Rod Dreher's Blog, page 197
October 24, 2019
Frat Boy Thermopylae
GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz compared the House Republicans storming the Intelligence Committee today to the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. Well, that’s one way to look at it.
I think the optics were terrible. It looked more like a reverse version of the Otter-led Deltas storming out of Dean Wormer’s kangaroo court:
Yes, it’s fair to object to the Democrats holding these depositions behind closed doors. I wish they were happening in the open. Kevin Williamson writes:
The Democrats have offered no plausible and persuasive rationale for holding these proceedings in secret and keeping the evidence and testimony behind closed doors. Given the character of the people in question, it is safe to assume that their reasons for doing so are corrupt and motivated by narrowly calculated political self-interest. If Trump is to be impeached for corruption, it must not happen through a process that is itself corrupt. If corruption must be corruptly rooted out, better to leave it in place and let the voters decide, relying on whatever mysterious criterion guides those baffling wonderments, for themselves.
However, Democrats say these House Intelligence Committee procedures aren’t official hearings, but rather the equivalent of depositions, meant to gather facts that will later be examined and argued over in public hearings. Republicans are fully present and able to question witnesses in these closed-door sessions. If there are going to be impeachment hearings, I assume that they will be done in public, and all these witnesses will be brought back to face open grilling.
Russell Berman writes that Democrats have opened themselves to criticism by conducting these hearings behind closed doors, but their reasons for doing so are rational (that is, not arbitrary). I don’t fully trust Committee Chairman Adam Schiff either, but if the Democrats can get a mass of evidence via testimony they’ve gathered in collaboration with committee Republicans, and then that evidence is examined in public hearings, with these witnesses available for bipartisan questioning, then the secrecy of this phase of the investigation would have been justified, or at least it would cease to be an issue for most people.
However, as Jim Geraghty writes today:
The most common justification is that this is like a grand jury portion of a criminal hearing, and the committee majority and their staff, acting as the equivalent of prosecutors, don’t want the witnesses and potential witnesses to coordinate their testimony. This answer would be a little more compelling if we weren’t getting considerable leaks of information, which would seem to undermine that objective. Bill Taylor’s detailed, 16-page opening statement was first in the Washington Post but eventually posted everywhere – Time magazine, CBS News, CNN, PBS.
He’s right about this. There should not be leaks. As a political decision, the Democrats keeping the hearings closed is risky. But unlike barging into a secure room to disrupt a Congressional procedure, it is legal. Again, the leaks ought not be happening, but that’s not a justification for opening up the hearings at this phase in the impeachment inquiry. Do not forget that the House Republicans, when they were in the majority, conducted most of the Benghazi hearings behind closed doors — and for good reason. In fact, after Hillary Clinton’s 2015 public testimony, Chairman Trey Gowdy decided to return to closed-door hearings. From an Atlantic piece in 2015:
Don’t look for the House Select Committee on Benghazi to do business in public again anytime soon.
On the heels of Hillary Clinton’s 11-hour appearance before the panel last week, the committee is heading back behind closed doors for what’s likely to be the rest of the roughly two dozen interviews that Republicans envision.
Closed-door, transcribed interviews have been the GOP’s standard practice throughout the long-running probe, which has included just four public hearings (and Clinton’s was the first since January).
That preference likely reinforced by the hearing with Clinton, which was widely viewed as a political win for the Democratic front-runner and also featured some bitter exchanges between Republicans and Democrats.
Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, appearing on Meet The Press on Sunday, said private sessions don’t include “bickering” among members. Host Chuck Todd asked Gowdy whether TV cameras add to “grandstanding” on both sides of the aisle.
“What do you think, Chuck? You have been following Congress for a long time. I can just tell you the private interviews, there is never any of what you saw Thursday,” Gowdy said. He said the next two dozen interviews would be behind closed doors. “The private ones always produce better results,” he said.
“The private ones always produce better results,” according to the Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in 2015.
Well, yes. After yesterday’s stunt, I don’t blame Democrats for holding the fact-finding part of the investigation behind closed doors, to make it impossible for Republican members of the committee to grandstand for the cameras. The assault on the secure room by the mob of GOP members vindicates that decision. I wasn’t sure what to think about it until I saw the clip of Matt Gaetz, swaggering and cocky, like he had just successfully pulled off a panty raid. Yesterday’s frat-boy Thermopylae shows that the House Republicans aren’t taking this seriously enough.
Writing on the Fox News website, Howard Kurtz explains why even though you might think this impeachment process is bad, you can’t just dismiss the testimony of Acting US Ambassador Bill Taylor, a decorated Vietnam veteran who came out of retirement at Sec. Pompeo’s request to serve in Ukraine. The man has credibility. He is no left-winger. And yesterday, in an important column, Jim Geraghty of National Review wrote, about Bill Taylor’s testimony:
Perhaps the most mind-boggling sentence in his prepared statement is this one, describing concern at the highest levels of government about aid not getting to Ukraine in July of this year: “My understanding was that the Secretaries of Defense and State, the CIA Director, and the National Security Advisor sought a joint meeting with the president to convince him to release the hold, but such a meeting was hard to schedule and the hold lasted well into September.”
Read that again. Are we honestly to believe that four of the highest-ranking cabinet officials with duties relating to national security couldn’t get a meeting with the commander-in-chief? What, was the president avoiding them?
This should not be an eternal, impenetrable mystery. Either secretary of defense Mark Esper, secretary of state Mike Pompeo, CIA director Gina Haspell, and former national-security adviser John Bolton will corroborate this account or they won’t. If they contradict it, then Taylor is offering a version of events that exaggerates the level of concern about Trump’s blocking the Ukraine aid. If they confirm it — and the President of the United States simply wouldn’t talk to four of his top officials about a decision about aid to an ally against the Russian military — then we have a state of dysfunction at the highest level of our government that is positively nightmarish and that must be remedied immediately, by whatever constitutional methods are available. [Emphasis mine — RD]
The president can think aiding Ukraine is a bad idea all he wants. He could have tried to legally and constitutionally withhold the aid under the Impoundment Control Act, which gives Congress 45 days to effectively veto a president’s attempt to stop such an expenditure. But Trump didn’t do that. Based upon what we know now, it appears the president and his top staff tried to withhold the aid in secret, in defiance of Congress, and in defiance of the advice of his top national-security officials. Refusing to distribute funds that Congress had authorized and appropriated would be a violation of the separation of powers; the president cannot decide to simply refuse to carry out funding decisions of Congress and not tell anyone.
Beyond that, the administration’s repeated insistence that there was no quid pro quo is contradicted by government officials, including the president, stating that U.S. military assistance would only be sent if the Ukrainian president announced the Bidens were under investigation. That’s what a quid pro quo is.
Geraghty’s right. Schiff should subpoena those top four officials and question them about Bill Taylor’s claim under oath. We have to know if this is how the President of the United States is running the executive branch.
After watching the House Republicans, especially Matt Gaetz, carry on yesterday, I don’t have faith that they really want to know the truth here. They would rather obfuscate. Watch the Gaetz interview linked above — it’s short. He says, “I love the president so much I may never love another president again.” Gaetz is clearly having a good time with this. He has no sense of the gravity of what is happening. It’s just a big game for him. The rule of law is a pain in the butt.
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From JP2 And BXVI To … Francis?
Yesterday I posed this question, which had come to me through a conservative Evangelical friend who is shocked to see what’s going down in the Catholic Church under Pope Francis:
Remember when all the trad/conservative Catholics were confidently claiming that JP2 and B16 had transformed the church through their wise appointments and driven out the “Spirit of Vatican II” once and for all? So what happened? Why didn’t it work out that way? I have looked for answers and haven’t found any.
A Catholic priest friend saw that and responded as follows. This is really excellent:
A useful first place to look is the memoir John Paul II wrote towards the end of his life, “Arise, Let Us Go Forth.” In that book, as he looks back over the years, he admits that one thing of which he must accuse himself is having neglected the administration of the Church.
He had inherited a mess. Paul VI never recovered from the storm that greeted the birth control encyclical in 1968. There was no strong papal authority exercised in his last ten years. It is crucial to understand this: the Church was permanently marked by the Protestant revolt of the 1500s. She is always going to carefully deal with unrest in the Church so as not to cause schism (and where schism does occur, such as the Old Catholics in Europe or George Stallings’ Imani Temple here, she will ignore it in hopes that it dies of neglect). So, what was the first Polish Pope, the first non-Italian Pope in five hundred years, to do?
Wojtyla had a strongly mystical, sacramental concept of his role as Pope. Symbol is a very important part of Catholicism. He decided that he would be like Saint Paul: he would travel the highways and by-ways of the world bringing the Gospel to the farthest corner. He wanted to write, to teach, to travel, to work especially with youth: he devised a program that allowed him to do just that. The sheer symbolism of the Vicar of Christ traveling like Paul from place to place, country to country, was electrifying, was meant to convey the importance, the crucial centrality of Christ to a world in danger of forgetting Him. To be on Fifth Avenue when he first came to America, to be among the crowds outside – my cousin was working there at the time and she, a stylish young professional Manhattanite, said, “Never, I never experienced anything like the electricity of that crowd.”
Undeniably, it had an effect, in varying degrees and for various lengths of time in different places. But meanwhile, despite the fact that the media played up Cardinal Ratzinger as John Paul’s hatchet man beheading various dissenting theologians, there was little effort to achieve consistent discipline. A good example was the first encyclical John Paul wrote on the Eucharist early in his reign, which was issued accompanied by an instruction from Ratzinger’s doctrinal office identifying specific liturgical abuses to be corrected. Grrrrrrr, WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! Twenty years later he did exactly the same thing – Eucharistic Encyclical, Instruction on Liturgical abuses… nothing had changed because nothing was enforced. The same thing happened with the encyclical on the Catholic University, Ex Corde Ecclesiae; it was issued, it has been discussed and referenced in conservative Catholic scholarly circles, but the once-grand network of Catholic colleges and universities continued to decay into the patchwork of secularized institutions we see today.
Rome received during those years regular reports on what was going on in schools, chancery offices, Religious communities, from people like the great Father John Hardon, S.J. But most of these reports did not lead to action. To an unprecedented level of civil disobedience in the Church, the Holy See responded by carefully avoiding provoking the open rebellion which would be provoked by disciplinary action.
Benedict XVI had watched carefully during these years. He was not the extrovert the Polish Pope had been; his approach was different. He would correct by example. He would stress the continuity of the Church in various ways, demonstrating that Vatican II was not supposed to be a radical rupture from the past. So, his letter Summorum Pontificum (2007) eliminated the restrictions on the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass. He had his Master of Ceremonies bring out of the mothballs classic papal vestments (with sometimes ironic results, as when he resurrected the camauro, a red cap trimmed in white ermine which has the effect of making him look like one of Santa’s elves. The move was derided by progressive fashionistas, who apparently were unaware that the last Pope to have revived this arcane bit of pontifical haberdashery was… their “patron saint,” John XXIII).
Benedict’s gentle guide-by-example approach had a definite effect. There are many young seminarians and priests who today look to him as my Pope, the one whose influence they responded to. It was the hope and expectation of this parish priest that this approach would continue through a longer Benedict reign followed by a like-minded successor. I still believe the effect would have been profound. The Puff the Magic Dragon generation that has been running so many things in the Church could not have lived forever, although it now seems to have been granted another roll of the dice.
Benedict’s abdication was a tragedy. Never in my wildest nightmares could I have imagined what would follow. Nevertheless, there is reason to hope, for it is undeniable that what has been called forth by these circumstances is a strong, insistent reaction by faithful Catholics which is growing as the Vatican sinks into the mire of its own ineptitude and theological incoherence. With the appointing of officials tainted by sexual scandal, the loopy optics of the shaman-infested Amazon synod, and the surfacing of a good, old-fashioned money scandal, the Holy See has made of itself a tawdry, risible target for just about every responsible person on the face of the earth: orthodox Catholics, progressive Catholics, secular humanists, atheists. Never have we been more catholic – an object of universal scorn. It is in just such times that God raises up His saints in the Church.
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October 23, 2019
Father Martin Inches Closer To The Brink
Father James Martin meets in the Vatican with Pope Francis on September 30 (Vatican Media photo)
Interesting: “Where the Bible mentions [same-sex sexual] behavior at all, it clearly condemns it. I freely grant that. The issue is precisely whether the biblical judgment is correct. The Bible sanctioned slavery as well and nowhere attacked it as unjust.. https://t.co/52jL6NDgRu
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) October 23, 2019
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Father Martin (quoting in his tweet a blog entry by the popular Franciscan Richard Rohr) is intelligent enough to know that slavery is not the same kind of thing as sexuality. And he’s not openly endorsing this, either; he’s only saying that the claim is “interesting.” How Jesuitical. This is precisely the species of sophistry that Pope Francis, Father Martin’s fellow Jesuit and great champion, will use to overturn Catholic teaching on homosexuality. Well, that’s not exactly right — Francis will probably not live long enough to cross that Rubicon. But the bishops he has appointed and the cardinals that he has made will. Or perhaps his successor will.
I know faithful Catholics won’t agree, because they believe that the Catholic Church will be protected from teaching error on faith and morals. I don’t want to argue with y’all on that. You are my friends. If what you believe about the Catholic Church is true, then you will be proved right, and I will be proved wrong. With respect, I don’t share your ecclesiological convictions, so I do expect this to happen — and believe me, I dread it!
I do believe, though, that as a matter of prudently reading the signs of the times, faithful Catholics should prepare themselves for the possibility, either in this papacy or the next, that Rome will abandon Biblical teaching on homosexuality. If that happened, it would not necessarily negate your ecclesiological faith, but it would mean that the pope and those who followed him would be heretics — and that you would have a schism on your hands.
Remember, Father Martin is a favorite of Pope Francis, who named him as an advisor a couple of years ago. Last month, Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia criticized Father Martin in print (respectfully), regarding Father Martin’s teaching on homosexuality. Excerpt:
Father Martin — no doubt unintentionally — inspires hope that the Church’s teachings on human sexuality can be changed. In his book, Building A Bridge, he writes: “For a teaching to be really authoritative it is expected that it will be received by the people of God … From what I can tell, in the LGBT community, the teaching that LGBT people must be celibate their entire lives … has not been received.”[vi] One might easily, and falsely, infer from such language that the Church’s teaching on sexual intimacy lacks binding authority for same-sex attracted Catholics.
Again to his credit, Father Martin has stressed that, “as a Catholic priest, I have … never challenged [the Church’s] teachings, nor will I.” [vii] But what is implied or omitted often speaks as loudly as what is actually stated, and in the current climate, incomplete truths do, in fact, present a challenge to faithful Catholic belief.
When people hear that “the Church welcomes gay people” or needs to be more “inclusive and welcoming” without also hearing the conditions of an authentically Christian life set for all persons by Jesus Christ and his Church — namely, living a life of chastity — they can easily misunderstand the nature of Christian conversion and discipleship.
For this reason, Catholic teaching always requires more than polite affirmation or pro forma agreement, particularly from those who comment publicly on matters of doctrine. Faithful Catholics who are same-sex attracted need support and encouragement in the virtue of chastity. They deserve to hear — as all people do — the truth about human sexuality spoken clearly and confidently. Anything less lacks both mercy and justice.
In its 1986 Letter, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned us,
“This Congregation wishes to ask the Bishops to be especially cautious of any programs which may seek to pressure the Church to change her teaching, even while claiming not to do so. A careful examination of their public statements and the activities they promote reveals a studied ambiguity by which they attempt to mislead the pastors and the faithful.”
Supporters of Father Martin’s efforts will note, correctly, that several Church leaders have endorsed his work. Those Churchmen are responsible for their words — as I am for mine, as pastor of the Church in Philadelphia. And specifically in that role as pastor, I want to extend the CDF’s caution to all the faithful of the Church in Philadelphia, regarding the ambiguity about same-sex related issues found throughout the statements and activities of Father James Martin.
After the appearance of that Chaput column, Francis summoned Father Martin to the Vatican for a friendly meeting in front of the cameras. It was widely interpreted as a papal show of support for the liberal priest. Father James Martin knows what he’s doing. So does Pope Francis.
UPDATE: From a reader:
“Where the Bible mentions murder at all, it clearly condemns it. I freely grant that. The issue is precisely whether the biblical judgment is correct.”
“Where the Bible mentions adultery at all, it clearly condemns it. I freely grant that. The issue is precisely whether the biblical judgment is correct.”
“Where the Bible mentions exploiting the poor at all, it clearly condemns it. I freely grant that. The issue is precisely whether the biblical judgment is correct.”
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The NSA Can Know Everything
This is hugely significant news for a number of reasons:
Scientists claimed Wednesday to have achieved a near-mythical state of computing in which a new generation of machine vastly outperforms the world’s fastest super-computer, known as “quantum supremacy”.
A team of experts working on Google’s Sycamore machine said their quantum system had executed a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken a classic computer 10,000 years to complete.
A rival team at IBM has already expressed scepticism about their claim.
But if verified and harnessed, the Google device could make even the world’s most powerful supercomputers — capable of performing thousands of trillions of calculations per second — look like an early 2000s flip-phone.
The reason that most interests me is what this means for privacy. In his new memoir, Permanent Record, Edward Snowden writes about a speech that Gus Hunt, the CIA’s chief technology officer, gave in 2013. Only the Huffington Post covered it (though you can watch it online). From HuffPo’s report:
Speaking before a crowd of tech geeks at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York City, CTO Ira “Gus” Hunt said that the world is increasingly awash in information from text messages, tweets, and videos — and that the agency wants all of it.
“The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time,” Hunt said. “Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.”
Hunt’s comments come two days after Federal Computer Week reported that the CIA has committed to a massive, $600 million, 10-year deal with Amazon for cloud computing services. The agency has not commented on that report, but Hunt’s speech, which included multiple references to cloud computing, indicates that it does indeed have interest in storage and analysis capabilities on a massive scale.
More:
“It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information,” Hunt said. After that mark is reached, Hunt said, the agency would also like to be able to save and analyze all of the digital breadcrumbs people don’t even know they are creating.
“You’re already a walking sensor platform,” he said, nothing that mobiles, smartphones and iPads come with cameras, accelerometers, light detectors and geolocation capabilities.
“You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times, because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off,” he said. “You know this, I hope? Yes? Well, you should.”
Hunt also spoke of mobile apps that will be able to control pacemakers — even involuntarily — and joked about a “dystopian” future where self-driving cars force people to go to the grocery store to pick up milk for their spouses.
Hunt’s speech barely touched on privacy concerns. But he did acknowledge that they exist.
“Technology in this world is moving faster than government or law can keep up,” he said. “It’s moving faster I would argue than you can keep up: You should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.”
Note well: “It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information.”
Here is a link to Gus Hunt’s speech on YouTube.
In its vast Utah Data Center constructed earlier this decade, the National Security Agency has the capacity to store virtually unlimited amounts of digital data it hoovers up daily. This is what Gus Hunt was talking about. The biggest problem is how to make that data useful for the government’s purposes — that is, how to find the needle in the haystack of data.
This Google quantum computing breakthrough, if verified, would appear to solve that problem.
Here’s an excerpt from Alan Rusbridger’s interview of Snowden’s memoir:
[Snowden’s] sleuthing led him to a crucial program called XKEYSCORE – “perhaps best understood as a search engine that lets an analyst search through all the records of your life. Imagine a kind of Google that instead of showing pages from the public Internet returns results from your private email, your private chats, your private files, everything”. When he manoeuvred himself into a position where he could start playing with XKEYSCORE he was astonished:
Nothing could prepare me for seeing it in action. It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science fact: an interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone’s address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at was their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything. You could set up notifications that would pop up when some person or some device you were interested in became active on the Internet for the day.
Snowden accepts that such a capability is desirable when narrowly targeted at people who present a credible threat to public order and safety. His concern was over suspicionless mass data collection – the vast digital trawl nets that could gather up the communications of countless millions of entirely blameless citizens. “The freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of its citizens, and it’s my conviction that these rights are in fact limitations of state power that define exactly where and when a government may not infringe into that domain of personal or individual freedoms that during the American was called ‘liberty’ and during the Internet Revolution is called ‘privacy’.” Even to someone who understood the systems a thousand times better than any MP or member of Congress, the evidence was breathtaking.
I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who’d ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those people were about 320 million of my fellow American citizens, who in the regular conduct of their everyday lives were being surveilled in gross contravention of not just the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society…
I repeat: If Google’s quantum computer really works, then the NSA will have the technological capacity to sift through the mass of data it collects, to find what it wants to find. Your entire life is in storage somewhere — and the government will be able to search it at will, quickly. There is — or shortly will be — no place to hide. This new book I’m working on will seek to discover from people who lived under the Soviet surveillance state how to do so without losing your mind.
By the way, here’s a YouTube link to the nearly three hour interview Joe Rogan did with Snowden, which just went up.
UPDATE: Several readers who know computer technology — both in the comments thread and e-mailing me privately — say that this is not the threat I think it is. Everyone says some version of what Secular Misanthropist said in his comment:
IBM is correct to call BS on Google’s claim, and everyone should calm down.
Google’s quantum computer only has 54 qubits. That is not a general purpose quantum computer. Instead they selected a task that was amenable to their quantum computer, but hard with a general purpose classical computer. However, such a machine can’t crack codes, or do much else useful.
It’s not that dissimilar to IBM’s Watson PR stunts. Yes it can play Jeopardy really well, but it over promised and under delivered on everything else.
tl;dr Google’s achievement is impressive, but was basically done for bragging rights.
tl;dr tl;dr Fake News
One reader who works in that world added that what the agencies can already do with the computers they have is scary enough on the privacy front.
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Andrea Long Chu: Liquid Modernity’s Poster Gal
About a year ago, I wrote in this space about Andrea Long Chu, a man who was on the verge of having a sex change operation, and who penned a NYT op-ed about it.
The NYT piece was highly controversial at the time. Chu said in it that he did not expect his pseudo-vagina to make him happy, but he deserved to have a pseudo-vagina anyway, simply because he wanted it. Desire is its own justification, in other words. Chu wrote that for the rest of his life, he is going to have to insert an object into his fake vagina to prevent it from healing shut, as his body will consider it to be a wound. As I wrote in response:
Do you see what’s happening here? Chu says that the treatments doctors have given him are making him sicker, even making him desire suicide. But if he wants to suffer and to die, then he should have that right. Satisfying desire is the only thing that matters.
This poor man with asparagus-colored hair is going to submit to mutilation next week, and will have to spend the rest of his life inserting an object into the wound surgeons will have made in his pubic area, to prevent his body from healing itself. This man — “like many of my trans friends” — expects this medical procedure to make him no happier, and in fact may make him feel more miserable, even suicidal.
But he wants it. People like him want all of society to upend its laws, its customs, and its norms to facilitate that desire, and to act like there’s nothing wrong with it. And society is giving them what they want, and punishing those who deny that this is paradise.
Freeing the autonomous will from sex and gender norms is the summum bonum of contemporary American progressivism. The insatiably miserable Andrea Long Chu is its incarnation.
Well, we’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the casting-off of Chu’s male genitalia, and the miserabilist critic sits down with New York magazine to talk about zir’s new book. Excerpts:
Nearly a year after the surgery, she says she’s feeling more miserable than she’d expected. “It’s perversely vindicating,” she adds with a wry smile. Dressed in a jumpsuit patterned with blue-and-white flowers, she brushes a curtain of curls away from her face with a flip of her wrist, revealing a tattoo of a geometric vulva on the underside of her forearm. “It’s very dangerous to get what you want.”
So, there’s some stability in Chu’s life, then. More:
Chu was 23, a couple of years into her Ph.D. studies and in the midst of a breakup with a girlfriend, when she felt compelled to transition. Within a week, she’d bought her first bra. She wasn’t “coming out of the closet” after years of consciously (or unconsciously) hiding; the desire to be a woman descended upon her suddenly, like “a tongue of fire or an infection,” as she writes in Females, and she acted on it with uncharacteristic speed. It was “easily the most impulsive thing I’ve ever done,” she says.
Like a possessing spirit. And:
Snapping out of her reverie, she sighs and adds, “Now I’m just in a sexless marriage with myself.” As she describes it, the root of all her unhappiness — the reason she believes there’s no “cure” for gender dysphoria — is that she will never be able to fulfill her deepest desire, which is not just to be a woman but to have always been one. “If I were to unleash the full force of dysphoria onto a conversation partner, it would be Lovecraftian in the scale of horror,” she explains. “It would be like an indescribable, tentacular nightmare.” And yet she’s almost amused by the tragedy of it. After all, our endless striving in the face of certain failure is an essential part of what it means not to be trans but to be human. “We tell ourselves the object compels us. This person will give me what I wanted, this job, this belief, this breakup,” she says. “But it’s desire itself that compels us. It is by nature gratuitous and without purpose. The infinite desire to desire.”
Chu is in hell, driven by desire, but unable ever to find satisfaction for it, no matter how elaborately she masquerades, and self-mutilates. A hero for our liquid-modern times.
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A Detransitioner Jumps Off The Trans Train
Above, a remarkable story from 60 Minutes Australia, about Patrick, an Australian boy diagnosed as transgender as an adolescent. He began living as a girl at 12. He demanded puberty blockers, and threatened to run away or kill himself if he didn’t get them. He couldn’t get them easily under Australian law, so Patrick’s mother put him on her own estrogen pills at 13. It permanently changed his body. But then at 14, Patrick decided that he wanted to be a boy. Now he’s walking around with breasts, and his mother is trying to get him surgery to remove them.
Watching the story, you feel for these people. The mother had no business doing what she did, but medical authorities, which she trusted, told her Patrick was transgender, and then Patrick threatened to kill himself if he didn’t get what he wanted. She loves her son, and wanted to save his life. She ended up very nearly ruining it. Her, and the doctors treating him.
Amy Welborn cuts loose on the transgender mass hysteria. She calls for widespread resistance. Excerpts (all emphases in the original):
Resist attempts to change the law, resist the intrusion of this into your schools, your public spaces – snort derisively when you’re asked your pronouns – and never stop being deeply and annoyingly logical. So if your community passes some sort of Self-ID in terms of gender, the next time you go to the DMV or have to fill out a form indicating your identifying characteristics – go crazy. If you’re Asian with straight black hair, demand to be accepted as an Irish redhead. If you’re obviously a woman, calmly claim that you’re a dude. If you’re 60, put down 1982 as your birthdate. And don’t let go – demand to know why – if that guy over there can be named “woman of the year,” can win women’s sporting events, can be awarded a woman’s spot on a committee – it is perfectly logical that I, too, can self-identify in any way, respect or category I decide.
There is no logical argument. None.
It is mostly misogynistic, crowd-driven, profit-fueled gnosticism.
More:
And it needs to stop – and the law could play a part in stopping it – or opening up the floodgates. Either way. The citizens of this country – who make the laws, remember – could demand, for a start, that their state and federal representatives ban medical transitioning of minors – no drugs, no puberty blockers, no hormones, and God help us, no surgery. No teen girls lining up for binders and mastectomies, no boys, their genitals shrunk by years of puberty blockers and estrogen, having their penises and testicles sliced off, the remaining skin tucked in to form what amounts nothing more than an open wound that must, for the rest of their lives – the rest of their lives – be dilated daily for….what?
Start with banning that in your state. Don’t allow it and run the medical professionals who profit from it out of business. And then stand firm against the Equality Act. If you have the opportunity to interact with one of the Democratic candidates, ask them about it and don’t let go. Don’t accept platitudes. Ask, over and over – Should any biological male who says he is female be granted access to women’s spaces such as locker rooms? Well, we need to be an inclusive society, welcoming of all people. Great. Should any biological male who says he is female be granted access to women’s spaces such as locker rooms and restrooms? Trans folks experience a lot of discrimination, you know. That’s too bad. Should any biological male who says he is female be granted access to women’s spaces such as locker rooms, restrooms and prisons? I’m for equality for all people. Good for you. Should any biological male who says he is female be granted access to women’s spaces such as locker rooms, restrooms, prisons and shelters for abused women?
Read it all. We are going to have to do this ourselves, because as is perfectly obvious to anyone who follows this stuff, the news media are entirely on the side of the trans activists. As is corporate America, the Woke Capitalists. Make all Democratic candidates answer these questions.
As Welborn points out, every one of the Democratic presidential candidates has endorsed the Equality Act, which would write transgenderism into civil rights law. I bet not one person in 1,000 in this country even knows about this. That cannot stand.
For that matter, make all Republican candidates answer these questions too. They’ll probably give you the answer you want to hear, but push them on it: What are you planning to do to derail the trans train, and protect vulnerable women and children?
Can we not pass laws saying that no one should receive cross-sex hormones or transsexual surgery until they are 18 years old, no matter what?
Can we not pass laws making it a crime for schools and other institutions to deceive parents about the sexual and gender identity of students? Why does GLSEN run our schools, anyway?
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Catholic Orthodoxy Sinking In Liquid Modernity
As trade-offs go, it would be one for the books – after traditionalist opponents of the Pope stole the much-ballyhooed statues of Amazonian women from a Roman church early yesterday and tossed them into the Tiber, actual Amazonian women could just emerge from the “river” of this Synod clad in the stole of Holy Orders.
With the draft of this weekend’s Final Document now in discussion among the gathering’s 12 language-based workgroups, a report earlier today from Chris Lamb of the London-based Tablet said that a proposition for the ordination of women to the permanent diaconate in Amazonia has made it into the current stage of the all-important closing text.
While unsurprising given the explicit openness to the idea from a majority of the circuli minores in their Friday reports, that the sheer prospect of ordaining women would be contained in a Vatican document – even in preliminary form – is staggering to a degree that, on this beat, few things genuinely are. Yet even as the ultimate product lies in the hands of the 13-man drafting team led by the Relator-General, the Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes OFM, you can bet the house that nothing would be put on the table without Francis’ implicit approval… and even so, the notion of extending the priesthood to married men in the Amazon – and, for that matter, the admittance of women to the instituted ministries of lector and acolyte – suddenly doesn’t feel so big after all.
That said, as discussion on and proposed amendments to the draft Final continue from within the small groups, there’s still a long way between now and Friday, when the finished proposals – usually over 100 in all – are presented in the Aula before Saturday’s voting, where each proposition must receive two-thirds approval from the 185 clerical members (i.e. 124 “placets”) to pass. And again, given the now-explicit possibility that the Pope can simply ratify a Synod’s Final Document as a text of the Magisterium at will, the stakes are higher than most would’ve anticipated.
A friend — a conservative Evangelical — brought that to my attention earlier tonight. He texted (I quote this with his permission):
You know, I have never believed that the claims of the Church of Rome were true, but I have always taken a certain comfort in the belief that Rome would hold firm to its ancient convictions. And now the Ancient Faith is being transformed into the Episcopal Church before my eyes — the dismantling could be completed in less than a decade of this papacy. Of all the amazing things happening around the world this is surely the most amazing. How could anyone doubt the “liquid modernity” thesis after this?
“Liquid modernity” is the concept that the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman came up with to describe our present condition. An explanation:
In the 1980s and 1990s, Bauman was known as a key theorist of postmodernity. While many theorists of the postmodern condition argued that it signified a radical break with modern society, Bauman contended that modernity had always been characterized by an ambivalent, “dual” nature. On the one hand, Bauman saw modern society as being largely characterized by a need for order—a need to domesticate, categorize, and rationalize the world so it would be controllable, predictable, and understandable. It is this ordering, rationalizing tendency that Max Weber saw as the characteristic force of modernization. But, on the other hand, modernity was also always characterized by radical change, by a constant overthrowing of tradition and traditional forms of economy, culture, and relationship—“all that is solid melts into air,” as Marx characterized this aspect of modern society. For Bauman, postmodernity is the result of modernity’s failure to rationalize the world and the amplification of its capacity for constant change.
In later years, Bauman felt that the term “postmodern” was problematic and started using the term liquid modernity to better describe the condition of constant mobility and change he sees in relationships, identities, and global economics within contemporary society. Instead of referring to modernity and postmodernity, Bauman writes of a transition from solid modernity to a more liquid form of social life.
For Bauman, the consequences of this move to a liquid modernity can most easily be seen in contemporary approaches to self-identity. In liquid modernity, constructing a durable identity that coheres over time and space becomes increasingly impossible, according to Bauman. We have moved from a period where we understood ourselves as “pilgrims” in search of deeper meaning to one where we act as “tourists” in search of multiple but fleeting social experiences.
What my Evangelical correspondent means is that what was once solid no longer is. The thing that seemed most solid within Christianity — the teachings of the Catholic Church — are now revealed to be made not of rock, but lava. My friend continued:
Remember when all the trad/conservative Catholics were confidently claiming that JP2 and B16 had transformed the church through their wise appointments and driven out the “Spirit of Vatican II” once and for all? So what happened? Why didn’t it work out that way? I have looked for answers and haven’t found any.
That’s a very good question. I don’t have a good answer either, only some intuitions. I’ll throw it open to you readers.
For one, I think conservative Catholics — I was one of them, as you know — were victims of wishful thinking in a particular way. We thought that because the Catholic Church is an absolute monarchy, having a strong, orthodox pope at the pinnacle would cause reform to flow down and out to the peripheries. We didn’t count on the fact that liberals staffed the Church’s bureaucracy, and had a lot of staying power.
Second, the kind of conservative Catholics (CCs, from here on) prone to believing this, and talking about it, were intellectuals. I came into the Catholic Church at age 26, and was genuinely shocked by the chasm between the actual, existing parish churches, and the Catholic Church as reflected in the writings of contributors to First Things magazine, Crisis, and the other CC publications I devoured, as well as the many writings by converts and apologists.
To be fair, I had the starry eyes of a convert, and was ready to be talked into buying the narrative. I became serious about Christianity at the same time I felt called to Catholicism, and I remember thinking that all these other churches are either surrendering to the spirit of the Age, or eventually will — but not the Roman Catholic Church! It seemed like such a solid thing. Anyway, intellectuals are prone to believing that if you think clearly, everything will get sorted. Looking back, it’s easy to see how those wonderful encyclicals by JP2 made people think that a new day was dawning, and that there would be no turning back.
Third, JP2 and BXVI did not appoint stellar bishops across the board. There are no doubt many reasons for this, but something to keep in mind is that the bishop-making system is designed to produce yes-men and managerial types. And, though the pope names bishops, he typically chooses from a handful recommended by the local bishops’ conference. It’s not possible for any pope to know everything about episcopal candidates. He has to rely on those he’s delegated to give him good advice. You could blame JP2 and BXVI for poor episcopal appointments, or at least not-great ones, but you also have to consider what they had to work with, and the constraints under which they labored.
Fourth, there is the matter of keeping up appearances. A Catholic friend back in the late 1990s repeated to me the substance of a conversation a leader in one of the lay movements had with a curial cardinal. The layman wanted to know why the pope (JP2) was not governing with a stronger hand against dissenters. The cardinal said that the pope well knows that the Catholic Church is in a state of undeclared schism, and he hopes to keep everything together long enough for the dissenters to age out. I had no way to verify that anecdote, but it sounded plausible.
Along those lines, there was this in 2012 from the traditionalist Catholic writer Christopher Ferrara:
The answer is revealed by an incident of which I was reliably informed during a recent Ignatian retreat at the Retreat House of the Society of Saint Pius X in Ridgefield, Connecticut. During an audience with the Pope, Bishop Fellay found himself alone with the Pope for a moment. His Excellency seized the opportunity to remind the Pope that he is the Vicar of Christ, possessed of the authority to take immediate measures to end the crisis in the Church on all fronts. The Pope replied thus: “My authority ends at that door.” (Castel Gondolfo August, 2005)
Again, that’s a secondhand story, but it sounds plausible. I was told a few years back by a priest who knows Benedict XVI personally that the reason he resigned was because he concluded that he was a figurehead, blocked on all sides by the curia, without actual power. He hoped that the Holy Spirit would send a pope who had the strength and the capability to defeat the curial evildoers. That, as we know, is not how it all came down. But that was BXVI’s hope, or so my source said. (I have heard versions of this basic story repeated by others since then.)
What does it mean for an absolute monarch whose office has exclusive, God-given powers, to have little effective control over his kingdom? This is not a question that faithful Catholics, especially conservatives. were eager to ask, because it could call the entire system into question.
It is also the case that both JP2 and BXVI were fated to lead the Catholic Church in a time of widespread dechristianization in the West, even apostasy. Here’s a quote from Roberto Suro, who covered JP2 for the Washington Post, and who was interviewed by the PBS Frontline documentary series for a film about him (transcript here). The part I’ve highlighted below is what came to mind just now as I was thinking about my Evangelical friend’s question, but the entire quote is so good that it deserves reproducing:
I think if you’re going to try to judge John Paul’s legacy, it has to be on his own terms, as a spiritual figure, as a religious leader. Not as a worldly man. Not in terms of his impact on culture or politics. But he is someone who clearly believed that this time in the world’s history that there was an opportunity for great spiritual reawakening, for a new understanding for humanity in spiritual and moral terms. A time for the ascendancy of Catholicism, in the demise of Communism and Capitalism. It didn’t happen.
Now, it may well have been that he was struggling against something that was overwhelming. Twentieth century culture with its materialism, its immorality, in his terms, –the force of ideology–were too great for him to overcome. But you know, had he done what he set out to do, he would have been another Saint Paul, a Luther, a man who transformed humanity’s understanding of itself, transformed Christendom certainly.
Instead, I think he ends up a smaller figure than that–a Lincoln, a Thomas Jefferson, a St. Thomas More. A man who stood for great value and had a tremendous impact on the world, but maybe didn’t change it as much as he believed possible, or as much as he believed was necessary. Now whether that was his failing or ours, is a much more difficult question.
…I think the pope has to be a prophetic figure, somebody who changed humanity. What he offered, what he suggested, the road laid out, if followed, would have transformed humanity in a spiritual sense. He was calling at the end of the twentieth century for a spiritual life to become the center of man’s humanity, for all men, and certainly for all Catholics and all Christians to rediscover spirituality as the guiding force in their lives. If he had accomplished that, he would have been a millennial figure, not the man of the century. Somebody who produced much grander changes than that.
Instead he is a historical figure, he’s somebody who lives within the period of time, who had a message that had impact, that changed events, that changed lives, but did not nearly reach the dimensions that were the ambitions that its author set out.
At the end of the day, when you look at this extraordinary life and you see all that he’s accomplished, all the lives he’s touched, the nations whose history he’s changed, the way he’s become such a powerful figure in our culture, in all of modern culture–among believers and not–taking all of that into account, you’re left with one very disturbing and difficult question. On the one hand, the Pope can seem this lonely, pessimistic figure–a man who only sees the dark side of modernity, a man obsessed with the evils of the twentieth century, a man convinced that humankind has lost its way. A man so dark, so despairing, that he loses his audiences. That would make him a tragic figure, certainly.
On the other hand, you have to ask, is he a prophet? Did he come here with a message? Did he see something that many of us are missing? In that case, the tragedy is ours.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — who became Benedict XVI — was JP2’s right-hand man for his entire papacy, so what is said about JP2 can also be said to some degree about Ratzinger. To the extent they failed, it was because it would have been impossible for anybody to succeed in these times.
Nevertheless, the system they left in place, in which every cardinal who voted on BXVI’s successor had been named either by JP2 or BXVI, was supposed to be fail-safe. It was not supposed to produce a revolutionary figure like Francis. But it did. And he’s tearing down JP2’s and BXVI’s legacies, in substantive ways (e.g., what the pope is doing to Pontifical John Paul II Institute).
Those are my thoughts. I agree with my conservative Evangelical friend: it is beyond astonishing that the Catholic Church is being transformed into the Episcopal Church right before our eyes. It is one of the most important religious stories of my lifetime or anybody’s lifetime. It is one thing when the parish down the street is a hotbed of theological revolution. It is quite another when the Vatican is.
I would really like to hear from Catholics and other Church watchers willing to offer non-ranty, serious answers to my friend’s questions, which I’ll repeat:
Remember when all the trad/conservative Catholics were confidently claiming that JP2 and B16 had transformed the church through their wise appointments and driven out the “Spirit of Vatican II” once and for all? So what happened? Why didn’t it work out that way? I have looked for answers and haven’t found any.
Serious comments only. If you just want to take potshots at Rome, or at Rome’s critics, save yourself the trouble, because I’m not going to post your remarks.
One thing is for sure: the kind of appeal that conservative Catholic apologists made to potential converts like me — that Rome was a solid rock in a world of theological shifting sand — is no longer plausible. Francis has turned that to rubble.
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October 22, 2019
Taylor’s Damning Testimony
I don’t see how Trump avoids impeachment now:
The top American diplomat in Ukraine on Tuesday gave impeachment investigators a vivid and impassioned account of how multiple senior administration officials told him that President Trump blocked security aid to Ukraine and refused to meet the country’s leader until he agreed to publicly pledge to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals.
In testimony to impeachment investigators delivered in defiance of State Department orders, the diplomat, William B. Taylor Jr., sketched out in remarkable detail a quid pro quo pressure campaign on Ukraine that Mr. Trump and his allies have long denied. He said the president sought to condition the entire United States relationship with Ukraine — including a $391 million aid package whose delay put Ukrainian lives in danger — on a promise that the country would publicly investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his family.
His account implicated Mr. Trump, citing multiple sources inside the government. Those include a budget official who said during a secure National Security Council conference call in July that she had been instructed not to approve the security assistance for Ukraine, and that, Mr. Taylor said, “the directive had come from the president.”
Here’s a link to the full text of Taylor’s statement to the committee. From Page 6:
In a regular NSC secure video-conference call on July 18, I heard a staff person from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) say that there was a hold on security assistance to Ukraine but could not say why. Toward the end of an otherwise normal meeting, a voice on the call — the person was off-screen — said that she was from OMB and that her boss had instructed her not to approve any additional spending of security assistance for Ukraine until further notice. I and others sat in astonishment — the Ukrainians were fighting the Russians and counted on not only the training and weapons, but also the assurance of U.S. support. All that the OMB staff person said was that the directive had come from the President to the Chief of Staff to OMB. In an instant, I realized that one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened. The irregular policy channel was running contrary to the goals of longstanding U.S. policy.
I hope you’ll read the full statement. It reads like the testimony of an honest man pushed to the brink. Whether or not you agree with US policy on Ukraine, this is a shocking behind-the-scenes account of the total hash Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani have made of US foreign policy towards that country. If what Taylor testified is true, then they corrupted our foreign policy. Trump certainly demanded a quid pro quo, just like Mick Mulvaney said he did. Leaving aside the morality and legality of that act, you have to read the full Taylor statement — seriously — to appreciate the impossible position this White House puts US diplomats, foreign policy, and national security staffers in. We cannot run a government like this. We cannot have Rudy Giuliani running a shadow foreign policy.
To me, the most amazing thing about this debacle is how stupid and unnecessary it is. Donald Trump won the damn 2016 election! And yet, he is so obsessed with it that he has risked the fate of Ukraine, the reputation of the United States, and his own presidency on trying to strongarm the Ukrainian president to … investigate the Democrats’ possible Ukrainian connection to an election that he won. That, and to put Joe Biden in a bad position in 2020.
What a waste. A waste of a presidency. A waste of a world-historic opportunity to change things for the better. He threw it all away.
The Democratic House is going to impeach this clown. Mitch McConnell knows that. Trump will have put the Senate Republicans in a terrible position. And for what? When you consider what’s at stake for the Right if the Democrats win the White House, especially given that odds are improving that the Democrats will also take the Senate — well, it’s infuriating.
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View From Your Table
Cambridge, England
That’s King’s College Chapel across the street. Normally I wouldn’t publish this because it has faces in it, but it’s just too beautiful not to share.
A reader visiting Budapest sent this the other day:
Budapest, Hungary
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A (Formerly Woke) Pastor’s Awakening
Pastor S. Carter McNeese writes:
I’ve emailed you before, but I’m sure you get a lot.
I hear you and understand your absolute (totally justifiable) outrage at what is being done to that poor child in Texas. But in some ways, it gives me a little hope.
I was, as you may recall, raised in a fairly liberal family in the US South. Grew up in an evangelical mainline church (United Methodist Church) and definitely got the message early on that the Democrats and liberals in general were the “right” folks. Part of this was a New Deal hangover (when FDR gives you electricity, you don’t forget it), but much of it was the result of the Civil Rights movement and the actions of Nixon &Co. to play the “Southern Strategy” and, you know, undermine the Republic.
Over the years, as the Overton window in the Democratic Party has shifted to the left on social issues, the family, myself included for a time, shifted with it. If the party said that it was good to allow abortions, then it was good. If support of LGBTQQIA+ nonsense was the way to go, then gosh golly the UMC book of discipline must be wrong.
Even as recently as 2-3 years ago, I was pretty agnostic on many of these social issues. “I may not support it, but who am I to try and stop it, speak out against it, etc.” I was trying to hold that middle ground that Gushee talks about (hate to see what has happened to him. He was such a good ethicist until he all the sudden wasn’t).
What shifted me, fully and finally, was this Trans non-sense. It is, after all, just Gnosticism in a new guise: “my flesh and spirit are separate, my flesh is false, and must be brought into line with my spirit.”
Seeing where this was going, seeing that we were seeking to help these folks that suffer from what is clearly a mental illness that should be met with compassion and care, not support for their delusions, I knew that I had to rethink, from top to bottom, my assumptions about things. I read heavily, sought the Truth, and found it in the Reformed tradition. Reading folks like Rosaria Butterfield and Sam Allberry showed me that there was a side to this that I’d never considered.
But how, you may ask, does this give me hope?
Because even now my parents are seeing the extreme of all of this. Even they are seeing that what these children are being subjected to is too far — is, to be frank, abuse.
Like I said above, I’ve written to you before, as I’ve experienced this shift, and in fact you’ve used my emails before but I’ve always asked you to not use my real name. I no longer care. If you wish to use this, feel free to attach my name.
—
S. Carter McNeese
Pastor, Fairmont First Baptist Church
Fairmont, NC
Thank you, Pastor McNeese. Readers, this is an important shift: not only has the pastor changed his mind, but significantly, he is willing to use his name in public to speak out against this madness. Let this be an example. If we are not afraid to stand up and be counted, and to not be afraid of being attacked in the public square, we might be able to turn this around.
The propaganda is everywhere. Look at this, from a Lexington, Mass., public elementary school:
3/4 4th grade #students in Ms. Archibald’s class could clearly articulate what #genderidentity is to me and why it’s important to use #nonbinary language in describing people we don’t know yet.#JoyInLearning #EdEquity #LGBTwitter #WeAllBelong pic.twitter.com/tJaWvBEpHQ
— Johnny Cole (@LexingtonDEI) October 16, 2019
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Fourth graders. The trans-skeptical parents’ website 4thWaveNow tweeted:
Strange how we somehow didn’t need teachers to peddle this nonsense to kids until about 5 years ago…
An entire generation taught to think like this. Imagine where we are going to be as a society after 20 more years of this. Many of us are shocked that a jury in Dallas awarded sole parenting authority to a woman who wants to transition her seven-year-old to a female identity, over her ex-husband’s objections. At the rate we’re going, in another couple of decades, this isn’t even going to be an issue in most places. Resisting gender ideology is going to be seen by most people as a form of child abuse. The teachers and administrators at schools — the same places that are the source of this propagandizing today — will take sides with your gender-questioning child, and report you to authorities if you resist. You will lose your kids — and few if any people will be opposed to it, because they will have been instructed in gender ideology since early childhood.
This is all happening very, very fast. Do you know if your child’s school teaches gender ideology? If you don’t know, you had better make it your business to find out. And you need to organize with other parents and community leaders to fight it. 4th Wave Now is a good resource. So is the Kelsey Coalition. Mrs. DK, one of this blog’s regular readers, is part of a network of parents of trans and genderfluid kids who believe their children were used and abused by a system that exploited their dysphoria, and pushed them into making permanent changes to their body. She has said on this blog, and in private conversations with me, that her group includes religious people and atheists, liberals and conservatives, gay folks and straights. What unites them is anger over what the system — including schools — did to their kids, and how powerless it left them as parents.
From the Kelsey Coalition webpage in which people tell stories about things that are happening not in the future, but right now:
Parental rights are violated. In an attempt foster acceptance of differences, some schools teach young students about being transgender. This can lead vulnerable children to conclude that they were born in the wrong body. Many of our sons and daughters learned about this for the first time at school where transgender identities are common. When our children “came out”and requested name changes, we were not notified.
“Although the school knew our daughter was struggling with serious mental health issues, they changed her name and pronouns without our knowledge.”
“Behind our backs, the faculty and staff referred to her by her new name. We were told that their ‘hands were tied’ and that it was a law that they had to follow. Meanwhile, the school guidance counselor was advising our daughter about half-way houses because her parents did not support her.”
The propaganda machine in the media, the schools, and increasingly in the law is powerful and well-funded. It can be frightening to stand up to it. But what is the alternative? I have a lot of respect for Pastor McNeese for being willing to take a stand, and use his name. Why not you too? On its front page, the Kelsey Coalition has this quote:
“Our lives begin to end the day we stay silent about things that matter.” Martin Luther King
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