The Left’s Movement from Science to Faith

Liberalism/progressivism is a religion, plain and simple (see here, here, and here for more on the topic). The debate isn’t between the “enlightened non-religious” and those “backwards religious people.” If conservatives knew how to fight the information war, getting this basic point across to more Americans would do wonders.

Here is an excerpt from a recent article by Greg Weiner over at The Federalist:

To those with a fixed and skeptical view of human nature, it is obvious that allowing men unfettered access to women’s bathrooms and locker rooms based on gender identities that are self-selected and fluid by the hour is an invitation to abuse. To those who believe human nature is progressive and perfectible, such concerns are matters of “ignorance.”

This charge of ignorance is itself a sleight-of-hand by which the concern is reversed and turned back on transgender people—as here—to make those who harbor it look like fearful bigots. Yet the concern is not that transgendered people are going to commit abuse, it is that abusers are going to pose as transgendered people and commit abuse and there will be no grounds on which to inhibit them. Only a supreme optimist about human nature would be unable to foresee this possibility.

This brings us to the heart of the matter, and the heart of the capital-P Progressive mentality: an unrelenting faith in humanity’s progress toward a postlapsarian state in which the sexual abuse that many of the same activists tell us is ubiquitous in other contexts is unthinkable is in this one. On the campuses, predators lie in wait, but undress without worry in the locker rooms. Who would go there with ill intent?

Call this the New Progressivism. It shares with the old a belief in society’s evolution but breaks with what was at least its purported rootedness in science. This faith in evolution beyond evil and this rejection of a fixed and fallen conception of human nature constitute the essence of the New Progressivism and are the fundamental distinction the bathroom debate reveals.

Read more: The Federalist

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