The recent ceremony at the White House for signing the so-called Respect for Marriage Act encapsulates the state of public thought today.
The Act requires the federal and state governments to treat same-sex “marriages” as valid. It doesn’t add anything to current law as interpreted by the courts, but those who support it—who no doubt sense on some level the shakiness of their position—find it reassuring.
In his remarks, President Biden emphasized what seemed to him the clear moral necessity of accepting homosexuality as normal and abolishing social recognition of marriage as a fundamental natural institution. As he put it,
There’s nothing more decent, more dignified, and more American that we’re about—what we’re doing here today… This law, and the love it defends, strike a blow against hate in all its forms.
That supposed blow against hate, he told us, has clear implications in other situations: “racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia—they’re all connected.” Through a cloud of euphemism, the relevant situations can be seen to include the sexual corruption and mutilation of children:
When hospitals, libraries, and community centers are threatened and intimidated … because they support LGBTQ children and families, we have to speak out…
We need to challenge the hundreds of callous and cynical laws introduced in the states targeting transgender children, terrifying families and criminalizing doctors who give children the care they need.
As symbols of the moral outlook for which the President spoke, two drag queens who perform for children and draw them into their activities were guests at the ceremony. The more prominent of the two, Marti G. Cummings, also makes obscene videos, identifies as “nonbinary,” and praises the “kids” who he says are “out to sing and [engage in sexual acts].”
How did such views become worthy of civic honor and even—we are told—central to our identity as Americans? To explain an outlook that is so insane, so fervently held, and so widely accepted among generally intelligent and responsible people, we need to look at basic issues.
At bottom, that outlook has to do with a view of man as either the creator of what he is or a replaceable component of a machine. So he is now seen as either a divine being or an object for manipulation. The two come together in transgenderism: a man can make himself a woman by fiat, and is encouraged to call on biotechnology to aid him in his act of self-creation.
If man is a god or a thing, he is above or below human society. But he is social by nature, and to remove him from that setting takes him out of his element. That destroys his ability to live as a human being. So we are indeed seeing—as C. S. Lewis explained—the abolition of man through the abolition of essential human nature.
Lewis wasn’t the first with such concerns. But they were long limited to the few: almost everyone praised progress, meaning economic and technological progress. By the 1960s, however, the problems were bothering young people enough to provoke many of them to embrace the “counterculture.”
The hippies who led the effort were inspired by a vision of an organic way of life in community. They also aspired to the absolute—in the words of the song, to “break on through to the other side.” But they were young, and badly guided, still in the grip of the expectation that progress would make everything easy. They thought they could create a better world without effort, by rejecting everything old and calling on the aid of sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll.
That didn’t work. Even so, that tendency of thought spread and progressively disrupted concrete social authorities passed down through tradition, such as family, religion, and inherited cultural community. The effect was to turn over what remained of social life to the power of money and the state.
That, of course, made matters worse. Human connections disintegrated, and any vision of natural human community oriented toward something transcendent was blanked out. Since then these tendencies have been reinforced by developments such as globalization and social media, and by ever more obsessive and intolerant enforcement of official social and moral principles.
The result has been an accelerating descent into the cultural confusion manifested in the ceremony at the White House. That confusion disrupts our understanding of man and our most basic human relationships, and thus the ability—especially among the young and vulnerable—to make sense of ourselves and those around us.
It is an obvious social and religious catastrophe. Even so, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and other influential Catholics believe otherwise. For that reason, it seems worthwhile to discuss evidence that these developments are indeed catastrophic.
Recent surveys cast light on today’s darkness. Perhaps most strikingly, 40 percent of Millennials (those born between 1984 and 2002) neither believe in nor care about the existence of God. Why should they, when they are taught that man makes himself and there is no principle of moral order intrinsic to the world?
The consequences, however radical, are predictable, notably with regard to the sexes and their relationships. Thus, 30 percent of Millenials, including 27 percent of Christians, identify as LGBTQ. Among those born between 1996 and 2004 (“Generation Z”) 39 percent do so.
Confusion regarding sex and the sexes means disorder in basic human relationships. Marriage rates have been dropping rapidly in recent years, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Other statistics confirm the growing weakness of ties between the sexes. For example, a survey found that 26% of Americans, and 41% of those born between 1981 and 1996, say they would be interested in having an “open” (sexually non-exclusive) relationship. After all, if sex and the sexes have no intrinsic meaning, what can be so special about marriage?
Such developments are officially considered liberating: they allow people (it is said) to be their authentic selves living their best lives. But surveys of young people say otherwise. Instead, they indicate large increases in depression and suicide.
Thus, one recent survey indicates that 42 percent of young people aged 18 to 24 have a diagnosed mental health condition, usually anxiety or depression. Thirty-one percent rate their overall mental health as bad, and 18 percent are in therapy.
As a recent article in The Washington Post noted,
The CDC found 45 percent of high school students were so persistently sad or hopeless in 2021 they were unable to engage in regular activities. Almost 1 in 5 seriously considered suicide and 9 percent surveyed tried to take their lives during previous 12 months.
Mainstream commentators are able to recognize some of the causes of this situation. They note that widespread use of social media puts young people in an artificial world without stable human relationships. And they recognize that “COVID”—meaning masking and lockdowns—caused young people special problems by disrupting daily life, human connections, and expectations about the future.
But they are unable to recognize more basic causes, since these prominently include the understanding of man, society, and morality celebrated at the White House ceremony. To reject that understanding today is to resign from respectable society, and that is not something well-placed people do in a careerist world.
The causes they suggest instead—terrorism, climate change, school shootings, and so on—are therefore superficial. Such things get publicity, and many young people focus on them, but the threats they pose are either speculative or remote, and unlikely seriously to bother young people who are otherwise generally secure in their lives.
While the trends are bad, what can’t go on won’t go on. It’s notable that people committed to the moral understandings now official are more depressed and less likely to have children, a tendency that is rapidly increasing. Progressivism is ascendant, but it is not an outlook to live by.
And that ought to mean a bright future for the Church. In remote antiquity, before the rise of the great empires, the seeds of the Logos inherent in local traditions were enough to support civilization. Afterwards, with the growth of cultural exchange and conflict, something more distinct, formal, and authoritative—the Higher Religions—became necessary.
Today, in the age of technocracy and wokeness, nothing less than the fullness of truth will do. Catholics must be prepared to present it to a world that desperately needs it.
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Very excellent and informative and sobering article…and Kalb concludes: “Today, in the age of technocracy and wokeness, nothing less than the fullness of truth will do.” The fullness of truth has nowhere to land if the victim generation is unaware of the “interior life.” Ask them about the interior life…”what’s that?”
In the mid-20th century, the convert (to Quakerism) from communism, Whittaker Chambers, discovered A VERY SIMPLE AND DIRECT WAY of rescuing his son from our perverse generation of dis-humanity and collectivism, but also technocracy and wokeness. Here’s a long and most exceptional quote from his book, “Witness” (1952):
“What little I know of the stars I have passed on to my son over the years….we often stop to watch through the apple trees the great sky triangle tipped by the evening stars: Vega in Lyra, Altair in Aquila and Deneb, burning in the constellation of the Swan.
“Sometimes, I draw my son’s eye to the constellation Hercules, especially to the great nebula dimly visible about the middle of the group. Now and again, I remind him that what we can just make out as a faint haze is another universe—the radiance of fifty thousand suns whose light had left its source thirty-four thousand years before it brushes the miracle of our straining sight.
“Those are the only statistics that I shall ever trouble my son with….I want him to have a standard as simple as stepping into the dark and raising his eyes whereby to measure what he is and what he is not against the order of reality. I want him to see for himself upon the scale of the universes that God, the soul, faith, are not simple matters . . . .
“I want him to remember that God Who is a God of Love is also the God of a world that includes the atom bomb and virus, the minds that contrived and use or those that suffer them, and that the problem of good and evil is not more simple than the immensity of worlds.
“I want him to understand that evil is not something that can be condescended to, waved aside or smiled away, for it is not merely an uninvited guest, but lies coiled in foro interno [that is] at home with good within ourselves. Evil can only be fought. . . .I want him to know that it is his soul, and his soul alone, that makes it possible for him to bear, without dying of his own mortality, the faint light of Hercules’ fifty thousand suns” (Whittaker Chambers, “Witness,” Random House, 1952, pp. 797-8).
My poor response to Kalb’s call to light a Catholic candle is my own book of 2017, intended to be readable specifically for millennials, and among whose few merits is that the final chapter includes the above quote (https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/03/29/a-generation-abandoned-why-whatever-is-not-enough/).
People who believe in truth and the natural law are not “haters.” They are intelligent human beings who acknowledge that there is objective truth in our world. Those who deny natural law and truth are the ones who hate.
Agree, Donna. No genuine Christian hates LGBTQ people. Rather an authentic Catholic Christian, unlike Joe Biden, cares enough for their eternal destiny to want them to know objective truth: “ in His own image…male and female he created them.”
Excellent article. Thank you for this.
People who protest Drag Queens reading to children at schools and libraries are not protesters now, they`re haters. That`s using leftist nomenclature when defenders are now a negative.
The definition of mental illness keeps enlarging. I’m surprised only 42% of young people fit into that ever-growing diagnosis. But it’s ironic that those who persist into adulthood believing themselves to be a different gender than their biology are not classified as mentally unwell.
” Nice” should NEVER trump reality , nor morality. EVER. The truth is the truth. Pretending a man is a woman, etc, is a vast exercise in fantasy, and helps no one. It is entirely possible to treat people with respect even if you disagree with their basic principals. However, that CANNOT mean condoning immoral activity, even if they think what they believe is totally innocuous. Sin is NEVER innocuous and such behaviors cannot be encouraged on the faulty theory that being nice is the most important life factor one can observe.
B iggest
I diot
D emocrats
E ver
N ominated
True yesterday, true today, true tomorrow
The Lunatic Left’s entire ideology is based around the idea that there should be fewer people in the world, wherever it applies to radical population control in the name of Climate Cultism, or to mutilating and sterilizing children at the behest of the Alphabet Mob.
Anti-human beliefs are at the heart of Leftist ideology. It guides their belief in Climate Cultism, which teaches that the Earth is suffering due to too many humans being on it, and therefore their numbers need to be reduced. It guides their belief in sexual ideology, which calls for the separation of sex from procreation, abortion, and the mutilation and sterilization of children. The Left wants fewer people on earth and wants the lives of the few who remain to be as miserable as possible (barring themselves and other members of the Elite).
I think it might be worthwhile to take a few steps back and ponder the situation from the “big picture” standpoint. The Church has been in a World War to end all World Wars for a little over one-hundred years. It started when Satan told God, I can destroy your Church. As with all offensive wars, battle plans are drawn up by the hopeful attacker, the steps of which are intended to culminate in victory for the aggressor. With the completion of each step in the plan, the consequences cascade, creating a seemingly irresistible force which cannot be resisted by the enemy (i.e., the Church). With each step comes different consequences. Because the members of the Church do not know the plan, they do not recognize the real significance of each of those cascading effects and how they fit together into one cohesive plan through which to destroy its enemy — the Church via the domestic Church.
Scripture has actually provided us with an outline of Satan’s battle plan. In Rev. 2:12-17, we read about the church at Pergamum. The sin of the church at Pergamum was fornication and/or adultery, both of the flesh and of the spirit (idolatry). Both have become rampant in the twentieth century. In the cited text, we learn of the “teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak.” Balaam knew the Church’s strength came from God. Balaam knew that without God, they would become weak and vulnerable. In order to make God angry at the Israelites, Balaam taught Balak to place stumbling blocks before them. To put that teaching into action, Balak employed some of the most beautiful women in his kingdom to lure the men into unclean fleshly and spiritual acts, i.e., sexual intercourse and idolatry.
There is no more effective means of luring souls to hell than the sins of the lust of the flesh. In order to maximize the tactic, Satan needed for these perverse acts to be humanly consequence-free; avoiding the light of Truth. This is where Margaret Sanger and artificial/inherent sterile sex comes into play. All artificial/inherent sterile sex destroys within us the likeness of God. Not the image, but the likeness.
According to the recordings of a priest-exorcist: “The demons admit that they penetrate everywhere to bring about the ruination of souls, especially through impurity. Everywhere they are spreading ‘the blackest deceptions.’ One demon who called himself ‘Luxuria’ and who used the possessed person to imitate femininity, told me proudly: ‘I have by far more servants than your Virgin (Bl. Virgin) has. [Anonymous Exorcist Priest, Mary Crushes the Serpent: 30 Years’ Experience of An Exorcist Told In His Own Words, ed. Fr. Theodore Geigerm, Cottingham Press, Kindle Edition, Location 491-492].
St. Hildegard of Bingen makes it clear that sexual depravity affects not only the sex partners, but also any children that may be produced. In other words, disordered sex produces disordered children. The science behind epigenetic plasticity and heritability reveals this fact to us in great detail. Hildegard writes: “Turning My rightful institution into sinful lust, although they should have known that the commotion in their veins [all hormones are delivered through the bloodstream] was not for the sweetness of sin but for the love of children. … The Devil said, ‘My strength is in human conception, and therefore humanity is mine!’… those hypocrites who say it is lawful for them to commit fornication, with animal appetites, with whomever they wish, are unworthy of My eyes, because, despising the honor and loftiness of their rationality, they look to the beasts and make themselves like them. Woe to those who live so and persevere in this wickedness! … let them not contaminate their seed by various vices, since those who emit their semen in fornication or adultery render their children … unsound. How? Can he who mixes mud or ordure with pure clay make a lasting vessel? [Hildegard of Bingen, Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias, ed. Bernard McGinn, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1990), 79–81]
Sr. Lucia, responding to Cardinal Carlo Caffara, wrote ‘the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid, she added, because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue.’” [Rorate Caeli, “Cardinal: What Sister Lucia told me: Final Confrontation between the Lord and Satan will be over Family and Marriage,” , 2/16/2008.]
By time the snowball reaches the Church at the bottom of the hill in 2023+, we can’t even see the pebble [of artificial/intentional sterility] that started the snowball in the first place.
My thought about the article is that it is hard to believe that this sort of thing is actually happening in the country, except for the fact that we see it rolling out almost every day. And here we have a president who is on board with it all, one who is representative of his party in the worst possible way. If anyone needed not mere evidence but hard proof of mental incompetence in this person–to put the kindest interpretation upon it–the ceremony in the White House provides it in spades.