Truth spoken here

When my neighbors Bob and Diane bought a small brood of hens, Bob named all but one. He left a single plump, speckled bird for their granddaughter to name.

“What do you want to call her?” Bob said, standing by the henhouse with 5-year-old Cailin in the willowy shade of a giant pepper tree.

“I want to name her … Chicken Carrot!” Cailin exclaimed.

“Chicken Carrot, huh?” said Bob, a ruddy financial planner-turned-country-gentleman whose hair has gone blond-white. He smiled and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “How about just Carrot?”

“No!” Cailin said, grinning. “Chicken Carrot!”

And so, the hens living across the street are named Frick, Yahoo, and Chicken Carrot.

I live where the Old West used to be, east of San Diego in the foothills of the Cuyamaca Mountains. Chicken Carrot and her girlfriends share their slice of the Old West with a trio of piebald alpacas named Gandalf, Oliver, and Shush. Same-sex alpaca herds are docile and curious. Oliver and Shush like to nibble grain from my hand. But let the lads near the ladies and look out! They become cloven-hoofed Casanovas liable to bloody each other in pursuit of a mate.

In normal times, the sex lives of alpacas wouldn’t be worth mentioning. But these are not normal times, and even the animal kingdom is being pressed into service to advance the new gender orthodoxy—a development that should be a scary canary in a surrealistic coal mine. To wit: Steven the Gay Alpaca is a TikTok sensation. The Washington Post this June: “Queer animals are everywhere. Science is finally catching on.” In May, NPR interviewed Eliot Schrefer, author of Queer Ducks, a book that teaches teenagers about animal sexuality.

“We can no longer argue that humans are alone in their queerness or in their LGBTQ identities,” Schrefer seriously said.

The libertarian in me says, Who cares? If you want to believe animals are queer, do your thing. If you want to declare that a castrated man in a dress is a woman, fine—just don’t drag me into your delusion. The trouble is, the new gender police are decidedly not libertarian.

For one thing, the point of all this is, of course, indoctrination: See, kids? It’s only natural. (Kind of like hating Jews and Kulaks.) For another, the American left takes its cues from Marxist methodology. It builds ­political constructs using words alone, then enforces its fictions using state power—and, these days, the useful idiots of woke capitalism. It is not the creation of trans liberty the left seeks, but instead the destruction of ­intellectual and spiritual liberty, the liberty of others to disagree. Those inclined to question the new orthodoxy based on, oh say, DNA, must now often choose between scientific rigor and keeping their jobs. Between religious expression and public shaming. Between speaking truth and, sometimes, a literal beating in the streets.

But we speak truth here. In these pages. And will continue to do so as long as God gives us resources and breath.

Here’s one: “The way of the wicked is like deep ­darkness; they do not know what makes them stumble” (Proverbs 4:19). Even as we lament these attacks on God’s very creation, we must make room for compassion, as we seek to love blind people who sincerely believe they can see.

In this issue, Mary Jackson unpacks the transgender lexicon: What do activists mean by terms like ­cisgender, gender fluid, and gender queer? In “The twisted self,” Grove City College professor Carl Trueman peers down the cultural rabbit hole: How did we arrive at this moment, when feelings are truth, sexual identity is the zenith of human existence … and NPR conducts straight-faced, tax-funded interviews about queer ducks?

In Schrefer’s book, comic-book animals attend meetings of the Gender Sexuality Alliance, and according to recent research, chickens can be gay. At this point, I’m seriously wondering how Chicken Carrot identifies.