Back around the year 2005 I gave a series of classes to a group of young women on the then newish phenomenon of gender ideology, in which I tried to explain to my rather bemused students how gender ideology held gender to be a “social construct” with little, or even nothing, to do with the physiological facts of the matter. Recently one of the women who sat through the series confessed to me that during those classes she found herself wondering why on earth we were studying such niche nonsense, given that it could never gain traction. But, she had to admit, gain traction it certainly had.
Her error is all too understandable. It is only natural to presume that societies composed of sensible people don’t fall for ideas bordering on the insane. People – we believe – just don’t buy this kind of stuff.
But unfortunately history, and in particular the history of the twentieth century, has demonstrated time and again the incredible power of propaganda and fear. Sustained propaganda on the one hand, can make a significant number of people believe almost anything, at least for a while – in particular if this propaganda takes the form of the indoctrination of children. For example, a survey in Germany in the 1990s found that committed anti-Semites were two to three times more prevalent among those Germans exposed to Nazi anti-Semitic indoctrination in school a half-century previously, in the Nazi era between 1933 and 1945 (see “Nazi indoctrination and anti-Semitic beliefs in Germany” by Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth).
Fear, on the other hand, generally sorts out those in society who prove resistant to propaganda. The terrible ideologies of the twentieth century only needed a militantly committed core group of believers working within a society which acquiesced over time to their demands. When we look at the stories of the rise of the Marxist and Nazi regimes of the last century we see how dissenters from the ideology to be imposed were gradually silenced though strong social and legal pressures. As a Nazi Prefect of Munich remarked a year or so before the outbreak of World War II, “The priests are all the same. Threaten them enough with arrest, rattle the keys of the concentration camp; they subside without further ado and shut up”.
For this reason I think we should listen carefully to the voices of those public figures who have been warning us about the kind of hate speech legislation envisaged in the “Incitement to Violence or Hatred Bill 2022” which has passed through Ireland’s parliament, Dáil Éireann and is now due for consideration by the Senate.
There are two very significant things to worry about in connection with this legislation. Firstly the concept of hate speech itself. The proposed Bill reads that hate speech occurs when “the person – (i) communicates material to the public or a section of the public, or (ii) behaves in a public place in a manner, that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of their protected characteristics [italics mine] or any of those characteristics, and (b) the person does so with intent to incite violence or hatred [italics mine] against such a person or group of persons on account of those characteristics or any of those characteristics or being reckless as to whether such violence or hatred is thereby incited.”
Furthermore, the Bill proposes the criminalisation of the mere possession of “material that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons … with a view to the material being communicated to the public or a section of the public, whether by himself or herself or another person.” Will it soon be a crime to possess a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (say with a view to preparing to talk to a group of people) with its clear teaching that “Everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity” (CCC 2333) or that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” (CCC 2357)?
Violence is an unambiguous phenomenon and as such is rightly criminalised, but hatred? Certainly, as a priest who regularly travels around Dublin city in clerical clothes, I find myself to be the object of plenty of hateful looks, gestures, and occasionally words. Am I going to press charges? No, these are not crimes by any stretch of the imagination. Certainly they are unpleasant, but they are part of life in a free society. And anyway, Catholic priests are not going to be afforded victim status by the masters of public opinion any time soon. As someone said, you know who rules the roost in society by who is permitted to get angry. Catholic priests (and Catholics in general) are not permitted to get angry. Whose actions, and what actions, which will be judged to qualify as hate speech will be decided by the master – in the sense that Lewis Carroll uses that word in Alice in Wonderland:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
Who then will be afforded this untouchable status? Those whose lifestyles are in keeping with the masterplan which is the dismantling of the traditional family. And that is why the proposed adoption of transgender ideology through the proposed legislation is so significant.
The second worrying element of the Bill is the interpretation put on the “protected characteristic” of “gender” which is interpreted by the Bill as “the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female” [italics mine].
The problem here is that the State does not recognise any genders other than male and female, even if since 2015 it has recognised that one can switch from one to the other. Now, stealthily, the State would recognise any of the myriad genders out there, or indeed genders that have yet to be conjured up by human ingenuity. Senator Ronan Mullen notes that in doing this, it “seems like the Government is smuggling a new definition of gender in the hope that it won’t get the scrutiny it needs…. The danger is that concerned citizens, including parents and teachers of school-going children, may feel intimidated about expressing concern about radical new definitions of gender being pushed by the State and activist groups. The Government never consulted with the public about this.”
Senator Mullen said the Government’s new definition of “gender” is one “at odds with all previous definitions and with no basis in reality”. He adds that this conflation of gender with gender identity “is not an accidental mistake in draughtsmanship.”
Obviously this proposed legislation would likely have a dramatic (and no doubt intended) chilling effect on all opposition to gender ideology in this jurisdiction. For example, could our planned review of Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender (which I hope will appear in the August issue of Position Papers) be construed as an incitement to “violence or hatred” against the “protected” group of those who consider themselves to have a “gender other than those of male and female”. Could the fact that Favale dubs (and we repeat her words approvingly) gender ideology as “meat lego gnosticism” be construed as inciting hatred. Clearly Favale can’t be said to like gender ideology – does she hate it? Will that be a crime? Or when Favale states that a man’s supposed “feeling like a woman” is similar to a (non-Italian) person “feeling like a cat”, or “feeling like an Italian”. Is that incitement to hatred? Or when Favale states (and we repeat) that the use of “preferred pronouns” is to actively participate in a lie. Does one venture beyond legality with that bald statement?
During the last week of May there was the highly publicised case of the Dr Kathleen Stock’s invitation to speak at the Oxford Union. For quite a while now Dr Stock, an eminent British philosopher and writer, has been subject to a lot of bullying and harassment on account of her very cogent arguments against transgenderism. The harassment continued in Oxford last month with LGBTQ+ activists trying to disrupt her address to the Oxford Union. But England is quite different from Ireland. There, many fellow academics have publicly defended Stock’s views, or at least her right to air those views. Even Prime Minister Rishi Sunak very publicly came to her defence saying: “A free society requires free debate. We should all be encouraged to engage respectfully with the ideas of others.”
Unfortunately I don’t think Dr Stock would get the same kind of support here in Ireland, at least not from many academics, and even fewer politicians.