We don’t need to know about—or figure out—everything

Karl D. writes:

The Daily Mail has an article about Chastity Bono. Chastity Bono in case you didn’t know is the daughter of Cher and Sonny Bono. She has had a full-on sex change operation including hormones and is now the obese, hairy and tattooed creature pictured in the article. Here is the catch. Chastity and her pretty, blonde, girlfriend are both lesbians and have been together since before the change. Yet their relationship now continues. How can her admittedly homosexual partner continue a relationship and be attracted to someone who is now for all intents and purposes, male, and a very unattractive male at that? I know some lesbians are attracted to “butch” lesbians but this is beyond the pale. It throws into question Chastity’s girlfriends whole homosexuality? I just don’t get it? Or maybe I am not supposed to?

LA replies:

I’ve looked at the photographs of Chastity Bono and her/his girlfriend that you sent. As for your question, I’m stumped. I haven’t a clue.

As I’ve said before, I think some things are so sick that there is no profit in thinking about them. What I mean is, our culture is filled with lots of sick things, which we as cultural conservatives need to attend to, to a certain degree. Now, beyond the range of usual sick things, there are sicker and sickest things. We don’t need to know about the sicker and sickest things. In order to understand the sickness in our culture sufficiently, it’s enough to know about the “middle range” of sick things. If we give our attention to the sicker and sickest things, we’re only poisoning ourselves, and gaining no new insights into truth, because the sicker a thing is, the further it is from truth.

I made a similar point last October:

As the Indian spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti once put it, if you want to know what is in a department store, you do not need to get out of the elevator at each floor and look at every item on that floor. You can look out from the elevator and see that this is the toy department, this is the men’s clothing department, this is the homes furnishing department and so on, and that is all you need to know. Similarly, in order to understand evil sufficiently, it is not necessary to examine every particular form of evil, no matter how evil it may be.

Karl replies:

Perhaps I should have made it clearer in the photos I sent you. That pretty blonde in the photos I sent you IS Chastity Bono before the change. The third photo down in the Daily Mail article shows Chastity (now called “Chaz”) and her girlfriend.

August 17

Jeannette V. writes:

She still has her vagina so even though the news calls her “officially” an man she is still physically a woman. Men don’t have vaginas. She is just a butch woman who had her healthy breasts surgically removed and is taking male hormones.

If she wanted to amputate any other healthy part of her body she would be considered mentally ill.

LA replies:

She didn’t have that surgery, changing her sex organs?

Jeannette replies:

Nope all the news articles I have read claim that she still an intact woman “down there.” Remember these people think gender is in the head. Not in the DNA.

Jeannette continues:

Here:

While Bono’s thrilled that surgery and injections helped him get rid of those breasts, however, he doesn’t have any designs on swapping a penis for his vagina. “At this point, I really don’t have any plans to do bottom surgery,” he said. “I feel really good, I feel like a man now, and I’m really happy.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 16, 2011 08:13 PM | Send