The Great Regression

Recently I decided to torture myself for my Lenten Penance by reading another “exposé” by Vice, which has fallen so far from what actual journalism they used to do almost a decade ago in regard to the Islamic State and other real threats. Vice senior reporter Anya Zoledziowski produced an article which both filled me with dread and amused me in equal measure: ‘Under His Wings’: Leaked Emails Reveal an Anti-Trans ‘Holy War’.

Probably the most amusing thing about the article is the thought that, at first glance, she had hacked into my intra-parish email server. I never knew casual benedictions like “God Bless” and religiously motivated behavior were somehow an event resembling a meeting of the KKK at the local Chucky Cheese. This article should not surprise anyone who has been following progressive activist journalism of the past five years. We have been told even within the past year that the Rosary is a sign of religious extremism, that Catholic Traditionalists are a threat to national security, and even that parents objecting to the aggressive sexualization of their children are dangerous fanatics. Although virtually all these articles and statements were withdrawn or ‘memory-holed’ once the public was made aware of them, one thing is clear: the contempt and hatred with which most of the media-entertainment complex holds traditional religion is real, and it is growing. Their positions are more brazen and unhinged, a toxic sludge of ignorance and alarmism.

At the same time, we cannot dismiss that American Federalism has had a dramatic resurgence in the past few years; state and local legislatures and other institutions where individuals can hold more influence have been the epicenter of the recent uprising against the “Dictatorship of Relativism”. On a strategic level, this phenomenon is a serious and growing thorn in the side of the forward-march of the progressive agenda. The progressive ‘Eye of Sauron’ now turns its fiery gaze, once again, to the most private corners where people live their lives: in their hearth and home.

A few years ago I had dinner with an academic who was lamenting the suffocating ideological conformity now reigning over virtually all of higher education. Interestingly, he commented about the increasing amount of peers who were taking up more kinetic professions: engineering, sports medicine, even agriculture. I truly believe that most people want to be left alone to live in peace and carry on their own affairs, but the progressive leviathan will not rest at the door of the university or the court house steps. The left knows it is not sufficient to put millions of young adults into debt slavery in order to indoctrinate them into the new orthodoxy. They know that the younger they start, the more likely they are to succeed in their project to completely transform our civilization. Hobbled though it is in the West, the family remains the aboriginal institution of humanity. It is one thing to lose one’s career and reputation; but heaven help someone who tries to intrude in the lives of someone’s children.

I asked my friend what situation would ever arise which would truly galvanize the wider public to resist the ever-growing imposition of the progressive worldview. He answered without hesitation: “When they try to come after their kids, when they come even to try to take away their children, because the parents are considered enemies of the state, and are unfit even to procreate and to educate their own children.” With the abolition of Roe v Wade, we have truly moved into unknown territory, and I agree with some conservative commentators that as much as I believe in the genius of the American Founders in providing robust powers for the individual states, we have only reached a second national Missouri Compromise. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise was enacted in the US Congress in order to preserve the Free State/Slave State political equilibrium, and to contain the spread of slavery across the wider Union. However, even the commentators at that time, two hundred years ago, were quite aware that the issue of slavery was not just a legal or policy issue, but a moral and metaphysical one.

In the wake of the Roe v Wade decision, the majority of American States have chosen to put in place more or less restrictive abortion laws, which polls consistently show are favored by the majority of Americans. Most Americans do not favor a complete abortion ban; yet neither do they favor abortion on demand. American society tends to be pragmatic, and when asked, the plurality of Americans consider abortion to be unfortunate and sad, at the very least. But now that transgenderism has crossed into the mainstream, the progressives have done something quite adroit. With the abortion issue, because the unborn child is unseen and cannot speak for itself, the societal debate has largely been concentrated on the question of whether a woman’s bodily autonomy trumps that of the little, distinct biological life within her. With transgenderism, the conversation has become more dangerous: as the influence of gender ideology is now being imposed upon more and more young people, the potential for explosive conflict now exists between the state and the family. Now, the question cannot simply be framed as one of “privacy” or a woman’s right to choose. A minor in this country, who is not considered mature enough to drink alcohol, to vote or to go into military service, is now considered mature enough to decide something so utterly and literally transformative as to permanently or semi-permanently alter their physiology in order to reflect, or indeed “correct”, a disconnect between biological sex and a child’s self-conception.

In traditional hunter-gatherer and tribal societies, the time of sexual maturation was almost always concomitant with the entrance into adulthood. Once a boy or girl was able to procreate, the presupposition used to be that now they were able to step into adult responsibilities. This was as much a product of the low quality of health care and high mortality before the advent of modern medicine and sanitation as anything else. Many people, myself included, would be dead several times over by the age of 13 because of things which we can banish with a pill today. It was essential to the survival of our species that we be able to procreate as early as possible and as often as possible. With the Agricultural Revolution, upward pressure began to be exercised in terms of what we largely considered to be the age of adulthood, and especially with the coming of Christianity, the importance of consent between spouses, and the extent to which a young person can give consent to wed, was a very pertinent question. It is a paradox of postmodern living that neurologists will insist a person’s brain is not fully developed until his mid-20s, and so they say people are not quite capable of making fully mature decisions (a point I dispute), and yet a completely and patently immature adolescent or pre-adolescent seems to possess complete and total bodily autonomy and mental clarity. The prevailing consensus in Western thinking has largely been not to ask whether a person has complete maturity in order to make adult decisions, but whether they have sufficient maturity. In the case of the radical medical interventions that gender transforming procedures require, the traditional guardrails which parents and society were supposed to respect in order protect the vulnerable young are being completely broken down.

In essence, this ‘progressive’ push to try to annihilate the constraints of human physicality is literally the most anthropologically and legally regressive movement in the history of civilization. The contradictions at the heart of the progressive project are now completely exposed, as they trample on the supposedly sacrosanct principles of bodily autonomy and privacy, in order to impose the misanthropy inherent in postmodern ontology. This is the long prophesied Abolition of Man, which C.S. Lewis foresaw.

It is well known that puberty is one of the most important cornerstones of a person’s biological development, rivaling that of conception and gestation itself. The biological journey from boyhood to manhood, and from girlhood to womanhood, is truly transformative, and organic in every respect of the word. Transgender medical ‘care’ is a technological monstrosity: puberty blockers, plastic surgery and other chemosurgical interventions dramatically and intentionally frustrate the inherent teleology of the human body, aggressively militating against the natural flourishing of inborn potentiality. We live in an age where it is considered outrageous and inhumane to trap chickens and cows in cages, to pump them full of growth hormone and antibiotics, to process them like industrial slag, and then to lie to consumers regarding their treatment, purposefully up-charging them and misleading them. We ought not to forget that transgenderism, much like ‘big abortion’, also has a pecuniary motivation. Planned Parenthood and its analogues have siphoned millions in taxpayer funds and private donations in the name of essential medical care. The same foundations are being laid right now with transgenderism, and it is in the interest of these malign, parasitic social engineers to increase and promote this ideology. Impressionable children will be made to question their gender/sex via indoctrination. Impressionable adults will be made to question their legitimate authority over their children via a parallel indoctrination. Both will be made willing or unwilling consumers of Transgenderism, Inc.

It has not been lost on many of us that the LGBTQ movement(s) has been the most commercially and politically enfranchised victim group in the political history of the West. The apps on our phone become increasingly chromatic as the month of June approaches, their flag flies over our embassies, even in countries where women are still circumcised, and men can be punished with the death penalty for homosexual activity. LGBTQ has created a multimillion dollar pipeline for some of the most unproductive and redundant positions in the corporate and political hierarchies. The professional grifters and pseudo-intellectuals have tremendous financial and political backing.

Parents are now on the frontline in a way they probably have not been in many years. The media-entertainment complex will try to shame, intimidate and silence them. It is crucial that we resist the social engineers. Additionally, this is a crucial moment for the Church, especially in America. The difference between a child educated in a government school and one in a parochial school will become so disparate it will be completely undeniable. Many of our adoption agencies had to close rather than genuflect to gay marriage. What will happen if and when they come after our schools because they are ‘centers of hate’?

Once again, a man and woman united in marriage, united in mind and in heart, is one of the strongest bulwarks against tyranny in any age. The project of breaking down the sacred alliance between the sexes has been going on since the Garden of Eden, and although Adam and Eve in their great temptation never had to defend explicitly Seth, Cain and Abel, their decision at the time of the Fall of Man is very much one which changed their children’s destinies. If we eat these sour grapes, not only our children’s teeth will be set on edge; the innocence and moral integrity of our youth, and so our ability to safeguard the future, is very much on the line.

In this Great Regression, the most progressive thing a person can do is to fall in love, get married, stay married, have kids, and defend them with every tool to be had. May God Bless our efforts.