Don't X Me Y, Just Do What I Say

It's settled. The homophobes have no idea what they're doing.

For those who know better than to read anything ever posted on WorldNutDaily, that's a link to a minor rant by a truly microcephalic lady named Nancy Pearcey. This is a woman who thinks Earth is six thousand years old (a figure apparently based on adding up the ages of all the sequential generations of people mentioned in the Bible, hint hint) and that people coexisted with dinosaurs.

That's only the start. The whole thing's so intellectually crap that it's only appeared on the site that gives a weekly column to Chuck Norris, possibly the subject of the greatest amount of misguided respect on the Internet...and this dumb bitch has decided that gay people and transgender people don't respect the human body.

...What? Why wouldn't they respect it? Like anyone, they put a lot of work into getting it to look just the way they want - the way they think their body should look. Like a lot of people on both sides of the gender divide, sometimes they resort to surgery. Why do they show any less respect for the human body than any of the people Pearcey isn't talking about?

The article's full of this sort of thing. Very vague definitions that don't really make sense when you look into them with real inquiry in mind, but which make just enough sense to resonate with anyone who's already decided gays are morally in the wrong for being who they are. Like a lot of opinion writers who come down on the repressive side of the moral viewpoint scale, she quotes old writings and implies they're factual, taking their accuracy and even their relevance as read without a second thought. She even uses Descartes' logic, by quote-mining a philosopher called Daniel Dennett on the topic of body-and-soul duality as Descartes laid it out - a view Dennett doesn't actually agree with, which means he'd probably be quite pissed if he knew what she did.

She kind of thinks in cartoons, too. Like, real kids' stuff. She keeps making this assumption that people are born with a sexual identity and should stick with it, and anyone gender-confused is apparently just being rebellious or sinful. What she thinks is in it for these sinners to do such a thing, she doesn't say. But she either doesn't know about or is deliberately ignoring the fact that XX and XY, the so-called 'officially' male and female chromosomal configurations, are not the only ones. There's a hell of a lot more than just those two, and without getting into complicated genetics info that I can barely make sense of it's hard to go into what the differences are. (It's easy to find the necessary stuff on Google if anyone does want to read up on it.)

There's also this little gem:

this represents a devastatingly disrespectful view of the physical body. It alienates people from their own bodies, treating anatomy as having no intrinsic dignity. No dignity is accorded to the unique capabilities inherent in being male or female.

What?

Which dictionary's she working from? The inner workings of a human being are not very dignified processes. Mine certainly aren't. While she's clearly talking about reproduction, the 'unique capabilities' inherent in the genitals of a human male are basically the kind of pressure systems that'd never make you want to pump up a Super-Soaker water gun again. A surge and a splat are not exactly noble goings-on. She's trying to appeal to some higher purpose inherent in all this, but consider it all in context it just comes out as 'ADAM AND EVE NOT ADAM AND STEVE BLAAGH DERP' and other such time-honoured wastes of space. If she's going to only use her body parts for what her god supposedly intended, does that mean she's not going to whistle? Will she follow her god's intent for her feet and make sure they never do anything that humanity came up with for itself, like driving a car or using a trampoline? Does she eat her meat raw and live in a tree? She typed that shit with her fingers, and I bet no one in the Bible imagined that one...and if she doesn't like the idea of going back that far to different body parts, then tough. You pick on people for how they use their penises, and they'll all rise to stand up against you.

Or something.