If you’ve followed political punditry much over the past couple decades, you know how significant it is that Matthew Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan are both questioning the conclusion drawn from a recent Center for American Progress survey:

A recent nationally representative survey conducted by the Center for American Progress found that LGBTQI+ members of Generation Z face higher levels of discrimination in areas including housing, school, and the workforce than previous generations report. According to the survey, this heightened discrimination results in higher rates of financial struggles, mental health issues and avoidance behaviors among LGBTQI+ Gen Zers. Comprehensive solutions at the federal level, such as the Equality Act, are urgently needed to address the discrimination these young people face and allow them to live their lives fully.

The progressive Yglesias writes:

This is surely telling us more about the respondents than about an actual increase in anti-gay discrimination — I remember the 1990s!

And the less-definable Sullivan:

In many ways, this suggests a crisis in gay America. The youngest generation seems incapable of thriving. Despite unprecedented acceptance and legal equality. The woke are poisoning the young.

This discussion belongs in the same folder as a John Murawski RealClearInvestigations article with the descriptive headline, “Medical Research Rapidly Adopts ‘Systemic Racism’ as Truth, Risking Scientific Credibility“:

Systemic racism, generally unseen but known by its perceived effects, doesn’t directly cause diabetes, hypertension or depression, but it purportedly creates the living conditions in which chronic conditions opportunistically thrive, advocates say. Such living conditions include unsafe neighborhoods, aggressive policing, substandard schools, discriminatory workplaces, inferior medical care and the resulting stress, despair and self-destructive behavior, the theory states.

Being on a very different topic, that article has broader implications and deserves additional review in the near future.  Our purposes, here, however, produce two relevant questions.

The first is whether it serves any purpose (including bringing us closer to the truth) to package these effects under some identity-politics “ism.”  Maybe it will help, but the case has to be made.  It could be, for example, that bigotry and accidents of history a century or more ago sorted people by identity, and it is the circumstances into which they sorted that are the problem.  Identifying the impetus for the moves may tell us nothing useful about the problems those people face or the attitudes of the majority today.

The second is whether the focus on identity as a source of sorting and power in our time is, itself, a significant cause of bad outcomes.  As Yglesias and Sullivan imply, if young gays today are more likely to look for and find discrimination even where it is less present, then that urge probably helps explain “mental health issues.”  Similarly, the constant refrain that racial minorities face insurmountable walls of “whiteness” surely contributes to “despair and self-destructive behavior.”

One day, historians will look on the madness of our times and find these observations obvious.  Unfortunately, we’ve a couple generations of indoctrinated young adults who need help adjusting to a reality that is better than they’ve been taught to desire.  The best thing we can do is to stop the indoctrination of any more millions of children.

Featured image by Gabriel on Unsplash.