Sounds mad but it is liberal morality at work

The British Medical Association has issued new inclusive speech guidelines for its staff. One of the new recommendations is that the term "expectant mothers" be dropped in favour of "pregnant people".

It sounds crazy, doesn't it? You would think that pregnancy was inextricably linked to women, but liberals want us to use a gender neutral expression instead.

It's important to understand why liberals think this is a reasonable thing, in fact a moral thing, to do. We have to understand liberals to defeat them.

Liberals believe that the overriding good is that we get to autonomously define our own selves. We are to live our lives according to our own unique, self-chosen, self-determined schema.

Therefore, those aspects of life that are predetermined have to be made not to matter. This includes our sex. Being a man or a woman is not supposed to matter in a liberal society.

This is one part of the explanation for a liberal organisation to prefer a gender neutral term like "pregnant people".

And what does "inclusiveness" mean for a liberal? The moral equation for liberals is the idea that each individual should be able to define their own life schema as they wish, as long as it does not interfere with others doing the same thing. Therefore, liberals think that a good person is someone who proves their commitment to non-interference by being inclusive, non-bigoted, non-discriminatory, tolerant, open, supportive of diversity and so on.

So, a liberal will take seriously the idea that something immoral has taken place if someone is excluded from some possible life choice on the basis of a quality like their sex, race, sexuality etc.

Hence the British Medical Association not wanting to exclude those identifying as men from the process of pregnancy.

There is much more of the same in the BMA document:

Gender neutral language avoids stereotyping people according to their sex...You should avoid references to a person’s gender except where it is relevant in a discussion...if you aren’t sure whether someone identifies as male or female, keep your language neutral until you know what terms they prefer to use...You should also respect a woman’s preference to be referred to using the title ‘Ms’. A new gender neutral title ‘Mx’ is now being widely used by the Government and many businesses in the UK and should be included as a title option in any application or monitoring forms.

Liberalism has to be attacked at its roots. The antidote to liberalism is the belief that human life should seek to be ordered toward what is objectively good. Having an equal respect and tolerance for all behaviours and choices is not what makes you a good person. A good person is able to discriminate between what is higher and lower, and a successful community is able to find a way to harmonise what has been called the "tripartite order of existence," namely the natural/biological, the social and the spiritual within a positive moral framework..

The new girl guide promise & the origins of liberalism

The Girl Guides in the UK have changed their promise. No longer will the girl guides pledge to "love my God" but instead they will promise "to be true to myself and develop my beliefs."

This got me to thinking about the way one branch of liberalism may have developed over time. There is a certain logic to the change to the Girl Guide promise. There are now more people without religious belief in the UK. Therefore, the promise to "love my God" might have seemed to exclude these people. The new pledge "to be true to myself and develop my beliefs" would still allow Christians to follow Christianity but it would include atheists as well.

At the surface level, therefore, the pledge seems to be neutral and to allow for a variety of beliefs. It doesn't immediately seem to do harm.

But it does do harm. If we try to incorporate every possible belief or lifestyle by retreating to a position of being "true to myself and developing my beliefs" then we are establishing as the default public position a relativism and an individualism.

We are establishing relativism because the pledge to be "true to myself and develop my beliefs" sends the message that something is true only relative to myself and my own subjective beliefs. And we are retreating to an individualism in the sense that we are no longer recognising a shared belief within a community, but only an individual one.

But it is difficult for a community to operate without some sort of shared value system and so what is then left to liberalism is to make the commitment to being inclusive the focus of a communal, and publicly enforced, morality.

Furthermore, what is clearly lost within this kind of liberal value system is a commitment to shared objective goods and truths within a community. How might people feel compensated for this loss? By focusing on the freedom to make up our own individual goods. So a certain concept of freedom will then be emphasised.

It is said by some that liberalism developed from the attempt to deal with religious diversity in the wake of the Reformation and the various wars of religion. It is possible that the starting point was the well-intentioned one that I have described, but that the logic of the falsely "neutral" position it involved then went on to do great damage to Western societies.

So how then should a diversity of opinion or belief be dealt with in society? If we learn our lesson we would have to say that the relativism and individualism of the "neutrality" position should be the least favoured option. Other options:

i) The atheists are allowed to simply opt out of reciting that part of the pledge.
ii) That part of the promise is dropped and the focus is on other goods that are shared by theists and atheists alike.
iii) A separate group of guides is set up for those parents who wish to avoid the promise to God.

These are only suggestions, but I make them to show that it's not necessary to deal with a diversity of belief by turning to a principle that is perhaps intended to be neutral, but which in reality is anything but neutral and which instead strongly preferences a view of the world which is relativistic and individualistic and which leads ultimately to the intolerant enforcement of tolerance and to a dissolving view of freedom based on the idea of the self-defining individual.