Stripping Spiritual Traditionalists of Their Connections to the Universe: The Problem with Same-Sex Marriage and Transgender Bathroom Rights

I spent a fewer hours of my Sunday afternoon discussing the nature of reality with Jack, one of my culturally conservative drinking buddies, at the Northampton Brewery.  Over the course of our conversation, I became increasingly cognizant of a point that repeatedly comes up in conversations with conservatives that I have finally decided to formally elucidate.  Emphatically, cultural conservatives are afraid that the onward march of culturally liberal secularists will ultimately undermine any objective conception of the universe, against which they can ground their arguments about "the way things are meant to be."  If this is most clear where politically and juridically determined realities shape our lived experiences on issues like marriage rights, then it is even more problematic when genetic/biological science starts tampering with otherwise fixed conceptions of gender and sexuality.  Such issues are ultimately at play in the current controversies regarding use of bathrooms by transgender individuals in public schools.  In the end, the idea that same-sex individuals should possess contractual rights to engage in marriage or that individuals born male and transitioning to female should be able to use a public women's bathroom constitutes a fundamental abrogation of universally objective material factualities, defined, in their minds, by spiritual TRUTH (i.e. by God!), and otherwise codified by objective science.  Proceeding in these terms, science must be defined as a partial, continuous, and eternally progressive elucidation of the timeless and unchangeable truths codified by the Creator before the moment of Creation. Thus, to say that an argument is scientifically proven implies an objective connection to the TRUTH of the universe.

                  In deference to Jack and to numerous other cultural conservatives in my life, including most of my family, my employers, and a long list of coworkers and friends, as a rigorously post-modern and post-structuralist Marxian thinker, I cannot help but reject such a conception of science.  For me, science has meant and continues to mean a rigorously conceptualized and experientially investigated inquiry into material existence that must continuously resolve itself into a realization that no scientific investigation, however thoroughly controlled for exogenous sources of deviation from the contextual conditions of laboratory experimentation, can ever constitute an objective statement on material reality.  The latter demands the sort of impartial perspective that perpetually eludes the permanently subjective, individualistic human gaze!  As such, true sciences always concede their subjectivity and partiality, speaking on behalf of evidence that remains perpetually inadequate to the task of deriving an objective portrait of the reality that the investigators had set about interrogating.  Rather than producing objectivities, true scientists produce arguments, oriented toward solving practical human problems, like the problem of moving several thousand miles in a limited timeframe against the force of gravity.  In these terms, the Newtonian theory of gravity produces an important scientific principle, not as a sterile element in a broader elucidation of a timeless TRUTH, but as a dynamic constitutive element in an effort to resolve practical questions on the problems of mechanically-aided human flight, pertinent to the particular technological fields of mechanical and aerospace engineering.      

                       Advancing along these partial and subjective lines, I concede a lack of any connection to the timeless TRUTH of the universe, and, in much the same terms expressed by my preponderant academic influences in my learning of Marxian theory, I don't think that my lack of a connection to the universal, timeless TRUTH of material existence makes much of a difference for me!  For my conservative friends and colleagues, however, disconnection from the TRUTH of the universe is big and important - it implies, fundamentally, that they cannot use the TRUTH as a material argument transcending experiential/everyday reality and, more importantly, unsubstantiated partisan perpective.  It just so happens, as such, that most arguments regarding everyday realities cannot be resolved by recourse to some timeless TRUTH but have to be negotiated through well articulated discursive persuasion. That is to say, if we divest ourselves of any timeless TRUTH about gender and sexual identity, grounded in lifelong biological sexual profiles, then an intersecting matrix of TRUTHS connected to the objective TRUTH of gender and sex must, invariably, be thrown into utter confusion.  The conception of transgender identity must introduce an entirely chaotic, deviant, and EVIL identity into an otherwise fixed and biologically well-ordered universe, ordained by the creative hand of God. A possible alternative might exist in recognition that the truths of biological sex/gender are thoroughly in flux, products of our increasing capacity as a species to reframe (if not actually eliminate) the limitations that genetics and micro/cellular and macro/anatomical biology have placed on us as a species. Coming to such a recognition, however, need not necessarily dethrone the objective TRUTH of a God-centered universe, but it absolutely requires that spiritual TRUTH manifest a substantial degree of plasticity in the face of the evolution of science.
In the end, it seems to me that the timeless objectivity of science to a cultural conservative commands an innately emotional appeal. It's hard enough to admit that the universe and our little corner of it is perpetually changing and that we have an important, though not controlling, role in its evolution. To admit, however, that for all we know, we just can't arrive at an objective knowledge of reality or a connection of that knowledge to some definitive center and source of all TRUTH is a fundamentally nihilistic source of anxiety regarding humanity's place. If this interpretation of the battle over transgenders in public bathrooms appears a little too philosophically broad, I think it gets to the heart of the problem for conservatives.