J.K. Rowling’s Moment of Truth Rachel Lu

Rowling s fans feel like she tricked them with a bait-and-switch. A lifelong liberal, she led her readers into what felt to them like a safe space, one whose characters grew with them throughout their childhoods. Then, as adults, she shocked them by articulating perennial truths that they preferred not to believe. The hysterical rage was especially fascinating given that the points Rowling was making had always been central to the Harry Potter series. Rowling is a gender complementarian; this has been clear from the earliest Potter books. Further, she very obviously believes that things have natures. Though it is impressive how she personally has been willing to defend her views publicly, instead of cowering before the cancel mobs, there is some level on which this reckoning was bound to happen given the unstable mutations of twenty-first-century gender ideology.

People crave epic stories, meaningful life pursuits, and courageous figures who appear to stand for something. Those goods are only attainable when words mean things, and when we accept certain aspects of the world as fixed, not compliant with our revisionary whims. Progressive activists have for some time been cheerfully torching large portions of American history and Western Civilization more broadly, which is upsetting to some of us, but perhaps just good fun for people who were never taught to value those things in the first place. Eventually though, iconoclasts find themselves standing, wood bundles and torches in hand, at the foot of something they genuinely love. For this group, Harry Potter turned out to be that thing. 

via lawliberty.org

I was never really a Harry Potter fan. I tried to read the first book, got maybe 100 pages in and thought, meh, this really isn’t for me. I’m more of an LOTR guy. But lots of smart people I know do like Harry Potter. Everyone else in my family does, for one thing. I had to stay home and watch the baby when everybody else went to see Harry Potter and the Temple of Doom or whatever it was called. Who knows. Perhaps eventually JKR’s fans will realize the wisdom in her books, which includes the natural order of things, to wit male and female.