A Few Shiny Pebbles

I really like Dennis Prager, the radio talk show host, but he said something this morning that I disagree with, and I think it’s an important issue.

This morning Prager was discussing the story out of Colorado about the little boy who has decided he is really a little girl. Of course the school system is going out of its way to accommodate the child.

World Net Daily reports:

An 8-year-old boy is preparing to return to his home school district in Colorado as a girl, so school officials are designating two school restrooms as unisex facilities, and preparing to counsel other students on the issue of transgenderism. [...] [… according to] the television station the school is handing out packets of information to other students and their parents containing "information" about transgender people, and officials will answer questions from other students about the boy-seeking-to-be-girl "in order to protect the child as much as possible."

Prager rightly argued that the Colorado people were making a mistake in allowing the circumstances of a single child to cause a whole system to change. (This is not to mention the whole issue of transgenderism, and how young the children are, and the rights of their parents.) Prager said that the Left is acting again as though a single individual is everything, and the needs of a large number of other children don’t matter to them.

I admit, it looks like that at first. Just as when one person finds offense in the existence of a Christmas Tree or a Christmas play at school, or when an openly atheist boy wants to join the Boy Scouts, the whole system is supposed to allow the offended or “different” single individual to change the already existent circumstances.

But if Prager thought more about it, he might realize that it actually has nothing to do with individuals or forcing a system to accommodate a single person’s difference. The Left are Collectivists. Their focus is on groups, on Identity Politics, on “authenticity” in adhering to an approved group attitude and group beliefs. So what’s happening, to make it look to Prager like an individual is messing up a whole system?

This is one of the most important issues we can deal with in America. What is actually happening is two different actions which have combined to change the way the Constitution was supposed to rule America, and thereby injuring the country.

The first issue can be found in The Federalist Papers, which is a collection of brilliant articles written in 1787-1788 to convince people to ratify the newly written Constitution of the United States of America. Federalist #10, written by James Madison, began with the words, “Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”

He goes on to define a “faction” as a minority or majority group of citizens who advocate beliefs or actions that are adverse to the rights of others or the interests of the whole community. He states that in the outcome of this conflict,

. . . the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.

And here is the important, the vastly important, issue. How do we cure this problem? Madison points out that there are two methods of taking the danger out of a faction: (1) “by removing the causes”, and (2) “by controlling its effects”.

He looks at method #1: How do we remove the causes? There are only two ways, the first is to destroy liberty by force, and the second is to give “to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests”. But it would be wrong to destroy freedom, and as long as there are human beings, there will be differences of opinion, different interests. So, he concludes, [emphasis mine]: “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

Hence [emphasis mine]:

The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS. [….]

Madison writes that in the American Constitutional system, whereby different States come together in a Federal whole, under a Constitution of individual rights, allows factions to be handled by local or state action, and keeps the fights from becoming national conflagrations of hatred. (We have usually been pretty good about this, with areas considered to be “the Bible Belt”, or “the Southwest”, or Nevada allowing a form of licentiousness that Utah forbids, etc.)

Madison and the other writers were hoping to ratify the U. S. Constitution by convincing people that it would guarantee our rights and the check-and-balance form of Federalism.

But something has gone very wrong now. The Supreme Court, which is supposed to rule based on the Constitution, has been used by Leftist and Liberal activist Justices, to “rewrite” the Constitution, to find things in it that are not explicitly stated, to go against it in many ways (such as McCain-Feingold limits on political speech), and to interpret it by considering modern and postmodern views and the way that international governments and peoples interpret their own laws, which are apt to be Collectivist, and not for the Individual.

So, what is going on with those who insist that the individual boy forces the school system to make accommodations and instruct children in subjects that are not the provenance of the school system? If you consider that an individual person who wants a Christmas tree in the local townhall can’t get what he wants, you can see that it isn’t a matter of an individual against the system. In so many cases, such as in Colorado, it is actually that an “individual” who represents a Politically Correct, Politically Acceptable viewpoint, can thus force the non-Politically Correct, non-Politically Acceptable individual parents and other individual students to obey the Liberal, Leftist Collective mandate. It is each parent and each other student who is the individual here. It is the “transgender” student who becomes the PC Group, as a modular representative of that Group.

James Madison knew well that sort of danger. In Federalist #10, he wrote:

Theoretic politicians, who have patronized [the utopian, collective] species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

Mr. Prager, what is really happening in that Colorado school, or with Christmas, or with the Boy Scouts, etc., is like what Federalist #10 says about factions: you either cope with it (as a strict constructionist) or you forcibly change everything about the rest of the people. In the Colorado, etc., way the “individual” that has a proper group difference (PC) brings the faction into the Norm, but with those individuals outside that group, the improper individual (non-PC), each individual is forced to change to the PC strictures.

What is happening in Colorado is that the Collective that the little boy represents is assimilating all the other individuals into its mandates. It is Collective, not individual, justice.

This is why we need to be so careful about nominating and confirming Conservative, strict-constructionist justices.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Rosemary's Thoughts, third world county, The World According to Carl, Shadowscope, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, Cao's Blog, Big Dog's Weblog, Wolf Pangloss, Pursuing Holiness, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.