Mark Joseph Stern, the resident LGBT scold at Slate magazine, is having a hissy fit over pronouns. Stern complains that a “transgender” pedophile in federal custody was not allowed to be called by his preferred pronouns.

The case revolves around a man named Norman Varner, who, in 2012, was found to have sexual images of children on his computer. He was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison and 15 years of supervised release. The sentence was exacerbated by his previous convictions at the state level for possessing child porn and failing to register as a sex offender. Varner is clearly a very sick and perverted man who needs to be jailed for a good long time.

In 2018, Varner wrote to the district court asking that the name on his judgment sending him to the hoosegow be changed to—get this—Katherine Nicolle Jett. One question that springs immediately to mind is why transgender people seem to feel compelled to take stripper names. Is there some rulebook that they must follow? But that’s neither here nor there.

Norman says he came out as a “transgender woman” in 2015 and began hormone replacement therapy and planned to have a crude “vagina” fashioned from his mutilated johnson. This gaping, never-to-heal wound would require daily treatment for the rest of his life. But at least he might get to spend that miserable life with real women rather than with the tattooed toughs in federal stir who do not look kindly on men who get off on children. Pedophiles are on the very lowest level of the prison food chain.

Norman says he only wants his name changed and to be referred to as “she and her.” In these motions, you won’t read any further request about moving to a woman’s prison, but that most certainly is what’s on Mr. Varner’s mind. The motion to be called Katherine Nicole Jett and to be called “she and her” was denied by a three-judge panel that includes a recent Trump judicial nominee, Kyle Duncan. (More on him in a moment.)

The court points out that Varner’s request cites no legal authority. The hilarious and meaty part of Varner’s motion simply states, “I am a woman,” and that when others don’t refer to him as a woman, it “leads me to feel that I am being discriminated against based on my gender identity.” He goes on to say that “referring to me simply as a male and with male pronouns based solely on my biological body makes me very uneasy and disrespected.”

The proper legal response, of course, should be the belly laugh, the horse laugh, or, at the very least, a loud snort. I’m sure you could look this up in federal statutes.

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The decision goes on to a point that applies not just to the courts but to you and me and all the children in ideologically-driven schools who insist on phony pronouns. “In cases like these, a court may have the most benign motives in honoring a party’s request to be addressed with pronouns matching his deeply felt inherent sense of gender. Yet, in doing so, the court may unintentionally convey its tacit approval of the litigant’s underlying legal position.”

This puts me in mind of the fix kids are put in when they are sometimes forced to use phony pronouns for some sparkly boy who now says he’s a girl. It’s forcing not only children but everyone around them to live a lie. It’s the government compelling speech—speech that we don’t agree with. This is most especially dangerous for children, who then internalize the lie.

The court’s decision also can’t be construed as an imposition of a new kind of religion, namely, one of the new ecclesial communities of sexual lunacy that flatly contradicts the Christian faith that most Americans profess—both in and outside of prison, as well as in and outside of grade school—which holds that God created man and woman, and that these are fixed and immutable characteristics.

The court goes on to talk about how confusing all of this can be, particularly that it “oversimplifies matters to say that gender dysphoric people merely preferred pronouns opposite from their birth sex—‘her’ instead of ‘his’ or ‘his’ instead of ‘her.’ In reality, the dysphoric persons’ experienced gender may include alternative gender identities beyond binary stereotypes.” Here the court was quoting the diagnostic manual of the psychiatric guild, which is one of the bibles of the new ecclesial communities of sexual lunacy.

The court produced a widely circulated pronoun usage guide for gender dysphoric persons that included things even I have never heard of—including “(f)ae, (f)aer, (f)aer, (f)aers, (f)aerself” and many more. The court pointed out that “some transgender people may request… more unfamiliar pronouns, such as ze (pronounced ‘zee’) and hir (pronounced ‘hear’). If the court orders one litigant to be referred to as “her” (instead of “him”), then the court can hardly refuse to allow the next to be referred to as “xemself” (instead of “himself”).

The courts’ deploying such “neologisms” would hinder communication among the parties, and, presumably, if you disobeyed, they “would be enforceable through its contempt powers.” The court concluded by declining to enlist the federal judiciary in this quixotic undertaking.

The decision of the court was referred to by Slate as a “screed” and a “bigoted culture war harangue dressed up barely as your judicial opinion.” Mark Joseph Stern goes on to say it is a “bad day for basic human decency and judicial decorum.”

The decision was drafted by the newly appointed Judge Duncan, who is known to many in conservative and Catholic circles in Washington, DC, as a wise, kind, and principled man. Stern finishes his tweets by saying, “get ready for another 40 years of this, folks.”

And I say, from his lips to God’s ears.

What’s more, Catholic Never Trumpers need to rethink their Neverness right now.

Photo credit: Lev Radin/Shutterstock.com