The left - and, by extension, "we" - are beyond parady...

...as James Taranto points out:

You can understand the appeal of this approach. Identity politics has enormous cultural influence. If you belong to a group that acquires accredited victim status, influential people will tie themselves into knots to satisfy whatever demands you make. The reductio ad absurdum is the kerfuffle over what pronouns to use in reference to Bradley Manning, who following his sentencing on espionage charges declared that he is now a "woman" named "Chelsea."

Smaller lefty organs like Slate and The New Republic are demanding that everybody immediately commence using feminine pronouns to refer to the former private. As we noted yesterday, the New York Times NYT -0.42% is struggling to come to terms with the news, although its public editor is on board with "Ms. Manning." Most hilarious of all is a blog post by Andrew Rosenthal, the Times's editorial page editor, about a letter Manning wrote to President Obama:

Private Manning told Mr. Obama that he (I'm using the male pronoun to follow our newsroom's style even though he also announced today that he is a woman, and would like to be called Chelsea) entered the Army and went to Iraq believing that since the 9/11 attacks, "we've had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life."

To be sure, that wonderfully entertaining parenthetical is by far the best part of Rosenthal's post. But can anyone imagine Abe Rosenthal twisting himself into knots to be solicitous, especially of a man convicted of espionage against America? A lot changed in one generation, thanks to identity politics.

This will probably seem incomprehensible to most people today, but this insight is simply the foundation of Western Civilization, version 1.0.

Bad Catholic writes:

Our bodies matter. We are not souls trapped in biological cages, souls that might find — to their disappointment – that they “got the wrong body” and thus must explore the label “transgender.” No, we are our bodies. Any integration of the sexuality into the whole person that ignores the body or settles for being opposed to the body is no integration at all. If the body that I am is male, oriented in its inescapable biology to be fruitful with woman, than my personal integration of body and soul cannot be the embrace of homosexual acts, for in this embrace I leave the body behind. I perform acts that contradict the reality of my body, my personal design and my relation to the physical Cosmos. I welcome a ghostliness that neatly separates the reality of my body from the reality of me, as if I could be a me without my body.

Outside of matters involving where people place their genitals, the necessity for integration of the body and soul is usually upheld. An anorexic girl may believe that her normal, healthy body is hideously fat. She may live in the disintegration of soul and body, by which her soul (she) opposes her body by refusing to eat. But it’d be evil to laud this disintegration, this dualistic war by which she lives as a ghost trapped inside the wrong, disgusting, too-fat body. What’s truly loving is the encouragement of body-soul integration, by which a person takes on the project of loving the body she is, of being her body, of living in harmony with the biological functioning of her metabolism, her shape, her natural weight, etc.

We understand this, but having reduced personality to sexuality, we are no longer comfortable giving the exact same loving encouragment to a man who lives as a disintegrated soul and body, who believes he (a woman) is in radical contradiction with his body (male). It would be the social sin of social sins to look upon this man and say, “You are body, and your project is to become properly integrated with your body, and thus become the self who you are.” What he needs is not integration — that medieval fire of red-hot hatred — but a label, and the subsequent social acceptance of that label. Voila, transgenderism, put a “T” in LGB.

I guess we'll find out how Western Civilization, version 2.0, brings u.