We’ve long known that the Left likes fat in government to the point where Uncle Sam has become morbidly obese feasting on trillions in tax money. But leftists and their Cult of the Body didn’t seem to appreciate fat on people very much. They sure didn’t like it on President Trump when their “Girther” movement fat-shamed him in 2018, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Skinny) expressed concern for the commander in chief in May, calling him “morbidly obese” (because Nan surely would be beside herself if Trump dropped dead of a heart attack).
But all that is just so, well, last month. That is, at least according to Cosmopolitan magazine, which now is promoting obese women as healthy. Just feast your eyes on the mag’s February cover (below):
Then there’s this:
Now, I find myself in a funny position. Though oh-so sinewy, I once had to take up the cudgels for my friendly-fronted friends when they might have felt affronted by various, usually leftist-orchestrated attacks. There was the Mississippi Fat Burning proposal in 2008, in which three legislators in the Magnolia State — said to be the fattest state in the nation — introduced a bill to prohibit portly people from restaurant dining. (They said they were just trying to make a point.)
Then there was the Missouri judge accused of delaying an adoption until the prospective father lost weight, and the Ohio DCFS’s 2007 seizing of a boy from his parents because he was obese.
Inspiring my defense was that these were yet more examples of the Body Cultist nanny-staters stripping away freedoms based on their worldly priorities. They reject the concept of actual sin and mistake vice for “positive values,” and marry the former, but then enforce their own standard of faux sin.
Just consider, for instance, that the Left not only would’ve had no problem if the obese Ohio boy had been killed in the womb, but would have defended the decision. So “when it’s the matter of a body within a body, it’s the bigger body’s ‘choice,’” as I wrote at the time. “But when it’s a matter of just a bigger body, you have no choice. My, how the scales of justice tip when you tip the scales.”
But now they may be tipping again, and the significant issue isn’t that Cosmo is encouraging an unhealthy state of being. It’s that they’re denying objective reality.
The magazine’s “obesity-is-healthy claim is about as accurate as the other falsehoods going around — that men can become women, or that racism causes COVID,” writes commentator Monica Showalter. “It’s fantasyland stuff, and coming more and more from the left. So much for ‘following the science.’”
That is the point. I care not if someone says, as legendary actor Marlon Brando did, “I don’t mind that I’m fat. You still get the same money.” I care not that epicurean saint G.K. Chesterton was 300 pounds; he’s my favorite philosopher because his mind was far weightier still. I’ve also known two men who smoked cigarettes, knowing the risk, and unabashedly said they had no intention of quitting because they enjoyed it. As our Dr. Anthony Fauci put it, during an honest moment, “Everybody has their own tolerance for risks.” (We all do take certain at least calculated risks, too; I myself eat too many sweets.)
One vice that should never be tolerated, however, even for a moment, is twisting reality for others so that they can’t grasp risks. The aforementioned smokers would never have told children that coffin nails were as candy, and I’d never tell them candy was as cauliflower. We don’t owe our fellow man a chiseled physique or svelte figure or ivory teeth unsullied by tobacco — we do owe him the Truth.
For when lies reign and people fall out of touch with reality, they’re imperiled. A crazy man thinking he was Superman and inclined to jump off roofs might not be long for this world. And many deaths occurred because people weren’t in touch with the reality of mercury’s dangers and instead fancied the metal a medicine; Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang (259-210 B.C.) was one of its victims.
Likewise, young people today ravage their bodies, only to regret it later, after accepting that sex-switching is possible. Many elderly may die because of an identity politics lie causing certain politicians to prioritize China virus vaccine distribution based on race. And a civilization that believes sexual devolutionary social engineering in the military is an imperative may learn the hard way, and with finality, that reality is a merciless judge.
Speaking of things Chinese (yes, I was), there may be an unspoken reason why some leftists now cotton to corpulence. Recently it was reported that, shockingly, more than 50 percent of China’s population is overweight or obese (I guess the days of rice and veggies are over). This not only could explain why Beijing has so effectively been throwing its weight around, but also some leftists’ fat flip-flop.
After all, when you’ve been fattening yourself up on Middle Kingdom money, all things Chinese start to look pretty darn good.
Yes, that’s a joke. But denying reality never, ever is.
