Mike Miller at the Independent Journal Review posted a Tweet from Fox News’ Brit Hume about the University of Kansas Gender “pronoun buttons” — Hume Tweeted, “Is there no end to this foolishness?”

What foolishness? Miller reports that “Signs in the university’s various libraries explain the purpose of the buttons”:

Because gender is, itself, fluid and up to the individual. Each person has the right to identify their own pronouns, and we encourage you to ask before assuming someone’s gender. Pronouns matter!

Misgendering someone can have lasting consequences, and using the incorrect pronoun can be hurtful, disrespectful, and invalidate someone’s identity.

Misgendering. That’s a first for me — I hadn’t heard that word before. My vocabulary has expanded a lot in recent years.

More and more of the people who considered themselves “enlightened” and “open minded” about the LGBT “agenda” (Brit Hume might even be one of them) are now being pushed to their tolerance limits by the growing list of “identities” that we are all supposed to not discriminate against.

I wonder if Hume has bumped into the list of paraphilias. There is a short list and a longer list. I have not been able to find the entire 549 yet but I will keep looking.

When it comes to “identity politics,” as I noted last time, the list of possibilities are endless. The most common ones are race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and the bogus “sexual orientation” (more on that in a later post). In recent years, the letters following LGBT have begun to come out of the closet, and as noted above, the group wanting to expand the list of “genders,” such as at the University of Kansas — represent even more letters!

Two years ago when I discussed this series of articles with the Illinois Family Institute’s Laurie Higgins, she had this to say:

To your question about whether we should iterate and reiterate what distinguishes natural sex between men and women from perversity in all its protean forms, I say, absolutely. As often as the Left says homoeroticism is akin to skin color, we have to say, no, it’s akin to paraphilias, incest, and polyamory.

In this effort to lay out the range of possibilities in identity politics, let us turn to our first paraphilia: incest.

Wikipedia deserves much of the criticism it receives from political conservatives, but I like to refer to it when useful. Here is an excerpt from their page on incest:

Incest is sexual activity between family members or close relatives. This typically includes sexual activity between people in a consanguineous relationship (blood relations), and sometimes those related by affinity, such as individuals of the same household, step relatives, those related by adoption or marriage, or members of the same clan or lineage.

The incest taboo is and has been one of the most widespread of all cultural taboos, both in present and in many past societies. Most modern societies have laws regarding incest or social restrictions on closely consanguineous marriages. In societies where it is illegal, consensual adult incest is seen by some as a victimless crime.

This series will ask a lot of questions — here is our first: How will society respond when those who practice incest start self-identifying as such and begin clamoring for their “rights”?

Up next: Frightening the horses.

Identity Politics gets a lot of press — both conservative and liberal. The topic permeates nearly every area of life in the America of today. Yet for all the attention, not nearly enough people understand the most basic aspect of the conservation.

The advance of so-called “gay rights” and normalization of the lifestyles of the LGBTers has made huge (what its supporters call) “advances.” Supporters of Judeo-Christian morality call it, simply, a return to paganism. More on that (paganism) as the series unfolds.

It is my contention that identity politics is childish and succeeds only when thinking people decide to accept faulty premises. If that doesn’t sound “intellectual” to you, think for a bit about how common sense often sounds: common. My goal with these articles is to take a look at just how many potential “identities” are possible. That survey, I believe, cries for common sense to finally become a bigger part of this national discussion.

I’m a white guy — yes, one of those — but I’m no WASP. I’m not a member of the elite or the establishment. I wasn’t born into money. I have worked many blue collar and white collar jobs, both in the private and public and political sectors. My bio on my website reads simply: I am a Christian, an American citizen, and I work in the arena of applied political science.

So let’s list what I am (some of my “identities”):

• I am biologically a male.
• I am of white European extraction.
• I am a Christian.
• I am an American citizen.
• I am a heterosexual.
• I am both a social and economic conservative (I realize those are general headings).
• I guess in the age of ageism I should note I am well into middle age.
• I am a student of the Bible, of history, and a nominal sports fan (though you should know I swing both ways — I’m both a Cubs and Sox fan, a Bears and Packers fan…and yes, that’s possible).

No doubt there are other categories I fit into, but that’s enough for now. To be honest, though, I’ve never thought in terms of my “identities.” For all of my life they have been a side issue to what I am at my core: I am a human being with God-given rights — and I happen to believe in that very same God.

But let’s say you meet someone who is a man but wants to be identified as a woman? Or a white girl who wants to be identified as a black girl? Let’s say you meet someone who claims to be the person that was the inspiration of the Jason Bourne character from the novels and movies. That’s how they self-identify. It’s deep in their soul. It’s how they see themselves. What if I have severe doubts about the legitimacy of their claims? Am I a hateful intolerant bigot for not buying it?

The list of identities of all sorts is actually endless. Obviously not all “identities” involve sexual arousal, but since we have so many of them to cover, most of my focus will be on the paraphilias.

For the record, I look to those I consider the well-versed or even experts on the topic of identity politics, which includes the LGBT issue. The substance of this series will depend primarily on the words of others.

Back in 2014 I penned a series called “The Paraphilia of the Day,” which ran on BarbWire.com and my own website. What is a “paraphilia”? This intro to the Wikipedia page on the topic is good enough:

Paraphilia (also known as sexual perversion and sexual deviation) is the experience of intense sexual arousal to atypical objects, fetishes, situations, fantasies, behaviors, or individuals. No consensus has been found for any precise border between unusual sexual interests and paraphilic ones. There is debate over which, if any, of the paraphilias should be listed in diagnostic manuals, such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).

The number and taxonomy of paraphilias is under debate; one source lists as many as 549 types of paraphilias. The DSM-5 has specific listings for eight paraphilic disorders. Several sub-classifications of the paraphilias have been proposed, and some argue that a fully dimensional, spectrum or complaint-oriented approach would better reflect the evidence.

By the way, when I first cited that page, there were 547 types of paraphilias.

Too few Americans actually talk about what we’re really talking about when the subject of the “LGBT community”/identity politics comes up. LGBT represents only four letters — thus, 4 identities.

For the past couple of years the “T” in LGBT has been getting a lot of attention. A biological male can become a female, don’t ya know. Well, that’s not the worst of it. Get ready because a lot of letters follow that “T.”

You have probably seen a Q added on, or a Q, I, and A as well. From what I can gather, there is currently a great debate over which letters should be officially added next — and what those letters should stand for. Here are just a couple of variants currently discussed:

LGBTTQQIAAP
LGBTQQIP2SAA
LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM

I kid you not.

Up next: Wading into the alphabet soup of paraphilia identities.