British Columbia Supreme Court Muzzles Father on Gender of Daughter

The states that are the foremost bearers of Western civilization are increasing their use of force in moral matters that traditionally, rationally and morally are and should be beyond any state’s powers. By doing this, Western states are becoming more totalitarian. The results are horrifying, horrendous and shocking. The leaders of Western civilization are destroying Western civilization.

These new and enhanced intrusions are actually part of a deeper longstanding trend of greater state initiation of force. That major trend includes both major parties in America. It’s manifested in domestic socialist legislation and in foreign aggression, such as in the attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. The newer cultural, personal, family, religious and moral intrusions are becoming more and more noticeable and outrageous. They are profoundly stupid and destructive, but they are ongoing nonetheless. The tide against them has not turned yet.

British Columbia in Canada has a Family Law Act that empowers the court to intrude in a family in order to “protect the safety and security of the at-risk family member…” The law allows the court to assess risks very broadly in order to effect such protection.

This might be reasonable if a father were threatening his daughter with a knife or pistol, but what if the father insists on calling his daughter “she” rather than the pronoun “he” that the girl prefers? What if the father tries to persuade “Maxine” to abandon the hormone treatments she thinks will make her “Max”? What if the father gives interviews in which he refers to her as Maxine and argues against the ill-effects of ingesting gender-related hormones? What if the court decides that all of these actions place Maxine at “a significant risk of harm”?

These what-ifs (not the knife or pistol) have happened in neighboring British Columbia. Its Supreme Court has decided that using pronouns, using persuasion, providing information and speaking to media make a father guilty under this law. The court has muzzled him. (See here and here).

The trend in Western law is to turn personal matters, personal moral matters, non-violent matters, emotional matters (like purported hate), non-physical matters and communications matters into supposed crimes with perpetrators and victims. This is similar to jihadists thinking that a Christian church doing them no harm is an enemy, or a cartoonist making fun of their God is an enemy, and that they have a right to kill in order to stop such “insults” and “invasions”. This is similar to students rioting against particular speakers on campus because they consider their words “violent” or “insulting”. This is similar to laws that intrude upon labor relations and laws that demand hiring and promotion be along racial or sexual lines. This is similar to laws against hate speech. This is similar to laws and practices that demand diversity, meaning preferences of one sort or another and disregard of standards and qualifications that matter for job performance.

The wisdom of Ayn Rand in Galt’s speech and later Murray Rothbard stands higher and higher, for they clearly distinguished between the initiation of physical force and what one may rightly say or do.

“Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: ‘Your money or your life,’ or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: ‘Your children’s education or your life,’ the meaning of that ultimatum is: ‘Your mind or your life’—and neither is possible to man without the other.”

Western law is becoming more and more the highwayman, the initiator of physical violence. “Your children’s gender or your life” is indeed “Your mind or your life”. The state cannot intrude beyond controlling the initiation of physical force and into the moral territory of religion, speech, family, and persons without destroying its own basis and civilization; and yet this is exactly what it is doing.

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9:11 am on April 30, 2019