OPINION:
Over the past several weeks, as the average American watched in stunned silence as the world burned, the lead story that seemed to have entirely escaped the attention of the mainstream media is our culture’s near-universal degradation of women and their rights. Consider the following headlines:
NCAA championship swimmer Riley Gaines is assaulted at San Francisco State University. She is punched multiple times by a man wearing a dress. Why? Ms. Gaines was speaking out in defense of women’s athletics and the right of biological females to have their own sports. What was the media’s response? Crickets.
Dylan Mulvaney, a young man who mocks women by dressing up in exaggerated costume, is featured as the icon of “female representation” in a Bud Light marketing campaign. The establishment press reacted with little but a shrug. Apparently, the misogynistic “blackfacing” of actual women is no longer newsworthy.
Volleyball player Payton McNabb, a senior at Hiwassee Dam High School in Murphy, North Carolina, testifies to her state legislature that she suffered a concussion, neck injury, partial paralysis, impaired vision, and unremitting headaches as the result of taking a spiked ball in the face from a male athlete claiming to be a female. The response from CNN, MSMBC, Don Lemon and Whoopi Goldberg? We’re waiting.
In New Hampshire, Katie Lennon, who was encouraged by what can only be described as modern-day witch doctors to “transition” from female to male at age 18, speaks out about the devastating and irreparable damage of having healthy organs removed from her body via a double mastectomy and radical hysterectomy. The silence of the “fact-checkers” at Facebook, YouTube and Snopes remains deafening.
And while all this is happening, the U.N. International Committee of Jurists calls to eliminate all laws against sexual intercourse between adults and minors and, thus, declares it open season for old men to prey sexually upon young girls. What do our moral exemplars at CBS and ABC have to say? Not a peep.
The common thread to all of this is irrefutable. It’s called misogyny. Nearly every gain feminists have achieved over the centuries has been lost in what seems like the blink of an eye. Women no longer have the right to their own restrooms or showers. They don’t have the right to their own scholarships or sports. Women no longer even have the right to their biology, genetics or DNA. My goodness, they no longer have the right to their own pronouns. Today, a woman doesn’t even exist as a defined legal category. Female identity is now meaningless because it has no objective meaning. Feminism is dead. Our culture now hates women.
Why are we surprised by any of this? Why does this demeaning of women catch us off guard? Can we take anyone seriously who pretends to be shocked?
If we have any measure of honesty left in our cultural soul, the answer has to be no. This story was as predictable as the sunrise.
We knew this would happen. All we needed to do to was look at our public schools and what we’ve been teaching for decades.
For years, our schools have mocked chivalry and self-control. Why are we shocked to find we live in a society governed by cads?
For decades, we’ve taught our children there are no boundaries. Why are we surprised that we have raised generations of young men whose nihilism is boundless?
Year in and year out, we have taught our children the merits of sexual experimentation rather than the virtue of sexual restraint. And now we wonder why our country lacks virtue and our culture is fixated on sex?
Nearly a hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton warned, “The terrible danger in the heart of our society is that the tests are giving way. We are altering not the evils, but the standards of good by which alone evils can be detected and defined.” He went on to say, “The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming from [those] resolved to enjoy themselves, with [nothing] to hold them back.”
Indeed the “attack” has come, and it did not come from without but, rather, from within — from right within our schools.
Ideas have consequences. When schools spend more time teaching boys how to copulate “safely” rather than control themselves, you will get a nation of misogynists “with nothing to hold them back.” Alter the standard of good by which you detect evil, and evil prevails.
It’s time we just admit it. America now hates women because our schools have taught our children to do so.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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