Fine-sounding lies

In my work on empathy, I’ve argued that what distinguishes true compassion from the sin of untethered empathy is that genuine compassion reserves the right not to blaspheme. True compassion won’t lie to suit the feelings of the aggrieved. Instead, it will keep the long-term good of individuals and society in mind and thereby avoid being swept away by destructive human passions. To make one relevant application, true compassion won’t call a man a woman simply to please the sexually perverse or their empathetic advocates.

David French used to know this. Writing for National Review Online in 2018, French argued that conservatives must resist the cultural pressure to use someone’s preferred pronouns. “The use of a pronoun isn’t a matter of mere manners. It’s a declaration of a fact. I won’t call Chelsea Manning ‘she’ for a very simple reason. He’s a man. If a person legally changes his name, I’ll use his legal name. But I will not use my words to endorse a falsehood. I simply won’t. We’re on a dangerous road if we imply that treating a person with ‘basic human dignity’ requires acquiescing to claims we know to be false.” Echoing his colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty, French asked, “‘[A]re we allowed to tell the truth?’ Increasingly, the answer is no.”

He concludes: “Treating every single human being with dignity and respect means not just defending their constitutional liberties and showing them basic human kindness, it also means telling the truth—even when the truth is hard. Any compromise that requires conservatives to grant the other side’s false and harmful premise is no compromise at all.”

One wishes that 2018 David French could have a word with 2025 David French. The latest iteration has seemingly abandoned his argument from seven years ago, and is instead celebrating the Dispatch’s hiring of Brian “Jessica” Riedl, a center-right economist who transitioned from male to female within the last year and prominently flies the rainbow flag on his X account. In a recent interview with Riedl, the new David French abandons the counsel of the old French and instead repeatedly refers to Riedl as “she.” In response to the controversy, other ostensible conservatives defended French and Riedl, arguing that politeness requires us to use someone’s preferred pronouns. Apparently, conservatism now means standing athwart history, yelling, “But he/she is a good economist!”

French’s migration on this issue was predictable. In 2019, he infamously argued that we must accept Drag Queen Story Hour in the local library as “a blessing of liberty.” In 2022, he noted that he  changed his mind (again) on the definition of marriage in the civil sphere, endorsing the Orwellianly-named “Respect for Marriage Act,” which sought to enshrine Obergefell into federal law (just in case the Supreme Court overturned it).

What’s more, his migration illustrates the power of one’s social circle in shaping one’s moral and ethical positions. The English theologian Richard Hooker once described the way that “perverted and wicked customs—perhaps beginning with a few and spreading to the multitude, and then continuing for a long time—may be so strong that they smother the light of our natural understanding.” When you surround yourself with those who have already surrendered to the moral revolutionaries (as French has done), you begin to talk and act like them. If you suppress your moral gag reflex, eventually you sear your conscience and parrot the worldly lie, rationalizing it in the name of empathy, compassion, and kindness (while claiming that you’re “not backing down one inch from Christian orthodoxy”).

Assimilating to the regnant sexual orthodoxy afflicts many erstwhile “conservatives” in the think-tank world based in New York and Washington, D.C., and not just on the trans issue, but also on LGBTQ issues in general. In both cases, toxic empathy for transgender-identified individuals and sodomites overcomes the substantive harm done to individuals and society by the sexual revolution, whether we’re talking about Riedl’s children who simply have to accept Dad’s new fetish, or the babies who are bought and sold in the lucrative market of gay surrogacy.

In the face of such compromise on the part of such self-described “conservatives,” what are we to do? There are judicial and policy aims that we ought to pursue (Obergefell delenda est). But I’d like to highlight an important linguistic one. My guess is that some readers flinched in the previous paragraph when I used the term “sodomites.” And this is understandable; we have been ably catechized beneath the progressive gaze. The left has not only commandeered the dictionary, redefining words as it sees fit. But it has also become the arbiter of manners and politeness, ostracizing those who refuse to repeat its fine-sounding lies.

But as Chesterton observed regarding the Victorian Bowdlerism of his day, “Nine times out of ten, the coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the word that excuses it.” Language instructs, and thus it’s important to retain coarse words for vile affections and vile acts, especially when there is pressure to sanitize the language in order to mute resistance to their spread and celebration. Coarse words puncture our empathetic rationalizations and teach us to abhor what is evil, rather than accept it as normal. They empower us to assert inconvenient facts, such as “a woman is a woman and a man is a man,” and “children have a right to a mother and a father.”

So in contrast to the compromise and capitulation of those like David French, we instead ought to heed the exhortation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”