I read in the Washington Post today that Democrats in California have enacted a law that obliges large retail sellers of children’s toys to have a separate section for gender-neutral toys, presumably to ensure that young children with gender-identity issues (if any exist) do not feel slighted when they find themselves in large toy stores.
The law is illiberal because it needlessly infringes upon the commercial liberty of sellers. It imposes even more needless burdens on retailers trying to make a living in California. And it is obviously intended as virtue-signaling to adults, not as a protection for children, who I presume and hope are largely unaware of gender-identity issues and go to toy stores with their parents in the hope of finding fun toys.
The law is also the last straw for me. I just made it official, changing my registered affiliation in California today from Democratic to independent. I will continue to vote against Republicans, but I have become too estranged from the Democrats to remain affiliated with the party.
For me, the deal-killers are progressive Democrats’ apparent hostility to commerce and “soak-the-rich” contempt for those who succeed in business or any profession (except possibly for celebrity actors); their divisive obsession with identity issues; and their double-standards for varying demographic groups (e.g., Trumpster whites are indefensibly ignorant for refusing to take vaccinations, but Blacks' low vaccination rates are the consequence of systemic medical racism). How about imposing vaccine mandates and offering outreach and information about vaccines to the hesitant and anti-vaxxers without casting judgment?
To my dismay, current Democratic progressives in the House have upheld for months the best infrastructure bill and best scientific research bill that the Senate has passed in decades. The Democrats should pass those long overdue measures, which we really have needed since the 1980s, and then reach a compromise agreement on climate-change and social-welfare measures. But no, the infrastructure and core research bills are being held hostage to the social-welfare measures, some of which I strongly favor — notably funding to address the climate emergency, funding for childcare, and free community college. But I don’t favor making good bills hostage to controversial ones, and I really dislike progressives’ tone-deaf, impractical politics, which so often seems suffused with provocative virtue-signaling seemingly calculated to incite antipathy among the Trumpsters. It’s as if the Trumpsters and progressives devote most of their efforts to offending one another pointlessly.
In the recent past, Democrats in control of San Francisco’s school board tried to rename most public schools in that city. The targets included not only schools named after Presidents Washington and Lincoln, but also a school named after an abolitionist (Lowell), another named after one of the most eloquent writers of English ever to have lived (Robert Louis Stevenson), and another named after "Roosevelt." For this last school, someone objected to the proposal on the ground that no one knew whether the school had been named after Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt, but the school board’s rejoinder was that it didn't matter because both men were racists. These men thus had their names removed from public schools and their entire lives reduced to a facile summation: they were racists. Never mind that they lived in different eras when moral standards were very different from our own, and never mind any of their accomplishments, aspirations, noble sentiments, character failings, triumphs, failures, or historic legacies. For the progressives in charge of San Francisco's schools, they were merely racists and thus bad people, and therefore their names must not adorn any school.
That kind of facile, reductionist thinking is anathema to me.
Far worse, these same “progressives” in San Francisco gutted the academic standards for Lowell High School (which after a public outcry was not renamed). Until then, Lowell High had been San Francisco's elite, low-cost public school for its highest-achieving students. But the progressives changed its admissions standards after concluding that the traditional standards were racist because too many Asian-Americans were admitted, but too few Blacks or Latinos. People who “reason” in this manner without considering issues of cause and effect are difficult to persuade, but my response is simple: rather than water-down our academic standards and thereby deprive our best students of good opportunities to develop their full potential, let’s provide much better funding of education from early childhood onward in order to help and encourage all students to excel.
As for LGBT issues, I am a tolerant liberal. Consenting adults should enjoy absolute liberty to find and enjoy love, friendship, sex, and diversion however they wish, so long as they do not directly and obviously harm any non-consenting individual by their behavior. Any relationship or conduct protected by this very permissive rule is no one else’s business, and all the best to those out there who seek fulfilling relationships, fun, adventure, and true love in this harsh world. But must there be actual laws mandating how stores display toys for children that accommodate the switched-gender preferences of children's parents? Must LGBT issues be taught to little children in school — which is another progressive policy?
Don't even get me started on progressives' decision to change math standards on the pretense that math is somehow “racist”. Anyone who makes such an assertion should not be teaching anything to anyone. Of course, we can look for better ways to teach and explain math, but decrying it as racist is absurd.
Then there were the progressives who killed the bullet-trains from San Diego to the SF Bay Area on environmental grounds.
So there you have it. For better or worse, social-justice progressives have at length driven me from the Democratic Party. Hector and insult me all you wish. Have at it. The party is all yours. I am done.
Long PS: The highest respect that you can show to another person is to judge and treat him or her the same way as you do everyone else, neither favoring nor discouraging anyone because of his or her demographic identity. That is the standard of Professor Higgins in Pygmalion. I try to honor it in my daily dealings.
We all have so much more in common with one another than anything else, if only we will look, and each person is an individual with endearing and less endearing traits. Please do not reduce us to mere specimens of this or that demographic group.
That said, I certainly have more respect for those who have overcome hardship in life in order to become people whom I like, admire, or appreciate. Those hardships are not limited to the demographic identity of any particular individual. I fully recognize that historic prejudice took a heavy toll on its victims, and that its consequences persist. But using a new kind of racism to remedy the old can never be the answer. It will only engender new conflict and rivalry.