With Its Celebration Of Caitlyn Jenner, The Left Doubles Down On Social Decay

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David French had an interesting take on the Jenner controversy yesterday: Last week, when Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner was enjoying a fresh 15 minutes of fame, a number of social conservatives passed around this Wall Street Journal article by Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Arguing against transgender surgery, he shared a number of politically incorrect facts, including a sobering corrective to those parents who seem eager to embrace transgenderism in their young kids, going so far as to administer puberty-delaying drugs. (It turns out that 70 to 80 percent of kids who report transgender feelings “spontaneously” lose those feelings.)

But most sobering of all was a study out of Sweden demonstrating that ten years after sex-reassignment surgery, transgendered people experience “increasing mental difficulties” — culminating in mortality from suicide at a rate 20 times greater than that of the “comparable nontransgender population.” While the gay community has long suffered from extraordinary rates of attempted suicides, the number McHugh reports for the “T” portion of LGBT is horrifying. Yet what does the Left demand? That we double down on transgenderism by celebrating it in all its forms, including the most surgically extreme.

At the same time that I watched the Left cheer Caitlyn Jenner, I was finally finishing Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. While I don’t think Putnam set out to write in defense of the traditional family structure, I can’t think of another book that more clearly lays out the devastating consequences of the breakdown of the family. As Putnam states:

Children who grow up without their biological father perform worse on standardized tests, earn lower grades, and stay in school for fewer years regardless of race and class. They are also more likely to demonstrate behavioral problems such as shyness, aggression, and psychological problems such as increased anxiety and depression.

All of this is well known by now. There is no serious argument that single parenting is the ideal family arrangement. But the problems go beyond single parenting and into the more sexually libertine lifestyle. Here’s Putnam again: “Multi-partner fertility is associated with less paternal involvement, less extended kin involvement, and more friction, jealousy, and competition, especially when there are children from different partnerships living in the same household.”