[Note: Facebook has censored Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn after she posted that gender-dysphoric male athletes should not compete in women's sports.]
Here is the Blaze article:
"Biological men have no place in women's sports," Blackburn wrote in a post shared to her personal Facebook page. It linked to a donation website that encouraged her supporters to "fight back against Big Tech censorship" by adding their names to her campaign email list and making a contribution, Fox News reported.
But the post, shared with Blackburn's nearly 150,000 followers, was flagged by Facebook for violating its "community standards on hate speech."
"Your post didn't follow our Community Standards on hate speech," Facebook wrote in a notice to Blackburn. "No one else can see your post."
The Tennessee Republican blasted Facebook and its parent company, Meta, as a "Silicon Valley oligarch" and said she would not be silenced.
"Big Tech and the Democrats are colluding to radically transform America," Blackburn said in a statement to Fox News. "They want to silence and censor conservatives for speaking out against their woke agenda. It does not take a biologist to know the difference between a man and a woman, and I will not be silenced or threatened by Silicon Valley oligarchs. Biological men have no place in women's sports."
Facebook's Community Standards have broad rules prohibiting "hate speech," which the platform defines as "a direct attack against people — rather than concepts or institutions — on the basis of what we call protected characteristics: race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease."
The social media platform prohibits exclusionary statements based on gender identity, among the other "protected characteristics" Facebook cares about. That includes statements "expelling certain groups or saying they are not allowed," as well as "political exclusion," "economic exclusion," and "social exclusion." Blackburn's comment that males who identify as female should not be allowed to play in women's sports would violate one or more of those standards.
Whether transgender athletes should be allowed to play on sports teams according to their self-professed gender identity has become a controversial political issue in recent years. Most Republicans, like Blackburn, have taken the position that males have natural biological advantages over females and should not be allowed to play in women's sports, no matter how they identify or what hormones they take.
Progressives and Democrats assert that restricting transgender athletes to competing according to their birth sex is discriminatory, bigoted, and otherwise hateful. Facebook's Content Standards align with that position.
Blackburn has been an outspoken opponent of men competing in women's sports and has used her podcast, "Unmuted with Marsha," to highlight the issue. She's interviewed Riley Gaines, who tied transgender swimmer Lia Thomas for fifth place in the women's 200-yard freestyle finals at the NCAA championships, as well as former Team USA Athlete Cynthia Monteleone, who each shared their stories of unfairly being forced to compete against men.
Here is my commentary:Think about the fact that Blackburn's opinion, only a few years ago--five, six? Ten at most?-- was mainstream. And yet.... without there ever being an actual open, freewheeling national debate on the issue...suddenly Blackburn's opinion is so repugnant, so heinous, so "dangerous" to the survival of democracy!!!! (How ridiculous can we get?)-- that it requires censorship. Again, let us pause to reflect that even at this moment, Blackburn's position is still the position of the majority of human beings in hundreds of different cultures, of all different races, all over the world.
What made an ordinary, garden-variety belief (with scientific backing to boot) suddenly become a LITERALLY UNSPEAKABLE opinion in the United States of America? So much so that the Supreme Court's newest Justice professes with a straight face to be unable to define a woman, a title she should be proud to claim for herself and for millions of others who can incontrovertibly claim it. And there is no mystery about that. Your cells each have an extra chromosome or they do not. The human species is bifurcated into two categories at the most fundamental (cellular) level at the earliest possible moment (the instant of conception). It cannot be any clearer.
Are we suddenly, magically smarter or more virtuous than other human beings anywhere at any time? What kind of hubris, what kind of narcissism, what kind of will-to-power is this? The people who are imposing this insanity.... are the very people who claim that THEY need to be PROTECTED from DISINFORMATION put out by those who disagree with them.
To protect real women from being forced to compete in sports against fake women does not constitute "hate speech" as it was ever previously understood. It might be marginally acceptable for Facebook to flag Blackburn's position as "controversial" if FB feels the need to stigmatize that position as inferior. But to treat it as literally UNSPEAKABLE?
The woke censors pretend that people who are capable of being equal (such as people of different races) are not so capable. But they pretend that people who are genuinely not capable of being equal in every respect, such as the two sexes which are different in crucial respects (ability to bear children, ability to perform certain athletic feats)--they pretend that those groups ARE not just equal as children of God, but are identical in their capabilities-- which is demonstrably false.
They turn reality upside down and inside out.
Why do they do this with such fanaticism and determination? Because it serves their long-term goal, which is to destroy the existing social codes and arrangements that enable us to have families, governments and other viable structures as developed through trial and error around the world through the ages. They want those structures out of the way to be replaced by.... what? Many of us think the likely outcome will be a sort of high-tech feudalism, with the majority of humanity employed as serfs for a small but highly privileged aristocracy.
But the majority of the human race does not want that. The majority of the human race likes families. The majority like their countries, their national languages, their national customs. They like class mobility and cross-fertilization. So for the aspiring aristocracy to get what it wants, it has to bully and gaslight the rest of the human race into "agreement" or at least passivity. A populace so confused and adrift that it no longer can tap into a mutually recognizable moral code, a code that upholds recognizable social structures-- is a populace that has lost its way.
That populace is ripe for the feudalizing.