Ep. 351 - Thousands of Biologists Deliver Devastating Blow To Pro-Abortion Side
Episode Stats
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Summary
When does life begin? Biologists have a 96% consensus on the question, and they agree on one thing: it's not by evolution. Plus, a new DNA test that could potentially make you 1 in a trillion.
Transcript
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So Elijah, Elijah Cummings, unfortunately died today. And it's really, I have to say, it's,
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it's pathetic and sad to see what the media has done with his death. Cummings had a long and
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storied career. But the media has eulogized him primarily as a Trump critic, or target of Trump
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criticism, as if that something that only came up, you know, for Elijah Cummings, this, this
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only the last couple of years of his life had anything to do with Trump at all. And so, but
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they've decided that's going to define him, as if that's the most significant thing about him. So
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look at some of these headlines from the Washington Post. Representative Elijah Cummings, Democratic
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leader and regular Trump target, dies at 68. CNN says, Representative Elijah Cummings, key figure in
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Trump investigations, dies at 68. The Independent says, Elijah Cummings' death, senior Democrat at
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center of Trump impeachment probe, dies, age 68. This is what their Trump obsession has wrought.
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They have, they have minimized him into Trump target, figure in Trump impeachment. It all revolves
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around Trump for these people. Everything revolves around Trump. Even the, even the, the obituary now
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of Elijah Cummings, who had been in public life for what, 40 years, his last couple of years
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going to head to head, head to head with, with Donald Trump. For the media, that's all that
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matters. It all boils down to that. Pretty, pretty outrageous and sad to see. Okay. So what I want to
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start with today, on this show today, we're going to take a step away from politics, sort of, and talk
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about a few things, a few interesting things that obviously have political implications because
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everything does, but are much deeper and more important, I think. And we're going to start with
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a fascinating article written by somebody who interviewed over 5,000 biologists and asked them,
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when does life begin? And there was a 96% consensus, almost unanimous. 96% of the biologists
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gave an answer. And the 96% agreed. And we're going to look at what their answer is and what they
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agreed on in just a minute. But first, a word from AncestryDNA. You know, I think it's, it's, it's,
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slash Matt. Okay. So a guy named Steve Jacobs has an article on the site Quillette's hardly a bastion
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of right-wing propaganda, we should say. And the headline of, of the article is I asked thousands
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of biologists when life begins, the answer wasn't popular. And in the article, he talks about his,
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his dissertation, um, for his PhD, which, which involved abortion. And as part of that research,
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he, he asked this question. He asked over five, there was 5,300 something biologists when life
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begins. Um, there's more to his paper than that. There's more to the article. You go read the article.
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It's interesting. It's worth a read, but I want to focus just on this element of it for a moment.
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This is pretty staggering. Quoting now from Jacobs. He says, I found that 500, uh, 5,337 biologists,
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96% affirmed that a human's life begins at fertilization with 244% rejecting that view.
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The majority of the sample identified as liberal, 89%, pro-choice, 85%, and non-religious, 63%.
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In the case of Americans who express party preference, the majority identified as Democrats, 92%.
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So 96% of a mostly pro-abortion, non-religious, liberal Democrat biologist sampling say that life
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begins at fertilization. That is about as powerful of an answer on a question like this that you could
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possibly hope to expect. Um, because you have people saying life begins at conception,
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not for any ideological reason. In fact, the ideology cuts against them and their ideology
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pushes them in the other direction. If they were to follow their ideology, they would say,
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oh no, life doesn't begin at conception. The only reason they're saying this, the only reason
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is because of what they know about science. They're biologists and they know that, yeah,
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life begins at conception. Um, it is, the science is clearly undeniable when you, what occurs there at
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conception, once conception occurs, you have a distinct living biological entity. Now I'm not a biologist
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and I appreciate these biologists saying this, um, but I don't think you need to be a biologist
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to understand this or to know that. In fact, you don't really need to understand anything about biology
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at all. You could have no understanding of biology and you should, because it's, this is, this is more of a
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logical conclusion than anything else. We know that just, just logically, we know that at conception
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you've got something else that has now come into existence. Despite how it's presented by the pro
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abortion side, this is not an extension of the woman's body. It's not an organ or a limb or a tumor.
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It's just not that it is something separate, something distinct. It is an entity of some kind.
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We know that. It is a biological entity. I don't think anyone would deny that.
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Okay. Well, now the question is, is it alive? Okay. Well, again, without even getting into the
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biological specifics, it would seem to me that for any entity that exists, there are only three options.
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It's either going to be living, inanimate, or dead, right? Those are the only, there's no,
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there's nothing in between there. Everything that exists, everything that's in this room right now
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that you can see is either living, inanimate, or dead. Nothing in between. There are no in-between
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categories. And so we know that this desk that I'm sitting at, this is inanimate. It's a desk.
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It's only ever going to be this until it decays and rots away. I mean, you could chop it up and
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build it into something else, but it's never going to grow on its own into something else.
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It doesn't breathe. It doesn't consume food. It doesn't, it's not, it's not developing or,
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or maturing into a, you know, it's never going to, it's just, this is all it is.
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The entity in the womb, is it an inanimate object? No, clearly not. Is it dead? Well, no.
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And if it were dead, then you wouldn't need the abortion in the first place. And so that leaves
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only living. So it is a living biological entity. And is it human? Well, we know that because
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it was created by two human beings and two human beings cannot, uh, mate and create anything but
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another human being. They can't create a duck or a, or a, or a, you know, spider monkey. It's just,
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they're going to create another person. So that's how we know it is a living biological human.
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Um, though it's nice to have the biologists confirm this rather obvious fact. Jacobs then goes on to talk
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about the backlash from anti-science, uh, from the anti-science abortion enthusiast crowd. That's my
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term, not his, to be clear. And he shares some of the email he received from these Looney Tunes. Uh,
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again, my term, not his. Uh, so some of the things he, he, he quotes, um, some of the emails to him.
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Is this a study funded by Trump and the Ku Klux Klan? Someone else says, sure. Hope you,
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you aren't a, an effing Christian. Someone else says, uh, this is some stupid right to life thing.
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Yuck. I believe in right to choice. These are, these are brilliant people. There's a bunch,
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a bunch of scholars, a bunch of gentlemen and scholars over there on the pro-abortion side.
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Um, someone else says the actual purpose of this quote survey became very clear. I will do my best
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to disseminate this info to make sure that none of my naive colleagues fall into this trap.
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Somebody else, sorry, this, uh, looks like it's more of a religious survey to be used to
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misinterpret by radicals to do, to advertise about the beginning of life and not a survey about what
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faculty know about biology. Your advisor can contact me. Uh, someone else says, I did respond to and fill
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in the survey, but I'm concerned about the tenor of the questions. It seemed like a thinly disguised
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effort to make biologists take a stand on the issues that could be used to advocate for or against
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abortion. Uh, someone else, the relevant biological issues are obvious and have nothing to do with
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when life begins. This is a nonsense position created by the anti-abortion fanatics. You have
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accepted the premise of a fanatic group of lunatics. So this is, this, this is interesting. So you've
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got, obviously you've got a few emails here. This is just a sampling from it, but you've got a few
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emails from, from semi-literate morons. Um, but then it's clear that some of these messages
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are from biologists who answered the survey and I'm assuming that they answered, no, life does not
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begin. And they're kind of revealing why they answered. They're making it clear that for them,
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it was ideological, that they couldn't overcome their ideological biases. And so they were afraid
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about, well, I don't, I don't, I don't know how this is going to be used politically. So I'm just
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going to pretend that life does not begin at conception. So I think what we see here is 96% of
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biologists said life begins at conception. The other 4%, um, they only said, they only said no
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because they were afraid of the political consequences of saying yes. So really, really
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in effect, it's a hundred percent with only with 96, it's more like this. 96% of biologists were
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willing to admit that life begins at conception. The other 4% weren't willing to admit it for the
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reasons they made clear here in these emails. Um, as much as people throw around the term anti-science,
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what you find on the pro-abortion side is this is literal, literally anti-science. They don't like
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what the science says. So they shout and scream and they stomp their feet and they refuse to
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acknowledge it or admit it. Life begins at conception. There's no way around it. Scientists
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know this. It is a, it's really not even a controversial subject. It just is.
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The only controversy is in the political implications, but that has nothing to do with
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science. The science says what it says, and there is no mystery here. There really isn't.
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You're not going to find biologists as this makes it clear. You'll be hard pressed to find
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biologists who scratch their head and say, gee, I don't know. Um, so then what happens next? Uh,
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does the bro, does the pro-abortion side, do they, do they throw up their hands and say,
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oh, we've been beaten? No, if they were honest, they would, but they're not honest. So they don't.
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So instead, um, either they'll just continue to claim despite all evidence that no life doesn't
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begin at conception because I don't want it to, or more likely they'll, they'll try for what appears
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to be, or what, uh, pretends to be a more nuanced and intelligent, you know, uh, uh, distinction
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where they'll say, okay, yeah, uh, the being in the womb is a human being, no way around that,
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but it's not a person. And they'll draw this artificial distinction between person and human.
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I've dealt with that distinction so many times. I'm not going to go into it in great detail here.
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You can find any of the number of things I've written on the subject to see how I deal with that.
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Um, what I will just briefly say is this two points. First of all,
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if there is a distinction between a person and a human being,
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can you, we put it this way, can you identify if you, if you believe in this distinction,
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can you identify any other areas where you draw that distinction?
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So you say that a quote fetus is a human being, not a person. Okay. Um, well, do you do that anywhere
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else? In other words, is, is this some, is this a distinction you only specifically came up with
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in order to deal with fetuses? And that's because if that's the case, that's going to make it seem
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like an ad hoc kind of thing where you just came up with this, um, distinction in order to get around
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the obvious truth. There is no other area where we would draw this distinction in any other context,
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right? We would say that the term human being and person is interchangeable. It means exactly the same
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thing in every other context, except in the womb where magically mystically you try to,
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um, create this difference where it doesn't actually exist. Now, second point, I say that
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in any other context, we would admit that a human being is a person. The two are interchangeable.
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That's true now today. But if we look back through history, that has not always been the case.
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Think about what we did with slaves in this country for hundreds of years,
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where it would have to be admitted. Yes, these are humans, but they're not exactly people.
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They're only partially people or sort of people, not quite as people-y as the rest of us.
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My point here is that if you look back through history, there have always been groups of people
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trying to claim that other groups of people are not people. And what we find is that in every
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case, that effort has led to horrific results. It has always been in the service of some evil
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institution that people draw this distinction. This effort to delineate between human being and person
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historically has always, always, always, always, always, always been in defense of evil institutions
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or evil acts, slavery, uh, uh, genocide, the dehumanization of women on and on.
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That's a historical fact. So if you're pro-abortion, maybe you look at that trend
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and you see, Oh gee, wow. You know, it seems like there's a, yeah, every single time in history
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when our ancestors tried to say human, not person, it was because they were trying to justify some evil,
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terrible thing. Yet here I am saying human, not person. Maybe I'm justifying an evil, terrible thing
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too. All right. Speaking of anti-science yesterday, uh, October 16th was, I don't know if you were aware of
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this. It was a holy day of observation known as pronouns day following in the sacred traditions
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of our ancestors. Uh, pronouns day provides the LGBT camp with yet another opportunity to lecture the
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world about what we're supposed to do and say and think, because the thing is that the LGBT folks,
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they don't have enough opportunities to do that, right? They, they, they, they only have,
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this is why they needed to come up with pronouns day because, um, they wanted to be able to lecture
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us and, uh, and they didn't get enough of a chance to lecture us on international transgender day of
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visibility, March 31st, lesbian visibility day, April 26th, international day against homophobia,
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transphobia, biphobia, May 17th, Harvey milk day, May 22nd, pansexual and panromantic visibility day,
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May 24th, pride month, June bisexuality day, September 23rd, bisexual awareness week,
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September 23rd to September 30th, national coming out day, October 11th, national LGBT center
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awareness day, October 19th, spirit day, October 20th, intersex awareness day, October 26th,
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asexual awareness week, October 23rd, transgender day of remembrance, November 20th, pansexual slash
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panromantic pride day, December 18th, transgender, transsexual tricyclists, tricyclists on trampolines
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awareness day, December 19th. Um, I only made one of those up. The point is that LGBT folks
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apparently need a lot of days dedicated to themselves. They need a lot of days to raise
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awareness about themselves and give themselves a chance to, to lecture us. And that's why they had
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to do pronouns day. Now at first blush, it may seem odd, right? That we have a day set aside
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for a grammatical construct. Why not a verb day or, or an adjective day or a preposition day?
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Well, I'm sure eventually we're headed in that direction as the English language becomes increasingly
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subjectivized and people are increasingly encouraged to make up their own rules as they go. So maybe
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eventually we'll have days like that. But, um, right now it's, it's pronouns day and
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there is one advantage of it is that it might take a whole day for you to learn all of the wild and
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wacky new pronouns that have been invented out of whole cloth in recent years. It's not just the
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normal ones. He, she, her, him. We're way beyond that. Okay. You're, you're stuck in the past. If
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you think that's the, the, the, the, those are all the pronouns or it's, if it's just the traditional
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ones, no. Um, the ever-growing list of pronouns includes such gobbledygook as Z, her, H-I-R,
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Zemself with an X, Ver, uh, Xers, K-X-Y-R-S. How do you even pronounce it? Xers,
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Per-Self, Fair-Self with an F, but the F is in parentheses and none of the rest of the world
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word is, uh, Xem, X-E-M, X-Zegs, X-E-X, and Zelf-Self. I made two of those up, but you can't tell
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which ones. And that's the point. You have no idea because they're all made up. They're all nonsense.
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Um, none of them have any meaning whatsoever. They are just random letters and sounds
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blended into a linguistic frappe. Um, we now live in a culture where we now live in a culture where
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a sentence like this is supposed to mean something. This is a, this is a quote, a real sentence now,
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supposedly. V went to the store with Per and met Zem and Z got into Zer car and drove home.
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What does that mean? There's a store, there's a car, there's going home, but who's going where,
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who's doing what, who's involved. You have no idea. I have no idea. And I'm the one who just came up
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with a sentence because it's gibberish. It doesn't mean anything. And this is the problem with the whole
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idea of people claiming their own pronouns. A pronoun, again, is a grammatical construct.
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It must be deployed according to the laws of grammar, not the individual whims of the person
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to whom it refers. That's not how grammar works. So if I am, let's say that I got up and I was
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standing on this desk, could be dangerous. I could hurt my, I could follow my, my head.
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Um, which maybe if I did fall on my head, then all this stuff would start making sense to me. I don't
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know. If I got up and I was standing on this desk and you wanted to describe what I'm doing,
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you would say he is standing on the desk. Now you really have to say that because that accurately,
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objectively describes what's going on. To say she is standing on the desk would be wrong because that
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would indicate that a biological female is standing on the desk desk, which is incorrect. If you were
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to say they are standing on the desk, that's wrong too, because that indicates that more than one
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person is on the desk when that is not the case. If you were to say, uh, uh, Z is standing on the
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table, that would be wrong too, because that would make it seem like there's some sort of space alien
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standing on the, on, on the desk wouldn't know that's not the case at all. So the whole point here
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is to convey objective reality. When you say something like he is standing on the desk,
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this is not subjective. You're not, you're not describing my feelings or my emotions.
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So if I'm standing on the desk while feeling like a woman, whatever that means,
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then you could say something like he is standing on a man who feels like a woman is standing on a
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desk or something like that would work. But my own personal feelings doesn't affect how you
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grammatically convey what's happening. Um, now in a similar way, if I was standing on the desk
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and I were to tell you that my preferred preposition is off, if I were to tell you,
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I don't like the preposition on, I prefer off. That's my, that's my personal preposition.
00:23:53.180
Okay, fine. You know, I like the word on, not off, whatever that means. Um,
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but it still would be nonsensical for you to go and tell someone he's standing off the table
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because I'm not, I'm on it, not off of it. Um, and that's what this comes down to.
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So prepositions, nouns, verbs, and pronouns are meant to convey objective facts and reality.
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If they're not going to perform that function, then they no longer perform any function at all.
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And meaningful, useful words have been reduced to impotent nonsense.
00:24:35.140
Uh, but shouldn't we just be polite and use somebody's preferred pronoun, uh, just to,
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you know, make them feel better? Shouldn't we do that? The answer is no. Okay. No, we don't.
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I'll tell you why. First, because you don't generally call somebody a pronoun when you're
00:24:59.340
speaking to them. So this whole thing about how it's about, it's about being polite and respected.
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It's, it's irrelevant most of the time anyway, because you're not, if, if, if I'm in the room
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and you're talking to me, you're not going to say he or him, you're going to, you're going to talk
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directly to me. You're going to use my name and my name can be whatever I want it to be.
00:25:20.260
So if you, yes, your name is totally subjective. It's arbitrary. Your name can be anything.
00:25:25.140
Okay. So whatever you say your name is, I'll call you that. It's your name. It could be anything.
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So if you're a man and you say you want your name to be Sally, then I'll call you Sally. If you're,
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if you're a woman, you want your name to be Fred. You say your name is Fred. I'll call you Fred.
00:25:40.840
Whatever you say your name is, you say your name is Higgly Boo. I'll call you Higgly Boo. I mean,
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it doesn't matter. It's your name. It can be anything, but pronouns are more objective than that.
00:25:51.300
And they're also more distant. So you're usually called by a pronoun when you're not physically
00:25:57.260
present for the discussion. So when someone insists on a preferred pronoun, what he's trying to do is
00:26:03.720
he's trying to prevent you from using proper grammar in relation to him when he's not even in the room
00:26:09.900
with you. So he's essentially saying, whenever you refer to me, even if I'm 10,000 miles away,
00:26:16.640
you must abandon the rules of grammar and parrot whatever nonsensical gibberish I assign to you.
00:26:23.640
That's not only arrogant. It's not only absurd. It's arrogant, arrogant and absurd, absurd and
00:26:29.520
arrogant. That's what it is. How are you, why would you even attempt to control the language
00:26:35.180
used when you're not even there? How could it possibly affect you?
00:26:40.080
And the second point, of course, is that using an incorrect pronoun is a lie. It's dishonest.
00:26:47.920
You know, if I say she in reference to a man, I am conveying an untruth and I am doing so
00:26:53.920
deliberately. And so that is a lie. It might be a lie with good intentions. It might be,
00:26:58.580
it might be a lie meant to avoid conflict or whatever, but it's still a lie.
00:27:05.140
And I think it's wrong to lie. But then, okay, but doesn't grammar evolve over time? Maybe this
00:27:11.160
is just the evolution of grammar. Well, yeah, grammar and language does evolve over time,
00:27:16.620
but it evolves according to a coherent set of rules and standards. In fact, that is what evolves,
00:27:23.800
is the rules and standards can evolve. But the point is that they remain rules and standards,
00:27:30.860
which means that they have to remain objective. Not objective in the sense of being immutable and
00:27:38.900
unchangeable, but objective in that they're the same for everybody.
00:27:46.740
And that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about people making up their own
00:27:50.500
rules individually according to their own feelings and desires. That's not evolution. That's devolution.
00:27:58.380
That's collapse. That is the collapse of language. Language is being destroyed here. It's not changing.
00:28:05.080
It's not being modified or evolved. It is being destroyed. Because if we don't have that agreed
00:28:11.760
set of standards and rules that are the same for everybody when it comes to language, then we can't
00:28:17.800
communicate anymore. Besides, and here's really the main thing. We aren't talking merely about changes
00:28:26.660
in language. That's not what we're talking about. Now, if we all decided to start using the word
00:28:34.280
Zem, X-E-M, however it's pronounced. Let's just say Zem. I don't know how it's pronounced.
00:28:39.020
It can be pronounced any way you want, I guess. That's the point.
00:28:42.900
So, this Zem is a made-up pronoun. Well, if we all decided that, you know what, we're going to start
00:28:51.300
using the word Zem instead of him. Okay, we can do that. I think it's a little weird. It's kind of
00:28:57.460
Dr. Seuss-y, in my opinion. But the word him doesn't always have to be him. If you go somewhere
00:29:04.280
else in the world, they don't have the word him. They have a different word for it.
00:29:09.920
Different languages have their own word for him. And sometimes those words change. Okay, fine.
00:29:15.300
But the LGBT lobby, they aren't asking us to exchange one word for another. Rather,
00:29:21.840
the lobby is demanding, actually, that we pretend to believe in an entire new category of human
00:29:28.460
existence. Zem is not a new word for him. Zem is supposed to be a completely separate sort of
00:29:34.960
person. Neither a her nor a him. But nobody can even begin to explain what a Zem is exactly and how
00:29:41.880
it differs from a her or a him. They only say, well, some people identify as Zem. Okay,
00:29:47.500
identify as what? What is that? What does it mean to be a Zem? How did you first discover that you
00:29:52.900
were a Zem? What's the process that you went through to discover that you are a Zem? Describe
00:30:01.700
the experience of discovering that you're a Zem. What does a Zem do differently? What are the biological
00:30:07.320
markers of a Zem? And how does a Zem differ from a Zer or a Zer or a Sir or a Vim or a Dabba Dabba
00:30:13.500
Doodle Fim or whatever? How does any distinguish between all these different things? But nobody can.
00:30:22.060
No one can provide any coherent answer for any of this. Just as I have pointed out many, many,
00:30:26.620
many times, and I'll continue to point out, that nobody can even explain or describe what it actually
00:30:33.300
means for a man to identify as a woman. Man says, I identify as a woman. What do you mean?
00:30:39.280
What exactly do you mean by that? Can't explain it. What is a woman? Can't explain it. I've been
00:30:47.720
asking that question for eight months. No one has offered an answer. Not one person. I mean,
00:30:51.940
not one leftist, I should say. So this is all nonsense. It doesn't mean anything. And yet we are
00:30:58.920
supposed to timidly cooperate as they mutilate our language and make nonsense out of everything.
00:31:06.060
And I'm just not going to do that. I'm not going to cooperate with that. Because why should I?
00:31:17.840
Okay. One other thing before we get to emails. Heartwarming video to play for you today.
00:31:28.200
Things have been a little too serious. So let's lighten the mood. Those extinction rebellion
00:31:32.980
idiots, the climate activists who have been stopping traffic all over the Western world,
00:31:40.440
they've especially been wreaking havoc over in the UK. And here's a video from, based on the accents,
00:31:47.080
it looks like this is in London. It's extinction rebellion, climate activists, climate alarmists
00:31:55.140
who are standing on the top of a train, preventing a whole group of people from getting to their job
00:32:01.540
so they can feed their family. And here's how that went.
00:33:15.420
Actually, there's not a however, period, end of the sentence, next sentence.
00:33:21.540
When you prevent an entire crowd of people from getting to their jobs to feed their families,
00:33:27.360
you are going to make them angry, and justifiably so.
00:33:48.260
And it just boggles my mind that these people, these climate alarmists, are allowed to continue doing this.
00:33:55.060
How are the police not showing up immediately with buses and just arresting all of these idiots?
00:34:07.140
You have no, that's not First Amendment rights there.
00:34:13.040
And if the police aren't going to step in immediately and just arrest everybody doing it, which is what they should be doing,
00:34:20.840
then the crowd might get very angry and might take matters into their own hands.
00:34:26.400
I mean, no sane person is going to feel remotely sorry for you.
00:34:31.960
And by the way, they're taking public transportation, you moron.
00:34:37.480
These are a whole group of people trying to get on the same mode of transportation.
00:34:45.220
You want people, isn't that the most environmentally friendly way of traveling and commuting?
00:34:49.960
That's what they're trying to do and you're stopping them.
00:35:03.000
But it got a little, these people just, the arrogance of it.
00:35:14.700
And it makes it even worse that all of these climate alarmists who are doing these protests, if we can even call it protests,
00:35:25.320
It's easy for them because they're living off their, they're either living off the government or they're living off of their parents or both.
00:35:32.960
So it's very easy for them to step in and prevent other people from getting to their jobs.
00:35:38.940
And they can say, oh, there's more important things than getting to your job.
00:35:42.300
Well, easy for you to say, you unemployed, non-contributing zero.
00:35:46.560
It's easy for you to say, you're going home to sit on your beanbag chair while your mom makes you Hot Pockets.
00:35:54.800
The rest of us have families that we have to take care of.
00:36:06.020
MattWalshow at gmail.com says, this is from Kelly, says,
00:36:10.300
I know how much the left speaks of men and women being the same,
00:36:13.460
and there should never be an excuse for men to try to differentiate between the two.
00:36:17.060
So I ask, should women be able to use PMSing as an excuse for being in a bad mood?
00:36:22.400
I feel like this is a great argument that clearly women are different than men.
00:36:25.440
I tried to tell my wife this, and she almost strangled me at the dinner table.
00:36:34.880
Thanks for being a great voice of my generation.
00:36:38.560
Kelly, you call me a great voice of our generation, and then you try to get me killed.
00:36:48.860
And besides, as we have already been through today, this is the year 2019.
00:37:09.360
Truly appreciate the humor, insight, and intellectual honesty you bring to the table.
00:37:13.740
During your email segment of yesterday's show, I was startled when I heard you mention your daughter's name,
00:37:19.240
My wife and I have seven kids, and our only daughter, oh, you have six boys, huh?
00:37:27.720
We got two boys, and honestly, when I hear people that have four, five, six boys, how is your house still standing?
00:37:37.360
Or at this point, have you just given up, and you're living out, you're just living in the woods somewhere under the open sky?
00:37:43.300
Because I don't, honestly, I don't, how does your house survive?
00:37:47.160
How does anything survive with that many boys running around?
00:37:51.900
Anyway, our daughter shares the same name, Emma Grace, although it sounds like you decided to separate the two and go with Emma Grace.
00:38:02.140
We had similar discussions and concerns as you and opted for the spelling here.
00:38:05.560
We knew we wanted to be one word and chose to capitalize the G, even though it's in the middle of the name.
00:38:10.040
Otherwise, when looked at, you might try to pronounce it as Immagrasi or something like that.
00:38:16.100
And yes, when we would say her name to someone, we would always follow up by saying capital G, no space.
00:38:23.700
We always thought it was a beautiful sounding name and still do to this day.
00:38:26.240
Although in an odd footnote, our daughter, 22 now, has recently dropped the grace part and just goes by Emma.
00:38:34.200
Well, your odd footnote at the end, that's the whole point.
00:38:37.780
You go through all of this work for 20 years to explain her name to people.
00:38:42.600
You put in all that blood, sweat, and tears, clarifying her name constantly.
00:38:47.760
And then the moment she gets a chance, she just cuts her name in half and throws out all the work you did.
00:38:55.820
And that was one of my concerns with my wife that I raised in an argument that I ended up being right about.
00:39:09.460
I figured people are just going to call her Emma anyway.
00:39:12.180
And that's probably what she's going to do for the sake of being just because it's easier.
00:39:36.680
This one's from Aaron says, earlier this week, you attempted to place Columbus in historical context in which you live by claiming that by our modern standards, everyone born before 1970 would be morally unacceptable to us.
00:39:47.540
Specifically, the idea is that land conquest through violence and racism are immoral are very modern notions.
00:39:52.920
Even if that's true, how can you claim to believe in the objective truth of Christianity while still maintaining the historical figures aren't responsible for the evils they've committed if those evils were universally accepted back then?
00:40:03.120
Christ revealed the fullness of truth in 33 AD.
00:40:06.040
The Bible canon was complete in the 5th century.
00:40:09.080
So Columbus and all of the European conquerors would have had full access to the gospels before they set sail.
00:40:16.560
They had no excuse for taking land by force or for treating those with different skin as subhuman.
00:40:21.000
Matt, without even realizing it, by attempting to contextualize their actions, you are becoming an apologist for moral relativism.
00:40:35.400
The Bible does not explicitly condemn invasion and conquest or racism.
00:40:44.460
In fact, in the Old Testament, well, you can make an argument for racism.
00:40:52.020
There is no Jew or Greek, man or woman in Christ, you know, that sort of thing.
00:41:04.500
In fact, it would seem to explicitly condone invasion and conquest, even command it at various different points.
00:41:13.620
Now, I'm not saying that invasion and conquest is actually consistent with biblical teaching.
00:41:20.440
I'm not saying that slavery and racism is consistent with biblical teaching.
00:41:24.620
I'm just saying that on first reading, it may not have been immediately obvious to people a long time ago that the Bible forbids it.
00:41:34.040
It doesn't come out at any point and say, in very clear terms, stop doing this stuff.
00:41:40.540
Now, we get to those prohibitions in a more roundabout way.
00:41:45.600
For example, that verse from Paul that I just paraphrased.
00:41:51.100
We today now see that as something that speaks very much to the issues of slavery and racism.
00:42:01.320
But my point is just that for a long time, that's not how people read it.
00:42:08.340
So the fact that the Bible canon was complete has, I think, little bearing on this discussion.
00:42:15.300
Considering it just because it doesn't speak very directly to these issues.
00:42:20.240
It took people a while to see it for what I believe it is.
00:42:27.620
Second, moral relativism would be if I said that it actually wasn't wrong for our ancestors to go and enslave and kill and do all that kind of stuff.
00:42:43.140
It obviously was objectively wrong for them to do those things.
00:42:53.220
The question, though, is not one of the objective moral rightness or wrongness of the act.
00:43:03.520
And this distinction between the objective moral rightness or wrongness of an act
00:43:08.860
and the moral culpability of the person who performs the act is very, very important for us to understand.
00:43:15.620
Not just for the context of this discussion, but in any discussion.
00:43:21.100
And I find that a lot of people, for some reason, this is a distinction that is lost on a lot of people.
00:43:28.000
So, for example, if a crazy person murders somebody,
00:43:36.500
Murder wasn't suddenly okay because a crazy person did it.
00:43:41.040
The act was just as wrong for him as it would be for me.
00:43:44.540
But he was less personally culpable than I would be because of his mental state.
00:43:52.780
Not that slave owners 500 years ago were crazy,
00:43:55.380
but that they had less moral culpability all that time ago
00:43:59.800
than I would have today if I went and bought a slave.
00:44:09.520
but our ancestors for thousands of years lived in a world where slavery was an accepted institution
00:44:21.960
For the 15th time, that doesn't mean that it was actually right.
00:44:27.600
And it bears on their personal culpability for doing it.
00:44:33.560
It just really didn't occur to a lot of people for a long time
00:44:38.420
that there was anything in principle wrong with slavery.
00:44:43.360
In the 15th century, there weren't a lot of abolitionists running around.
00:44:47.960
And there especially weren't a lot in the year 500 B.C.
00:44:52.920
And further in time that you go, you're going to find that even less and less.
00:44:58.540
So why didn't it occur to that many people that slavery was wrong?
00:45:02.500
Well, because apparently the wrongness of slavery is not an innate moral insight.
00:45:09.120
It's not something that just comes naturally to people, apparently.
00:45:12.540
It feels innate for us because we were raised in a society that completely condemns it,
00:45:21.220
But clearly, if you look at this from an anthropological perspective,
00:45:30.080
This is more of something that came about through progress, through moral progress.
00:45:35.200
We haven't morally progressed in every area in recent times,
00:45:38.700
but we have morally progressed in some areas, especially where it pertains to slavery,
00:45:46.460
Humanity had to, over thousands of years, progress to a point where the wrongness of slavery became clear.
00:45:53.300
And there were philosophical developments that had to happen to make that possible,
00:45:57.620
such as the formulation of the doctrine of universal human rights.
00:46:00.760
Like I said, a long time ago, nobody thought of that.
00:46:04.420
It's just, it's not something that people thought of.
00:46:07.560
It's not a concept that was really available to them.
00:46:13.560
And there was scientific advancement, such as the revelation that we are all one species
00:46:19.420
with only very small biological variances between us.
00:46:23.300
That also was not obvious to people a long time ago.
00:46:30.920
The idea that you live in your tribe or in your province, your town, with your people.
00:46:41.640
The idea that people 1,000 miles away are exactly equal to you in every respect.
00:46:49.100
That just, that would have seemed nonsensical to everybody back then.
00:46:59.420
So, again, all this stuff is obvious to us now, thank God, but it wasn't obvious to our ancestors.
00:47:06.260
These are insights, and this is another thing, that our ancestors had to...
00:47:28.000
We came along, most of us watching this came along, I know I did, after all of that.
00:47:32.120
And so, we inherited a society where certain moral truths seemed to us to be self-evident.
00:47:44.480
But that society was built over a long period of time.
00:47:54.500
And there was a lot of literal blood, sweat, and tears that went into it.
00:47:57.380
And I think it is the height of snobbery for us to come along and treat all of this like it's so perfectly obvious.
00:48:10.360
And to look down our nose on all of our ancestors who hadn't quite figured it out when we didn't figure it out either.
00:48:22.680
And so, yes, I would say that something like slavery, always evil, but the people who engaged in it 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, they simply do not have the same moral guilt that you and I would.
00:48:45.080
For all the reasons that I've tried to explain.
00:48:47.860
Okay, and last thing I'll say is, like I said when we talked about this, you either have to agree with me on this, or what's the implication of disagreeing with me?
00:49:01.680
The implication, because what's the only other option?
00:49:04.140
Either I'm right about this and the moral guilt is mitigated, or almost everybody who existed throughout history up until very recently, they were all a bunch of utter, complete scumbags with almost no redeeming moral qualities.
00:49:19.620
And that, you talk about a simplistic way of looking at the world, not only that, but a very reductive, insulting way of looking at the world.
00:49:28.400
But that, no, I'm not willing to look at the world like that, or to look at our ancestors like that.
00:49:35.040
And I also think it's just factually incorrect.
00:50:12.820
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens, edited by Donovan Fowler.
00:50:23.380
It's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:50:25.700
You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
00:50:32.060
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
00:50:35.080
So come on over to The Andrew Klavan Show and laugh your way through the apocalypse with me, Andrew Klavan.