The Goldberg File By Jonah Goldberg At The National Review

The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg

August 23, 2013

Dear Reader (Unless, of course, you’ve decided that pending your incarceration in Leavenworth you would like to change your legal status to something else, like, say “listener,” or “1973 Ford Pinto,” or maybe “cat vomit.” The only thing is, while I respect you, Dear Reader, so much, I cannot bring myself to accommodate your newfound identity and write “Dear Cat Vomit” every week),

So let me ask you something. What is the best time to announce that you want to be treated like a woman? Not wanting to be a woman myself, I can only speculate. But a few possibilities come to mind. First of all, if you are, in fact, a woman. Then there might be a whole panoply of times and situations when making such a request makes sense. Like when a bunch of steak-head dudes try to include you in their fart humor. Or when they challenge you to a chicken-wing-eating contest.

So I’m talking to you dudes right now. When would it make the most sense for a guy to ask to be treated like a woman? When you’re redeeming your coupon at a day spa, maybe? Certainly, if you’re the cowardly sort, when hostage-takers on your flight announce they will release the women and children. Maybe when you’re the only “man” in your Fifty Shades of Grey book club? Or perhaps when the testosterone in the air at BronyCon stings your nostrils. Again these are only guesses. And I’m just going out on a limb here — but my gut feeling is that one circumstance you can cross off your list, one moment when you don’t want to announce you want to be treated like a dame, is when you’re about to spend 35 years in a men’s prison.

Don’t get me wrong. Some dudes can pull it off. For example, this guy ( It’s funny!).

But Bradley Manning just doesn’t seem like the kind of fellah that could discriminate successfully among potential suitors and sundry other gentleman callers. 

Let me be clear up front, if Bradley Manning wasn’t a treasonous buffoon who materially damaged the United States of America, I’d take it a little easier on him. In fact, I’m a little squishier on this stuff than Kevin Williamson is — and he’s a libertarian.

I agree with Kevin that at least some of this sexual-identity stuff represents the triumph of English-major horse hockey.

For instance, remember the folks who’re deeply offended by the “rush” to declare that the royal baby was a boy? Why leap to that conclusion simply because he has, you know, a penis?

This calls to mind Thoreau’s famous line, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” Take that same thought and apply it to a Crying Game situation and, well, you know.

And I agree that Manning’s decision to simply declare he wants to start Womanning doesn’t really change any of the relevant biological facts. It’s sort of like when Michael Scott declares bankruptcy;

just saying the words doesn’t really change anything. Similarly, if you guys tell me you’re no longer my dear readers, but the aforementioned 1973 Pinto, that wouldn’t make it so.

“Oh, yeah?” a guy who thinks he’s a Ford Pinto might reply. “How do you respond to the fact that I am sure I am a Ford Pinto.” Similarly, Bradley Manning might respond, “Oh, yeah, how do you respond to the fact I’m sure I am a woman?”

My answer to both would be “You’re wrong.” Or perhaps more gently, “You’re confused.”

That said, I do think that such beliefs can be very, very strongly held. I also think that as we learn more about how humans develop in utero, gender-identity confusion can have a very hard-wired component. A man thinking he’s a woman — or thinking he was supposed to be born as a woman (or vice versa) — isn’t the same thing as dabbling in Marxism in college or thinking that Van Halen was better with Sammy Hagar. It is not purely a conscious choice or matter of taste. As such it deserves some sympathy, respect, and even a little social space.

But you know who else deserves space, sympathy, and respect? The majority of Americans who don’t think the factory installed their parts wrong. For instance, the push to make unisex bathrooms or let gender-confused girls use boy’s rooms and vice versa is quite simply madness.

The vast majority of Americans — straight, gay, black, white, young, old, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Jedi, and atheist — believe that the humans with the dangly bits should use the boys’ bathroom. And yet out in California, the DOJ just settled a suit saying that this very old arrangement must now be revised to accommodate a minority of one person.

Of course I believe in individual rights and liberties. I’ve always believed democracy without guaranteed individual rights is just a clever way to organize a mob (as I like to say, in a pure democracy, 51 percent of the people get to pee in the cornflakes of 49 percent of the people). But we’re talking about a civilization here, and in a civilization you don’t hold the entire culture hostage to the ever-changing whims and desires of a handful of people.

Majorities Have Rights, Too

The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a photographer had no right to refuse a job shooting a gay wedding. Why a gay couple would want a photographer who doesn’t approve of them is beyond me (more on that in a moment). And if a businessman wants to forego making a profit, that should probably be its own punishment. The justices saw it differently.

Justice Richard C. Bosson says the case “provokes reflection on what this nation is all about, its promise of fairness, liberty, equality of opportunity, and justice.” It also “teaches that at some point in our lives all of us must compromise, if only a little, to accommodate the contrasting values of others. A multicultural, pluralistic society, one of our nation’s strengths, demands no less.”

Jonathan and Elaine Huguenin, the owners of Elane Photography, “are free to think, to say, to believe, as they wish” Bosson writes. But in the “world of the marketplace, of commerce, of public accommodation, the Huguenins have to channel their conduct, not their beliefs, so as to leave space for other Americans who believe something different.”

Doing so, Bosson said, is “the price of citizenship.”

And you know what? He’s right! Sort of.

The problem is that Bosson, like countless others, sees only a one-way street. Officially recognized or fashionable minorities deserve respect, space, and compromise. Okay, but what about, you know, majorities? Don’t majorities deserve respect, space, and compromise?

Judge Bosson insists that the Huguenins must take the business of a gay couple as part of the price of citizenship. Well, what if the situation was reversed? What if it was the gay couple that refused to hire the Huguenins? After all, that would make more sense than the fact pattern of the actual case. Who wants to have their wedding photographed by someone who rejects its legitimacy? I married a Catholic girl. I looked for rabbis who’d officiate. They refused because they didn’t condone a mixed marriage. I completely understood their reluctance. It didn’t offend me in the slightest. But you can be sure I wouldn’t hire a photographer who passionately felt that what we were doing was disgusting or evil or wrong. So anyway, suppose the gay couple made the utterly reasonable decision not to hire a wedding photographer who passionately rejects the whole idea of gay marriage? Now imagine that the poor Hugenins really need the work. Should a judge march in and tell the gay couple you’ve got to give these people money to photograph a ceremony that disgusts them? The logic of Bosson’s decision would say yes. Everyone has to compromise. It’s the price of citizenship! In fact, as support for gay marriage grows and religious orthodoxy declines, it’s easy to imagine a world where the Huguenins are the minority — if they aren’t already. Do they suddenly merit intervention by a thumb-sucking judge simply because their views have become minority views?

Rightwing = Noncompliance, Again

There is one reason why a gay couple would want to force a photographer to shoot their wedding: The progressive idea that you must care, you must celebrate, you must comply. As I ranted last May in the Goldberg File:

Now let me be clear: I hate O’Sullivan’s law (I am rather fond of John, however). I hate it for the same reason that I hate the argument that I cannot command an army of cape-wearing super-intelligent flying basset hounds with laser vision: because it’s true.

But let’s be honest about why it is true. Because liberals are the aggressors in the culture war. This Lois Lerner woman, it seems increasingly clear, is a perfect example of a midlevel enforcer of O’Sullivan’s Law, a water-carrier for the Gleichschaltung, a junior officer in Matthews’s “war.” But it’s important to recognize that Matthews’s “war” isn’t about freedom qua freedom or rights qua rights, it’s a war over how freedom is defined. And in the minds of progressives you are free to live anyway you want so long as it’s progressive. You have the right to have me pay for things you want, solely because you want them and progressives say you need them.

Any institution that agrees with progressivism is free to stay clear of the State if it wants to (but, being “progressive,” few such institutions want to be free of the State). Any institution that desires to go a different way must be ground down and forced to conform. It is this act of resistance and not any explicit ideological commitment that renders dissident institutions “right wing.” Indeed “right wing” is often just a liberal word for “non-compliant.”

The Civic Value of Capitalism

One of the beautiful things about the free market is that it allows us to pay the price of our citizenship voluntarily. As I wrote almost 13 years ago, in my ode to Budweiser:

In 1953, when August “Gussie” Busch bought the St. Louis Cardinals, he was angry that the Brooklyn Dodgers, equipped with Jackie Robinson, were beating the tar out of everybody else. When he asked his own organization how many blacks the Cardinals were bringing along, he was horrified to hear that the answer was none. “But,” he stammered, “we sell beer to everyone!” In 1954, the Cardinals had a black first baseman.

Or for a related point, you might check out George Hearst’s philosophy of gold from the outrageously cancelled HBO series Deadwood.

The market’s not perfect, to be sure. Sometimes the state does need to break down illegitimate barriers or, you know, crush slavery. But such intrusions should be for the really important cases, not the trivial ones. Instead, what we do today is make the trivial cases into important ones. Indeed, we’ve turned vast swaths of the government into an industry that searches out boutique and often ridiculous arguments for new “civil rights” and then mints them accordingly. Each newly minted coin diminishes the value of more legitimate rights and trivializes the responsibility of liberty.

Liberals Aren’t Libertarians Dept.

One last point about this New Mexico thing. One of my great peeves is when the guy next to me on the bus taps out “The Girl From Ipanema” on his glass eye with a shrimp fork, but that’s not important right now. Another peeve is when 1973 Ford Pintos Dear Readers write in to tell me that there’s a typo in the G-File on the assumption that I can fix it. It’s an e-mail! I can’t go in and edit your e-mail. I’m not Obama’s NSA, for Pete’s sake. If there’s a typo in the G-File, deal with it.

Oh, so anyway, another peeve of mine is the way liberals — and many libertarians — act as if there’s a lot of common cause between liberals and libertarians. The thinking seems to be that since both liberals and libertarians are for drug legalization, gay marriage, etc., that liberals can be seduced to the libertarian cause or that libertarians and liberals should forge a new “liberaltarian” political alliance to replace the old right-leaning fusionism. This was my friend Brink Lindsey’s big cause for a while, and I never bought it. It’s also something you hear from a lot of liberal college kids who want a wee bit more plausibility when they pose as rebellious.

But the truth is that what we call liberals today — a.k.a. progressives — simply aren’t libertarian even on most of their “libertarian” issues. As I’ve written before, being a “social liberal” isn’t the same thing as being a libertarian:

Your typical liberal Democrat says she’s liberal on social issues but that doesn’t make her in any meaningful way a libertarian. For instance, the vast majority of the libertarians I know hate things like speech codes, smoking bans, racial quotas, and the vast swaths of political indoctrination that pass for “education” today. They tend to oppose gun control, think fondly of homeschooling (if not always homeschoolers) and are generally split on the question of abortion. They do not, however, think that the government should be steamrolling religious institutions with Obamacare or subsidizing birth control. Liberals tend to loathe federalism or states’ rights (though there’s been some movement there), libertarians usually love the idea. The liberals who don’t like it fear that states or local communities might use their autonomy to live in ways liberals don’t approve of. Libertarians couldn’t care less.

Sure, there’s overlap between liberalism and libertarianism on things like gay marriage. But the philosophical route libertarians and liberals take to get to that support is usually very different. Libertarians are disciples of thinkers like Hayek and von Mises. Liberals descend from thinkers like John Dewey. The former believed in negative liberty, the latter positive liberty. And therein lies all of the difference. As a gross generalization, libertarianism advocates freedom to do whatever you like (short of harming others). Liberalism supports freedom to do whatever liberals like; everything else is suspect.

Liberals are no doubt cheering the news out of New Mexico, while most libertarians are probably at least conflicted, if not dismayed, about it.  

That’s because libertarianism is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Various & Sundry

Okay, so I was gone for a while. I feel terribly out of practice in this whole “News”letter business and you have my apologies if today’s edition was a bit wobbly.

I did have a lovely time on vacation with the Missus. Though I gather many of you Ford Pintos didn’t think I should take so much time off. In fairness, I did write big chunks of a couple Goldberg Files, which now feel horribly dated because I wrote them from the boat or from the shores of Loch Torridon in Scotland. They’ll be like my basement tapes and will be sold with my estate years from now.  

But the good news is that I have accumulated a vast Various & Sundry section. So as Barack Obama says to himself every time before he speaks, let’s start with self-promotional stuff.

Right before I left for the NR Cruise, I wrote this cover essay on Breaking Bad and the nature of evil. I like it and I’ve gotten some very nice feedback on it (and yes, I should have mentioned Hill Street Blues). Now to read the whole thing, you can pay a quarter or you can subscribe to NR Digital (which you should be doing already). If neither of those options appeal to you, fine. But complaints about how you want everything for free will be greeted with cold indifference.

Here’s the new GLoP Culture podcast over at Ricochet. Let me know if you can hear me playing Tetris in the background.

Here’s me ranting against pragmatism and name-dropping G. K. Chesterton on Fox News.

Here’s my take on the Hillary Hype overtaking both Right and Left and why I hope Joe Biden runs.

Oh, and here’s my column today on MSNBC and their one-way understanding of racism.

Okay, now, as Obama never says to himself or anybody else, enough about me.

Speaking of Breaking Bad, here’s Mythbusters’ take on it. And, as luck would have it, these ghost hunters were making meth. And here’s Brian Cranston reading Ozymandias.

They laughed at you when you said cats were taking over the Internet. Well, who’s laughing now?

Meanwhile, if you take the last sentence and change “Internet” to “Detroit” and “cats” to “dogs” it would look something like this.

Eleven awesome interpretations of movies you probably didn’t think of.

The Flintstones meet The Thing (Unfortunately, the Marvel Thing, not the John Carpenter thing).

I thought this Cracked collection of weird movie posters (or weird posters for normal movies) was interesting. But I do wonder if the ones from the Iron Curtain are so trippy because redesigning movie posters was one of the few modes of artistic expression that might get around Communist censors. Just a thought.

Everything I said above notwithstanding, I think we should give this guy his own bathroom.

And, if you think dogs and cats sleeping together is a sign of the apocalypse, what do you make of this? Dog gives blood to save cat’s life.

British queen was prepared for Armageddon.

Didn’t Leonard go off to study this at the end of last season’s Big Bang Theory?

I’m trying to lose some weight, but this is giving me second thoughts. Seven Unbelievable Cases of People Whose Lives Were Saved by Being Fat.”

Thirty-two is the age at which we turn into our parents.

You may have seen 40 Maps that explain the world. But did you see the one of Pangea with all of today’s countries on it?

Baby panda meets its mom for the first time. (This would be kind of terrifying if the baby panda didn’t think he was a panda).

Splashing baby elephant!

Interesting data on the distribution of rats and loud parties in New York. Unfortunately, there’s not enough data on subway sharks to reach any conclusions at this time.

Mmmmm, waffle taco.

Zombie evolution! What’s strange is I think clowns are now scarier to more people than zombies. Scary clown evolution!

And if that wasn’t enough, here are Debby’s Friday links!

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