with religion:

For those with a religious conviction that sex is both biological and binary, God’s purposeful creation, denial of this involves sacrilege no less than bowing to idols in the town square.

When the state compels such denial among religious people, it clobbers the Constitution’s guarantee of free exercise of religion, lending government power to a contemporary variant on forced conversion. 

 But individuals need not be religious to believe that one person can never be a “they”; compelled speech is no less unconstitutional for those who refuse an utterance based on a different viewpoint, as the Supreme Court held in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). Upholding students’ right to refuse to salute an American flag even on nonreligious grounds, Justice Robert H. Jackson declared: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

This is precisely what forced reference to someone else as “ze,” “sie,” “hir,” “co,” “ev,” “xe,” “thon” or “they” entails. When the state employs coercive power to compel an utterance, what might otherwise be a courtesy quickly becomes a plank walk.

no problem here in the Philippines, where gays and transgenders are merely seen as part of the family: as an eccentricity, where family ties outweigh any moral disapproval.

and of course, in Tagalog, the pronouns are unisex.

The problem? The aggressive PC types are starting to push this foreign agenda on us: The Pope calls this cultural imperialism and has often noted the fruit of this is the destruction of the family, which outside of rich countries is the main basis of caring for the poor, the sick, and children.

And the gay enclave in Manila, where gay tourism and European/american style perversions are celebrated, and is the source of most of our HIV cases, and spills over into the widespread use of illicit drugs, and is part of a subculture that alas is too often associated with the abuse of street kids. (sexual abuse of street kids, both boys and girls, is an open secret here that church and government are trying to fight).

the bad news? As more people become Protestant, there is more disapproval of the behavior, so things could easily change.