Many liberals reacted to the Vanity Fair cover featuring Bruce Jenner’s
transition into Caitlyn Jenner by proclaiming Jenner to be a Goddess and
ordering everyone to bow down and worship her. Others hailed Jenner as a “literal Goddess,” while one vowed to “pray to
Goddess Caitlyn” for the soul of Drake Bell, an actor who was savaged
for tweeting that he would still call Jenner “Bruce”.
Guardian writer Paris Lees also ordered everyone to “bow down bitches” and genuflect in the presence of Jenner’s angelic image.
As Brendan O’Neill writes,
“There is a palpable religiosity to the wild hailing of Bruce/Caitlyn
as a modern-day saint, a Virgin Mary with testicles. Within four hours,
more than a million people were following Bruce/Caitlyn’s new Twitter
account, hanging on her words like the expectant horde waiting for Moses
at the foot of Mount Sinai. Her every utterance, all banal celeb-speak,
was retweeted tens of thousands of times. Celebs and commentators
greeted her as a kind of messiah.”
Those who dared blaspheme the new “Goddess” were the victim of swiftly organized witch hunts, with Twitter users targeting anyone who still had the temerity to address Jenner by her former name.
“Just as those who denied the divinity
of Christ were once expected to recant their heresy, so those who deny
the gender of Caitlyn Jenner are hounded by bots into apologising for
their moral error,” writes O’Neill. “The American gay-rights group GLAAD
is scouring the mainstream media for any use of the word ‘he’ in
relation to Caitlyn, like a modern incarnation of the Vatican’s Index
Librorum Prohibitorum, which monitored the public sphere for any
less-than-gushing commentary on God. It has issued speech-policing
guidelines for the media. ‘DON’T refer to her by her former name… DO
avoid using male pronouns and Caitlyn’s prior name, even when referring
to events in her past.’”
Meanwhile, although most liberals are
celebrating Jenner’s transition, CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill isn’t
happy, claiming that the huge publicity generated by the story
reinforces “tradition cis/and European standards of beauty.”
In other words, because Jenner is
white, financially comfortable and has adhered to traditional standards
of beauty in transitioning to a woman, this somehow negates the
“bravery” she has been praised for in coming out as transgender.
Presumably, Hill would only be
satisfied if Jenner was non-white, fat and ugly – an ideology embraced
by the fat pride movement, which asserts that men being attracted to
fit, pretty women is a grand conspiracy perpetrated by the
patriarchal-controlled cosmetics industry.
“If we only celebrate and welcome
Caitlyn Jenner bc she conforms to tradition cis/and European standards
of beauty, we are making a mistake,” tweeted Hill, adding, “Between the
Vanity Fair spread and “she’s so pretty” convos, we’ve smuggled in the
same old cis/Eurocentric narratives about womanhood.”
This again exemplifies how leftists will try to inject feminism, class warfare and race into any issue, even one being almost universally hailed by the left as a huge leap forward for “progressive” attitudes in society.
Perhaps some of the confusion on the
left about how to react to Jenner is also borne out of the fact that the
former Olympics gold medal winner identifies as a Republican and a Christian.
Meanwhile, President Obama was blasted for tweeting about the story, with many conservatives asserting that he should be focusing on real issues like fighting ISIS or China’s military-build-up.
Fox News host Neil Cavuto summed up
the feelings of many, commenting that the whole situation reminded him
of, “Rome, final days.”
