In reference to the editorial dated May 5, “‘Bathroom bill’ is step in wrong direction,” an alternative title might be “Bathroom bill seeks complicity of corporatism.”
The application of corporatism might be misunderstood and underappreciated by the uninformed reader given the singular reference to Target as a player in the matter. In actuality, the New Yorker (April 25) reported 80 corporations including Apple, Phizer, Microsoft and Marriot signing a letter to the governor of North Carolina, urging him to repeal the state law HB2. In addition, Lionsgate Studios declared it would be moving a production site out of the state: Deutsche Bank canceled plans for expansion and new jobs, and PayPal canceled plans for a global operation center. It appears that corporate might and its ability to create financial coercion has joined forces with the proponents of gender ideology.
If one construes corporations as inherently evil, as many do today, why then does the repudiation of the Bathroom Bill create such an unholy alliance between corporations and gender ideology? David Bentley Hart, an advanced fellow at Notre Dame, offers a not so subtle affiliation between these groups in an unrelated text.
Firstly, global capitalism is inimical to Christianity. Recent proclamations of Pope Francis warn the effects of unrestrained capitalism on the planet and the human person, the consumerist subject to all the prodding of advertising.
Secondly, at the heart of the alliance there is an indissoluble concomitance between late modern secularity and late capitalism. Public life is conceived by corporations that must embody pure elective spontaneity, resulting in a libertarian construct, or as one of his friends remarked, “free love, free markets, corporatism and hedonism, low taxes and high times, Ben and Jerry, Whole Foods, Bill Gates …”
Modern secularity, most prominently represented by gender ideology, makes the individual absolutely autonomous, freed from any reliance on God to become the arbiter of his/her reality. In other words, pure elective spontaneity. It is no mystery that in advertising there is the proven method of sexualization of every commodity and the commodification of sexuality, e.g., the profit made by the promotions of available pornography that many major hotels provide.
With the incursion of a new vocabulary to describe gender ideology and its evolving place in the mainstream, we might expect to find sexual terms codified in business plans. For corporations who readily bow with the appropriate lexicon of political correctness, immediate advantage is gained, since greed and lust intermingle to provide mutually desirable ends. Deconstruct the person so that he/she is defined by desire, and it is a “win-win” for gender ideology and corporations as well.
Alan Becklo lives in Gill.