According to reporting by The Hill, comedian Patton Oswalt appeared genuinely stunned and confused upon learning that California law allows birth certificates to list “non-binary” as a designated sex for newborns. The reason for the inclusion of a third category, the 2017 California law explains, is that infants “may later identify differently.”
His ignorance of a law in his own state — introduced and now enforced by a party he very actively supports — highlights two recent political curiosities. The first is that Democratic lawmakers keep adopting positions so demented that even their supporters refuse to believe they’re real. The second curiosity is related to the first, a vast majority of Democratic voters appear to have created a cocoon of ignorance around themselves and their communities so thick as to shield them from learning what their party is really doing or what it really stands for.
The education of Patton Oswalt occurred during a conversation with HBO host Bill Maher, who, like Oswalt, is reliably liberal but less insensible to the insanity that has overtaken many liberals today.
“We stopped being a scientific people,” Maher lamented of the left.
Insisted Oswalt, “But the left certainly stayed scientific.”
“No, they didn’t,” the HBO host replied, “Because they think their gender bullshit that they went way too far with — that’s not scientific. …We started to teach: ‘Every baby is, I don’t know, let’s not even put [male or female] on the birth certificate!’”
“When were we teaching that?” asked an incredulous Oswalt, who is otherwise extremely online and opinionated about politics and the culture wars.
“Teaching it?” Maher shot back. “It was a law here in California!”
“I don’t remember that,” Oswalt replied, sounding genuinely surprised. This is evidently par for the course.
During the 2024 presidential election, supporters of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris often scoffed at the allegations lobbed by Republican nominee Donald Trump. Harris’s boosters in the press and elsewhere claimed confidently that the things Trump said about Harris were merely inventions of the right-wing fever swamps.
The funny thing is more often than not; Trump was actually quoting Harris’s own positions back to her accurately. It’s just that the positions themselves were so hard to believe.
And then, of course, there are the indignant Democrats and members of the press who still insist that “abolish ICE” and “defund the police” are just general sentiments, not actual policy positions. That is a funny assertion, considering the sheer volume of left-wing activists and candidates who state clearly that they mean to “defund” and “abolish” in the most literal sense.
Now, to be sure, the Republican Party faces similar problems. But there is one key difference – the Dems main pitch to voters is that it is more intelligent, better educated, and more open-minded than the GOP. They want you to believe and, like Oswalt, kid themselves into believing that their Democratic Party doesn’t suffer from ignorance or insular thinking. It’s the party of settled science, of experts, of rational thought! It’s funny to see an organization that considers itself superior struggle with many of the same issues as the party it believes is filled with retrograde dunces and “deplorables.”