Then, there is Emile Ratelband, a Dutch TV host and “positivity guru” who attempted to legally change his age from 69 to 49, because he didn’t FEEL 69-years-old. As Ratelband put it: Emile’s logic may SOUND true. But it’s simply not ROOTED in truth. Now, we used to joke about pastors never letting facts get in the way of a good story for their sermon… but that was in regards to which of his three kids slipped going up the stairs, or was the line at the grocery store three people deep or ten… not whether it was a guy in front of the line or a girl… or a guy who was identifying as a girl. Which brings me to the birds and the bees... or rather, the X’s and the Y’s. In high school, there were some guys who felt more comfortable hanging out with girls and vice versa. There were girls who hated the idea of jelly shoes and high bangs, so they opted for trucker hats and high-tops… if you know what I mean. BUT, they were still definitely girls. We were taught very succinctly that there was no getting around our chromosomal make up – either we had two X chromosomes, making us a girl; or an X and a Y chromosome, m

My kids don’t get in much trouble for doing bad stuff at home. I have four boys, and they hit each other. They tease, trash talk, and put one another down. They leave their clothes lying on the bathroom floor and leave their dirty dishes on the table. They skip doing their homework and thus perform poorly on tests. And, yeah, they may get reprimanded for these or any of the other infractions they commit in regards to our house rules… but there are few “sins” under our roof worse than LYING. It’s when they hit their brother and then lie about it that they get busted. It’s when they lie, and say that their homework is done when it’s actually not, when things start to get ugly. It’s when truth is abandoned that the kraken of discipline is released. But, when I take a giant step backward and observe the culture surrounding my kids… who can blame them? Why should they live under the tyrannical governance of “truth”, when truth and facts are as relevant as a brontosaurus or a cosmic black hole… I mean, yeah, these things may have existed once upon a time. They may have even played a vital role in daily life here on earth, or even in the existence of the cosmos… but dinosaurs and supernovas don’t directly affect my kids’ lives today. How sad is it that the same can be said about truth? In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary actually recognized the term “post-truth” as its international word of the year. Post-truth is an actual thing! 

In other words, our culture is more swayed by peoples’ moods than objective facts. Consider the story of “Hampster Girl”. No, I’m not referring to a new Marvel comic book character, but I’m talking about a young professional writer who had an interesting disagreement with her editor. According to Carol Blymire’s Twitter stream, this young writer was so distraught after receiving constructive criticism from her editor that she called her mother, put her on speaker phone, and kept saying: 

“I thought what I wrote was perfect and she just made all these changes and then had the nerve to tell me I was spelling words wrong when I know they are right because that is how I have always spelled them…I mean, I always spell hamster with a P, she has no right to criticize me.”

Blymire Tweeted her perspective, which coincides with my own. She wrote:

“I think I was most perplexed by the insistence of wanting to spell something the way she wanted to because SHE WANTED TO, ignoring the fact that there are rules and dictionaries.”Then there is...

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