I was on the radio recently with a courageous North Carolina radio host, Lockwood Phillips, discussing the decision of that state’s governor, Pat McCrory, to defy the boycott threats of billion-dollar corporations, including PayPal and more than 100 other behemoths. The situation has gone from disturbing to surreal. Now even Bruce Springsteen, a man who was willing to perform in Communist East Germany, is getting in on the boycott party, to the consternation of dozens of graying tax exiles from New Jersey.

The controversy stems from a bill that prohibits local governments (such as the City of Charlotte) from imposing transgender ideology on its citizens by requiring that all public restrooms be open to anyone who claims to “identify” as the opposite sex.

Yes, of course, one problem with such a law is that it opens the door to voyeurs and other perverts who wish to leer at women in their locker rooms and bathrooms. That’s the visceral issue which got this sane law passed, protecting people’s right to a few fragments of modesty.

But let’s look deeper. Why is the gay lobby so worked up about this bill, to the point that the fear of gay stockholders and gay customers has huge corporations threatening sovereign U.S. states? The best estimates, based on surveys by the Center for Disease Control, reveal that a grand total of two percent of Americans say that they’re gay.

I don’t know that national surveys have been done to uncover the percentage that claims to be “transgender,” but it’s surely tiny. Even smaller is the fraction of Americans who don’t assault their bodies with hormone pills and surgery, but leave them largely intact — so that they’re still visibly male while “identifying” as female (or vice versa). It is this itsby-bitsy scintilla of a fragment (i.e., stubble-faced men who claim that they’re “inwardly” women) which the wacky Charlotte statute was meant to accommodate — at the expense of everyone else.

So, why would the gay lobby even bother? Aren’t there plenty of Christian bakers and florists left for them to sue into bankruptcy. There’s a very important reason they want your 10-year-old daughter to sit in a bathroom stall beside some tattooed biker with a handlebar mustache and a leer on his face. It’s a pretentious mouthful of neologism, but you had better wrap your mind around it, because it lies at the beating, rotten heart of our current madness. Here’s the word: Heteronormativity. And here’s a definition of it, courtesy of the tenured wackos at Genderandeducation.com:

Heteronormativity is a term used by social theorists in order to discuss the way in which gender and sexuality are separated into hierarchically organized categories. It has become one of the most important ways of thinking about sexuality within the academic study of sexuality. Theorists have argued that a discourse or technique of heteronormativity has been set up, and subsequently dominates, social institutions such as the family, the state and education.

Heteronormative discursive practices or techniques are multiple and organize categories of identity into hierarchical binaries. This means that man has been set up as the opposite (and superior) of woman, and heterosexual as the opposite (and superior) of homosexual. It is through heteronormative discursive practices that lesbian and gay lives are marginalised socially and politically and, as a result, can be invisible within social spaces such as schools.

I ran those paragraphs through the Star Trek universal translator, and in human language heteronormativity means: “We assume that boys are boys, girls are girls, and that boys are attracted sexually to girls, and vice versa.” Because the second part is true of 98 percent of people, and the first part, of pretty much everybody. And all other mammals. When my beagle was in heat, I kept her far from the dog run, because she sent half the dogs into howling frenzies of lust — the male dogs, I assumed. But perhaps I was blinded by heteronormativity….

Heteronormativity assumes that men will be uncomfortable undressing in front of strange women, and vice versa because most people are heterosexual. The whole notion of modesty is founded on this idea, which is deeply offensive to gay activists — not because it isn’t true, but because it makes them uncomfortable.

It summons from the grave the ghost of a hateful idea: natural law, which finds in our bodily functions and indeed in our lives themselves some kind of inner purpose. (Thus our reproductive organs are meant to reproduce.) And that is a deadly heresy for our modern day Gnostics, who insist that human life is a largely pointless saunter across the short stage of 70 years, which can only be slightly redeemed by maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. I’ve long called this philosophy by its precise but wonkish name, utilitarian hedonism, but given its debut in power politics, let’s call it Big Pleasure instead.

According to Big Pleasure, any teaching — religious or otherwise — which hampers the quest for pleasure must be dismissed as evil and politically persecuted, hunted to the wildest fringes of public life. Because even the knowledge that there are other people who disapprove of your sexual adventures might impinge upon your pleasure. Which violates your “rights.” So those prudes must be forced to approve, or at least pretend that they do.

If PayPal and other companies have their way, and states like North Carolina cave, it is easy to see the future. George Orwell painted it for us, if we change but a single word:

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Pleasure.