Hilary Clinton’s email scandal exemplifies the left’s war on objective truth
Gender is a continuum.
It’s one of the first maxims introduced to English students at the university level. A spectrum of “performance” roles (in the words of queer-theory icon Judith Butler) that are neither fully male nor fully female, gender identity was once just one of many temporary stopping points for human beings living within the shadowed world of postmodern philosophy.
Now, it’s become an essential part of our secular culture’s understanding of the self.
To those who promote this level of psychological dysmorphia, the answer to the question “What gender are you?” is not male or female.
It is, “what difference does it make?”
Hilary Clinton’s now infamous response to questions about the cause of the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans in 2012 didn’t just begin the sequence of events that have (most recently) culminated in the FBI deciding not to charge Mrs. Clinton with any formal crime, but the words highlight the dangers of the left’s refusal to acknowledge any kind of objective truth.
To recap, FBI Director James Comey told a congressional committee last week that he decided not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton because there was no “clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information” on Clinton’s part. While I don’t doubt this (Clinton may be a pathological liar, but she’s hardly an ISIS sleeper agent) the point is that “clearly intentional” doesn’t apply to the Federal Espionage Act — 18 U.S. Code § 793. The law in question, the law that Clinton broke, only requires proof of “gross negligence” to bring about a conviction.
According to Comey, Mrs. Clinton never displayed “gross negligence” in her handling of classified emails, many of which contained the names of CIA agents. But in sending these emails through unsecure servers in the presence of what Comey called “hostile actors,” Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
The kind of carelessness that can get people killed.
The kind of carelessness that is only differentiated from “gross negligence” through semantics and a selfish inability to face an objective reality.
Comey’s testimony and Mrs. Clinton’s numerous and well-documented lies about her handling of classified emails reveals that their view of the law as a malleable subject of interpretation—and what’s more, as a malleable subject of highly personal interpretation—mirrors the populistic appeal of the transgender movement which has gained so much traction over the past six months.
Just as one can be closer to the male end of the gender continuum, so one can approach—but not fully arrive at—the guilty end of a law continuum that no longer juxtaposes “guilty” with “not guilty.” And since the spectrum contains an innumerable amount of space between its ends—so much so the number of genders one might identify with remains virtually infinite and ever-expanding—the difference between “extremely careless” and “gross negligence” hardly matters. It can be a great distance in one circumstance or a small difference in another.
And when your last name is Clinton, and when you hold the future hopes of this inherently secular and relativistic conception of looking at the world within your hands, the distance between these phrases is great enough to put you closer to the “not guilty” end of the continuum.
There is only one problem: There is still the rule of law, which depends upon certainty of language and some element of objective truth to function. But when examined in the concept of a continuum, and applied with unequal and selective reasoning to different individuals, it exposes a trend toward totalitarianism that Saint Pope John Paull II warned about:
Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law, and on the basis of a correct conception of the human person. It requires that the necessary conditions be present for the advancement both of the individual through education and formation in true ideals, and of the “subjectivity” of society through the creation of structures of participation and shared responsibility. Nowadays there is a tendency to claim that agnosticism and skeptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which correspond to democratic forms of political life…
…It must be observed in this regard that if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.
This is what we are witnessing each and every day in America, where the question of “what gender are you?” has as many answers as “how guilty are you?”
Contrary to Mrs. Clinton’s infamous quote, the answer does make a difference, especially when the application of a continuum mindset is used to force burdens and beliefs on others, not to mention undercut human dignity and equal justice under the law.
And judging from the way some people are celebrating, or at the very least, are accepting the killing of five Dallas police officers as unavoidable and perhaps even warranted, the danger with continuums extends beyond the transgender question or the Clinton email scandal.
We in America have a carelessness problem, yes. Likewise, we have a problem with weighing individuals unequally before the law. And, finally, we have a flawed conception with how we choose to identify people and how we identify ourselves. Yet above all, we have a problem with truth, and the more we try to seize it for ourselves, claiming it malleable, personable, and ever-changing, the more we move closer to the tyranny we claim to oppose.