David Hegg: Self-identity, accountability and common sense

David Hegg
David Hegg is senior pastor of Grace Baptist Church and a Santa Clarita resident. "Ethically Speaking" runs Saturdays in The Signal.
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Why aren’t we, to a person, laughing hilariously? How come, as a society, we aren’t howling, sliding under the table teared up with sides splitting, and just generally guffawing all day long?

Why haven’t we treated the absurdity that is “self-identification” with the mirth and mocking we all know it deserves?

Recently, two things caught my attention. First, I read a comic strip made up completely of identical stick figures. In the first frame, one stick figure exclaims “I self-identify as a woman … don’t judge me.”

To which the second stick figure replies, “Well, I self-identify as a judge, so here goes!”

Secondly, a video shot at the University of Washington made the point even more perfectly (see it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfO1veFs6Ho).

A Caucasian male reporter wandered the campus asking students what they would think if he self-identified as a woman, or Chinese, or a 7-year-old, or as a 7-foot-6-inch tall person.

The comedy is so thick you can cut it with a sword as the university students struggle to maintain their politically correct absurdity in the face of incontrovertible facts.

These two comedic pieces ought to make us at least stop and think about the future the “self-identity” movement is creating for all of us. In this short space let me point out two tragic consequences we are already facing:

First, the loss of personal accountability, and second, the death of common sense.

We’re watching the birth of a new definition of freedom. It has been a rather long gestation period, but at last the baby had been born.

I remember as a kid saying, “This is a free country and I can do whatever I want to.” Of course, that was wrong, but after generation after generation has shouted it, we’ve come to believe it in a way that has morphed freedom into an entirely new concept.

Today, many consider freedom to be the absence of restraint, which means the absence of accountability. And now that we can self-identify as something our DNA proves is both inaccurate and impossible, we can continue changing our identity to gain privileges and demand rights we associate with our new status – while escaping any accountability inextricably tied to who we really are.

Can we as a society twist our intellectual powers so fully as to think this is the right path? Isn’t this whole pampering of the absurd really a recipe for societal disintegration?

What is at stake here is the veracity of truth facts. If we, as a people, are willing to both believe and re-arrange our society to accommodate propositional “truth” statements that we all know are false based on incontrovertible truth facts, can a total collapse of meaning be far behind?

Is it any wonder our politicians placate us with “alternative truth” given we’ve been led like sheep into the slaughter pens of truth already?

Perhaps more absurd than our politically correct addiction to the self-identification movement and its elimination of personal accountability is the cowardice of a society when it comes to using common sense.

Here’s the deal. Like the king in the fairy tale, the self-identification movement has no clothes! It is riding around naked and we’re all afraid to say so.

On Earth Day there were demonstrations by those holding up science as supreme. They marched against those opposing evolutionary theories of origins, human-created global warming, environmental protections, and several other controversial issues.

As I read I just wanted to scream. Why isn’t science – and more particularly, the objective truth of DNA – brought to bear on the absurdity of the self-identification movement?

Sadly, I expect the answer is the scientific community, like so many others, is afraid of being labeled unloving haters, intellectual obstructionists, or politically uncooperative.

So, here’s the deal. I can’t self-identify simply because my identity as a Norwegian, German, French, Swiss and Jewish white male of 60 years has already been set, and is beyond my ability to change at the genetic level where incontrovertible truth resides.

And for that I am so glad. Almighty God brought me into existence and has both placed expectations on me and provided all I need for my life to matter both to him, and to others. My purpose on earth is not to make my own way, pull my own strings, or create my own well-being.

My purpose is to be a man after God’s own heart, facing both good and bad, easy and hard, life and death in a way that glorifies him. Just mark me down as someone who self-identifies as satisfied to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

David Hegg is senior pastor of Grace Baptist Church and a Santa Clarita resident. His column “Ethically Speaking” runs Saturdays in The Signal.

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