Rod Dreher's Blog, page 548

Cease That Desistance!

A reader comments on the “Cult Of Transgender” thread:

To those who are skeptical of the authenticity of the published letter and this situation in general, let me assure you that it is real and true. When it comes to teens, transgender is the new anorexia — a life-threatening trend/fad which is endangering vulnerable kids.

I do not have US figures, but in the UK there has been a 930% increase in referrals for children who believe they are transgender — and this increase was seen in only one year. http://www.transgendertrend.com/uk-news-930-rise-in-child-gender-identity-referrals/

There are many theories attempting to explain the increase; some of them include social contagion, homophobia (a girl who likes other girls needs to be “fixed” and turned into a boy so she is straight), the proliferation of pornography (porn causing boys to expect girls to perform sexually as they have seen in porn, girls escape this situation by becoming boys), girls not wanting to be treated as second class citizens so they “become male” hoping to be treated better, etc.

My own daughter professes to be a boy. It is a nightmare. It came out of nowhere at age 15 — this is not a case of a girl who always wanted to be a boy, or always acted like a boy. This is a girl who was proud to be a girl until she developed physically and boys and men started treating her like a piece of meat and a second class citizen. The nightmare is that doctors and therapists are not allowed to question why she wants to be a boy. The “cult of trans” dictates that her word must be taken or they can lose their professional standing. SO they are ready to prescribe testosterone shots and a double mastectomy despite the fact that she is a minor. These physical “medical treatments” for her psychological problem are permanent and barbaric. It is against “ethics” for professionals to provide any other treatment. It is a mother’s nightmare. It is real.

I do not mind if she is a lesbian, but I am absolutely against her desire to transition medically. It will not solve her problems. Her problems are in her mind and in a society that allows grown men to fetishize underage girls, and allows boys to demand any and every kind of pornogrpahic sex from girls.

Please visit 4thwavenow.com and read for yourself what is happening rather than me going on and on (believe me, I could). There is so much ground to cover in this sinister cult, and the website author does a much better job than I can. Trans is a sinister cult that our children are falling for and we need everyone’s help to educate kids, teachers, school counselors, doctors, parents, and therapists about what is really going on.

Yes, do visit 4thwavenow.com. It’s like reading samizdat for the sane and ideologically uncowed. There, I found this link to a recent New York magazine piece by Jesse Singal, who writes about overwhelming number of gender dysphoric kids — 80 percent — who eventually resolve their disharmony by identifying with their birth sex. This is called “desistance.” Excerpt:

Desistance doesn’t even come up by name in the Guardian article, but it’s an absolutely vital concept. Anyone thinking or writing about trans kids, in fact, should be familiar with exactly what this body of research does and doesn’t say, and how it applies to the early, evolving science of helping kids with gender dysphoria feel better.

Part of problem is that some people don’t accept the desistance findings at all — they argue that the studies demonstrating high levels of desistance in gender-dysphoric kids are fatally flawed, and further that the very concept of desistance itself is really just a pretense for allowing bigots to deny the reality of trans people’s identities. This is understandable, in light of the very real discrimination trans people face every day and past misdeeds committed by the mental-health Establishment, but it’s also unfortunate: We can’t have an intelligent, informed discussion about these tricky issues if we’re going to ignore what is, at the moment, a solid scientific consensus.

More:

Childhood gender dysphoria, in short, is complicated and deserves a nuanced public conversation. The increasingly popular belief that gender dysphoria must mean a child will identify as trans in the long run has the opposite effect: It renders a complicated subject simple; it makes it harder to ask the questions that need to be asked. That doesn’t help anyone.

Sane, balanced, reasonable, right? Singal doesn’t deny that gender dysphoria exists, but he says that to discuss what medical science does and does not tell us about it, we have to separate it from pro-trans ideology. You will not be surprised to discover that on trans and trans-positive sites, Singal was denounced as a bigot. 4thwavenow is on it.

UPDATE: Look at this comment from a reader:

I was an adolescent psychotherapist for the better part of the last decade, had to stop seeing the kids last year because I couldn’t in good conscience do what was being asked if me – to immediately validate all emergent identities without exploration. There was an explosion of trans expression right after Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time in 2014. Trans is absolute brainwashing, or brain stretching to the point where the brain strains and rips apart.

After stewing and fretting about this bizarre and mystifying contagion for the past two years I’ve finally come to view the phenomenon as a kind of Trojan horse in which our kids are packed inside. The children are all absolutely confused, rightly terrified of being linked or in any way associated with beliefs that have been deemed toxic and contaminated – anything from the western tradition. They are desperate to rid themselves of the contagion of their own history. Being “queer” is the new salvation, it is the new blood in which the children are to be cleansed of the sins of their fathers; the youth are celebrated mightily for their embracing of any lifestyle that erodes the power of the individual to stand alone – that erodes the sacredness and sovereignty of our very humanity.

Where I live their displays of adherence to the new dictate are ubiquitous. Firstly, the youth make themselves look deliberately ugly and or just strange, their appearance must function as a kind of constant disruption of the notion of any kind of underlying or essential order, they are walking, talking protestations. They must aggressify (that’s a made up word lol) their personas, as they have been taught any sort of coherence, or beauty is intricately linked to oppression and evil. As they do not wish to be seen as either of these things (in the new Queer world, original sin only exists exclusively outside of queer – to be queer is to be saved) so they embrace deformity, dissociate themselves from their biological imperatives, their inheritance, they literally sacrifice their biological future and potential to gain elevation in the new queer order. These are the new invaders, they are the ones protected and cheered for sacking the old order; their vanity is stoked daily by all media insuring they will continue with the ravaging of a world they were taught to consciously hate before they ever had chance to know it personally.

The children are the sacrificial lambs, but they are too young to know what they have given up and have been made too intoxicated by unearned power bestowed upon them by whoever is most benefitting from their sacrifice.

There are powerful people in the world today whose aim is much further than I in my lowly life can even imagine. It sounds crazy but to me the trans/queer collectivity is probably being enlisted to further destabilize the fidelity of our country which in the past has sought to strengthen itself through strengthening its individuals. That’s the old evil way though, if you can manage to help yourself you are now associated with the new sin of inherited and unearned competence.

The powerful people are destroying institutions (however they can do it) that will interfere with their interest in seizing control of larger and larger swathes of territory. They don’t like strong religion because if makes people too self-sufficient, or as we used to say, “free”. This trans propaganda is so over the top and provides such a targeted destruction of our most basic foundational beliefs about reality, I can’t in good conscience see its current influence as anything less than a hostile takeover of the last bit of uncontested reality so many of us shared.

Trans is not a liberation movement, the children are not made free. Those of us who see this terror for what it is will continue to be actively ostracized, our voices silenced.

I was listening to a pretty widely viewed popular “anarchist atheist” podcast recently, and even this smart guy said he was astounded at how he was finding affinity more and more with Christians, rather than atheists. Why? He said the Christians offered him more freedom of movement than the God of the atheists – that being the state. Interesting. As an atheist I too have been finding myself inextricably draw to the truth of the cross.

My utter and total dependence upon the God of my childhood was unknown to me until recently.

UPDATE.2: This, from a regular reader who asked me to shield her name and alter this post slightly to protect her identity:

If your email security is any good, you probably can’t do attachments, but I’ve clipped on a photo of myself at 19, just for street cred ;). I wanted to share my experience, and say that while I find the trend toward hormone treatments for children alarming, I don’t find the trans “trend” at all surprising, or even alarming, in itself.

If you can’t see the pic I attached [I could — RD], it shows me at nineteen, with my shaved head and wire-rimmed glasses, looking for all the world like a fourteen year old boy. I looked that way for most of the time I was at University. I dressed in mens’ jeans and the white Hanes T-shirts that come in packs of three. I was startled, but not really displeased, the first time a retail clerk referred to me as “sir”.

It was so much cheaper/simpler than dealing with all the fussiness of “girl” clothing, and I felt that it kept me safe. I was fantastically emotionally immature, I was not ready for any kind of “relationship”. I did not want attention from men (or anyone else, really), and looking this way got me what I wanted– it exempted me from the college dating scene. At college, before I cut off my hair, I only got asked out by creeps. After: nobody ever asked me out, propositioned me, wolf-whistled at me, nothing… I had successfully made myself invisible to men. And it made my life simpler and safer.

I was socially awkward, probably an aspie, never had a clue if people were lying to me or not, and knew, to the core of my being, that “sleep with whomever you please” sexual mores would lead to my being exploited and hurt. I didn’t want that, and I didn’t (at the time) belong to any church, so claiming religious exemption wasn’t an option. If I were using the modern trendy terms, I would have called myself asexual.

If I had to guess, I’d say a lot of “trans” kids are doing the same thing, but now they have a convenient word for it, and (more importantly) legal protection. The modern dating scene, for a long time, has been absolutely toxic, especially if you are a girl. Opting out as a “normal” kid gets you branded a freak, and makes you a target for harassment. But opting out as “trans” or “alternate sexuality”– just think about it: nobody gets to argue with you! Suddenly, instead of being a freak who gets targeted for being a virgin and a prude, and getting completely ignored by the adults whose job it is to protect you, you have enthusiastic support from your school staff. It’s sad that we’ve come to this, but I think that it’s a cry for help. I know I was not the only socially-clueless girl who wanted an “out” from the predatory sexual customs of my peers. And if you don’t have a rock-solid religious community to back you up, what other options are there? There is no cheering section for people who don’t want to complicate their lives with sex. No moral support for those of us who, at sixteen, eighteen, twenty-three, weren’t ready yet. Nobody (outside of hardcore religious community), is out there rooting for people who want lifelong commitment without playing the “trying-on-shoes” game first.

Of course kids are deciding they’re trans. What other options are there?

UPDATE.3: This just in:

I tried to write this letter a few times.  Each time I found myself ranting.  So at the expense of that, I’ll keep it simple.

To begin, I just completed my teaching licensing program which required a year and a half of student teaching in a large, metropolitan school district—per metrics, one of the worst in the country.  So I knew there would be challenges but one of the largest challenges I faced centered around the issues of transgenderism.

First, it is not so much a cult as it is a fad.  Many of the self-identifying trans students I had  would have been social outcasts when I went to high school.  Instead, they are now seen as ‘cool’ and ‘brave’ by their peers, other teachers, and the administration.  This seemingly creates a self-perpetuating social system where being trans is a means for social acceptance.  So the kid that could be on the outside looking in, the ‘loner’, was now running with the cool crowd.  How many of these students were serious gender dysphoric of simply using the identity of bring trans to be seen as cool?  I don’t know.

But what I do know is that at this age, kids want to be seen as part of the group and they ‘try’ on various identities until one ‘sticks’—per cognitive psychology.  So, at the root of this fad, is a message of social atomization.  Which tracks with the macro social movements where we see large segments of society being atomized and removed from associations that once provided self-identity and meaning (Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” comes to mind).  Thus, for many students who would be socially isolated and left without ‘meaning’, the identity of trans provides a social status and self-meaning—for better or worse (mostly the later).

Second, one letter you posted called on teachers to help end this fad.  They cannot and many will not.  They cannot because, I’ll speak for what I experienced in my district, the district central office has unilaterally institutionalized LBGQT+ to the point of where you either accept it or you do not have your contract re-upped.

For example, the principle at the high school I was at, tried to quash the avalanche of LBQGT+ propaganda being posited by the teachers (which I’ll get to in a second) and the students.  He wouldn’t allow posters to be hung in the school nor symbols that would perpetuate their messages.  I never heard his reasons for doing so.  But for doing so, in addition to some of his personal views he aired during staff meetings, he was mandated by the district to attend sensitivity training multiple times.  He had to be brainwashed, in other words.  Most likely it was a simple choice: attend or else we’ll begin termination hearings.  Central office, sensing that there were others who held his view, brought in the director of the state flagship university’s gender studies department to instruct us during a school staff meeting about how being transphobic was the new racism and that we need to start using genderless pronouns.  Apparently he/she, him/her, etc. are transphobic.  Instead we were ‘encouraged’ to use the following nonsense: ze, zie, hir, hirs, etc.  While a few of us remained healthfully skeptical of this nonsense, you had to go along if you didn’t want to be blackballed for the rest of your career.

And I had to be very selective of the teachers who I spoke to about this.  At times, it felt like those of us not aboard the trans train were operating like an underground cabal.  If we were caught, we’d be brought before the administration and be publicly decapitated and our careers would be ruined.  So we were a small-tight-knit group among a sea of other teachers who were front-line cheerleading this trans stuff.  See, many teachers, at least in urban districts like this one, are left of Bernie.  The Right has abandoned education and the results are obvious.  (Tangentially: we need to re-think and reform our university schools of education—the real hotbeds of true and open socialist pedagogues.)

So no, you will not be able to get teachers to support any push-back on trans issues in school.  Many students report microagressions to their “ally” teachers who serve as the go-between, bypassing administration, and going straight to central office.  That is, many teachers are the ones actively working to create trans-friendly school atmospheres–either by their own preaching or rooting out unbelievers and skeptics.

Having seen all this, it’s sickening and it’s one of the main reasons why I decided to find employment in a district I knew wasn’t as openly LBGTQ+.

Just to show you how bad things have become in education, any whiff of this email attached to me would be the end of my days in public education.  But I had to share with you what’s really going on in schools.

Back in 2002, I interviewed a Catholic seminarian who came home from his first year at seminary and told his devout parents about all the gay sex going on all around him. He said his own parents refused to believe him. They could not accept that such a thing could possibly be true, therefore it wasn’t true. But, of course, it was.

They’re Coming For Christian Lawyers

Well, it has happened. Law professor Eugene Volokh blogs about the latest move from the American Bar Association. In this excerpt, Volokh quotes from a new provision in the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct, described by Volokh as “an influential document that many states have adopted as binding on lawyers in their state.” In the passage below, the boldfaced parts were highlighted by Volokh:

It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to . . . engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law. This paragraph does not limit the ability of a lawyer to accept, decline, or withdraw from a representation in accordance with Rule 1.16. This paragraph does not preclude legitimate advice or advocacy consistent with these rules.

Discrimination and harassment . . . includes harmful verbal or physical conduct that manifests bias or prejudice towards others. Harassment includes sexual harassment and derogatory or demeaning verbal or physical conduct. Sexual harassment includes unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other unwelcome verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature. The substantive law of antidiscrimination and anti-harassment statutes and case law may guide application of paragraph (g).

Conduct related to the practice of law includes representing clients; interacting with witnesses, coworkers, court personnel, lawyers and others while engaged in the practice of law; operating or managing a law firm or law practice; and participating in bar association, business or social activities in connection with the practice of law. Lawyers may engage in conduct undertaken to promote diversity and inclusion without violating this rule by, for example, implementing initiatives aimed at recruiting, hiring, retaining and advancing [diverse] employees or sponsoring diverse law student organizations.

Volokh points out that under this rule, a legal education seminar in which a lawyer, in discussing a case or a legal dilemma, said something that could be construed as critical of, say, Muslims, or gays, or transgenders, he could be disciplined by his state bar. More Volokh:

Or say that you’re at a lawyer social activity, such as a local bar dinner, and say that you get into a discussion with people around the table about such matters — Islam, evangelical Christianity, black-on-black crime, illegal immigration, differences between the sexes, same-sex marriage, restrictions on the use of bathrooms, the alleged misdeeds of the 1 percent, the cultural causes of poverty in many households, and so on. One of the people is offended and files a bar complaint.

Again, you’ve engaged in “verbal . . . conduct” that the bar may see as “manifest[ing] bias or prejudice” and thus as “harmful.” This was at a “social activit[y] in connection with the practice of law.” The state bar, if it adopts this rule, might thus discipline you for your “harassment.” And, of course, the speech restrictions are overtly viewpoint-based: If you express pro-equality viewpoints, you’re fine; if you express the contrary viewpoints, you’re risking disciplinary action.

Bottom line, according to Volokh: “the ABA wants to do exactly what the text calls for: limit lawyers’ expression of viewpoints that it disapproves of.”

Read his whole blog entry. 

So, let’s say that a lawyer in a state that adopts this new ABA guideline joins the Catholic Law Society. Given the Catholic Church’s official position on homosexuality, would she face professional sanction simply for joining such a group? The potential for oppression and persecution is enormous.

This is the kind of thing I keep talking about: that orthodox Christians are going to be de facto excluded from entire professions through licensing and related requirements. We have to fight it whenever and wherever we can. Eugene Volokh is not a Christian, but he’s a staunch free speech and expression advocate, so he can be counted on to take a strong stand. What about liberal lawyers? The fact that something this outrageous passed the ABA is not a good sign.

But it is a sign of the times. It’s the Law of Merited Impossibility in action. Keep that in mind in reading the comments section of this blog entry, when the usual suspects arise to say that this really is no big deal. It’s a very, very big deal. And it won’t stop here. Maybe — maybe — the ABA won’t get away with this. But consider the kind of culture within the American legal profession that would even pass such an outrageously bigoted rule change in the first place.

A Dissenting View Of SB1146

A reader writes:

I am choosing to email you on this as I prefer not to post publicly on blogs. That being said I will say that your recent and past posts that mention this particular Senate Bill in California have been disingenuous and borderline dishonest.

You have posted numerous comments from other internet writers, which have fear-mongered and actually made things up out of whole cloth on this bill. There was the accusation that it would prohibit religious services, which is false, there was the accusation that it would force the elimination of religious doctrine-based codes of conduct, also false, and now that Cal Grant money will be denied, also not correct.

I would suggest you actually ignore all of the internet commentary on this and go directly to the legislative analysis of the bill, which has been bouncing in and out of various committees for months and been subject to numerous revisions and reductions.

Basically, the first 2 sections require that schools receiving a Title IX exemption, must publicize that they have the exemption and the reason for it for all current and prospective students, why is being honest about how you run your organization for current and future employees and customers (students) a violation of religious liberty. Wouldn’t it be better for Biola, Azusa Pacific, or Cal Baptist to let people know where they stand as an encouragement for them to avoid the place? Seems if a gay students knows a school has a strong moral code and an exemption from Federal anti-discrimination rules due to their religious doctrine they would want to avoid it, and it would be in the schools interest to discourage those students from coming, No? It does not give the state Student Financial Aid commission the authority to withhold Cal Grants from students who are enrolled in such an institution.

The third is the interesting one. It provides the schools the opportunity to enforce their moral code of conduct, vis-a-vis gender and sexual ethics, and thus be exempted from state action provided they actually follow their code 100% of the time with 100% of their student body and staff. I.e. the schools cannot make exceptions for any reasons, or they have to make exemption for all reasons.

Cal Baptist University is a good example here. The school has a strict moral code of conduct, including sex-segregated everything, no parties, music, alcohol, etc. on campus. The school also requires twice weekly attendance at church services, and mandatory bible study (Baylor University should take a lesson from its smaller sister school in California). Our neighbors [who send their kids there] are [not Christian], but no exceptions were made for any of the rules. Under SB 1146 Cal Baptist would be protected from state action, and would not have to change its on campus or attendance and employment policies.

What surprises me in this discussion is that no one – not you, nor any of the other “out of state” individuals who think they need to have a say in the laws of the State of California – discusses the private right of action clause. So, in the scenario I described above, if a gay student were to be admitted to and attend Cal Baptist, they would need to follow the rules with no exception, and the state’s human rights commission would not interfere as long as the policies were not applied unevenly, nor would that student be prevented from spending their Cal Grant money there. However, that imaginary gay student would have the ability under this bill, should it become law, to sue the school in civil court for perceived discrimination, and while the school might be able to defend itself and win such a case, the cost of doing so would be the real challenge. The schools would have to likely carry higher insurance limits, and be more restrictive regarding admitting students, etc. They would also be subject to random and possibly frequent litigation, which would drive up tuition costs, and potentially drive away students and prospective faculty.

In my opinion, this is a far greater danger than harping on the imaginary case of Cal Grants being denied. This is also where your “beloved” SJWs can wreak havoc at such schools, and while some, like larger Catholic schools – U. San Diego, Santa Clara Un., etc. – may be willing to accommodate, other smaller schools like Loma Linda, or Point Loma Nazarene may not be, and would be at risk of being sued into submission. On a side note, the Pepperdine issue should be seen separately. Pepperdine has long quit being a religious school with a high moral standard, and has become a moderately elite business and law school with a pricy MBA program. Ironically, it was the same Ken Starr, of whitewater fame, who pushed this transition, and then moved on to create a mess at Baylor. The moral code apparently got in the way of getting MBA students and faculty, and building a Division 1 caliber athletic program. This is the same issue that we see with a lot of the Catholic universities – San Diego, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Loyal Marymount, etc. They sacrificed religiosity for elite status and sports.

Let’s come back to the Cal Grant issue for a moment. SB 1146 is currently back in the Senate Appropriations Committee. Why is it in appropriations you may wonder? Well, the Cal Grant issue is a big reason. The concern of some legislators isn’t that Cal Grants would be denied, but rather fewer students would use them at private colleges, meaning that more of them would be used at one of the 23 California State University campuses, which would cost the CSU system money in terms of lost tuition revenue. The estimate is that for each extra 450 students receiving Cal Grants at a CSU, it costs the state $100,000. This cost would be higher should the extra Cal Grant money flow to one of the 10 UC campuses, as tuition there is much higher. So it is in the states interest to make sure a good portion of those Cal Grant dollars go to private schools. The other issue, of course, is that if those students, who might be admitted to a private religious school (which often have higher admission standards that CSU) would instead choose a CSU campus, because of the Cal Grant (which is a need-based program), they would push a certain number of students out of CSU and into local community colleges, which in turn might restrict access for some students to those schools.

This is not a small issue, and makes up one of the major points in the legislative analysis in the committee discussions of the bill. As such it is one of the reasons that the bill continues to bounce around between the various committees. It still hasn’t been brought to the Assembly. This doesn’t mean that the current pack of politicians in Sacramento won’t eventually send the bill to Jerry Brown, but it is a big reason why the bill has taken so long and been revised so many times.

Given the financial implication I doubt that Cal Grants would be denied, it is easier to sell this bill if there is no financial burden to the state, which it would have if the Cal Grant money were to leave schools like Cal Baptist. In fact, I would see that should the state bar Cal Grant money from religious schools, this would likely be a First Amendment violation, as this would amount to government discrimination on the basis of religious belief, which would be actionable in Federal courts. I doubt the State wants that headache.

As stated before, given the litigiousness of society, I see the private right of action clause to be far more concerning, and I am surprised you haven’t looked at that aspect of it. Granted when private individuals and private organizations go to court against each other, it is difficult to wave the religious liberty banner, as the constitutional protections are not against other people, but against government action. If I remember correctly, the private right to action clause in the Indiana RFRA that cause a significant portion of the business community opposition to that bill and which ultimately had to be removed. Such a clause would create a near chaotic environment.

This bill is more an example of how legislators pander to, and “reward” their donors with ridiculous laws in order to make it look like they are doing something. Trust me, the Californian legislature does this crap all of the time, and the bulk of these bills never make it to the governor’s desk. Should it become law, which is still up in the air, as there is a good chance it will languish until the end of the year, in which case it would be permanently tabled and have to be restarted in the new, post-election, legislative session starting in January. There is a good chance that it may not happen, as Lara has already fulfilled his duty to his supporters.

I thank the reader for his letter. Comments, the rest of you? Does this reader have a point?

Exporting The Anti-Culture

A reader writes:

I’m an avid reader of your blog – never miss a post – and I deeply appreciate your coverage of the cultural implosion that’s going on in America because of the rise of individual autonomy as our society’s organizing principle, and the dissolution of bonds, between God and man and between man and his fellow man. But I think there’s another angle to the story that’s worth exploring: how deeply it affects the rest of the world, especially in places you might not expect it to.

I grew up in an American expat family living in a Persian Gulf monarchy. This is a place that underwent very rapid modernization in a short time, where the majority of the population literally went from dwelling in mud brick huts and scratching out a subsistence (usually as farmers or fishermen) to living in air-conditioned apartments and villas and working in climate-controlled office buildings, commuting between the two in cars on superhighways. All in the space of a single generation.

Looking back, I can see now that the collapse of traditional institutions was in an advanced stage, even before I left to return to the U.S. for college nearly a decade ago. People became atomized as they moved from their native towns and villages to suburbs in metropolitan areas. From inside those new homes in suburbia, they were bombarded with American movies, music, TV shows, and other mass media, and later the internet. You can imagine how corrosive this was in a conservative Islamic society with strict standards and codes for sexual purity. Every young man I knew was hooked on porn and video games.

What struck me most in reading your coverage of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is how much the cultural decay he describes in Appalachia tracks with what I saw in the rural areas of the country where I lived. Growing up, we were friends with a local family that lived out in the middle of nowhere, in a small village on the very edge of the desert. They were dirt poor and had eleven kids (including a son my age who I was good friends with), but every time we visited them, they were incredibly hospitable. They would really pull out all the stops for us, insisting we spend the night at their house and offering us the best they had in the way of food and company.

We fell a bit out of touch in my early teen years, but when we visited them again later on for a daughter’s wedding, I was amazed at what I found. Their son introduced me to most of the young men in the village who were in their late teens and early 20s. They were all either unemployed or worked dead-end jobs. I assume they were up to their eyeballs in debt, too, since they seemed to have spent a great deal of what money they had on expensive cars and cell phones. Cruising around town with my friend and some of his buddies in one of these cars, to the bass-heavy beat of an American hip-hop track, he pointed out to me the village prostitute – a young man who would, I was told, accept money to have sex with other men in the village while “acting the part of the woman.” (Real, flesh-and-blood women are not available for extramarital sex in this culture.) I was shocked to see my friend slip a pack of condoms into his pocket later on, at his house.

Sex between men didn’t just happen because of the absence of women, though. Even in this small town, outright homosexual behavior among the men was on public display. At the wedding we attended, members of the village performed a very traditional dance where a group of men and a group of women congregate on opposite sides of an open space. The two sides call out responses to one another while they dance on their separate sides, and it’s virtually the only contact men and women have during the whole of the celebrations. During the dance, two young men who had grown out their hair (very unusual in this culture) participated flamboyantly on the women’s side. In a society where women and men are kept strictly separate, no one even bothered to try to prevent them from joining, because it was widely known that they were gay and wouldn’t bother females.

I have many more examples of things like this. If the anti-culture can penetrate an inland village in the deserts of Arabia, is anywhere safe?

My experiences make me skeptical of talk of a “clash of civilizations” between traditionally Muslim and traditionally Christian countries. Modernity, as conceived by Western society, is in the process of erasing Christianity, and it’s already made major inroads in wealthy, conservative Muslim countries. This, I think, is key to understanding the appeal of groups like ISIS. I don’t buy the materialist explanation that ISIS is just a product of the discontents of modernity. Nor do I think that it’s necessarily the logical conclusion of Islam as a religion. ISIS and Al Qaeda are what happens when Muslims who are assimilated to modernity react against it, but retain its key principles. I can’t stress this enough. There’s a whole history behind this that goes back to the Muslim Brotherhood and a time in the late 19th century when Western Enlightenment thinking was introduced in Muslim countries through colonialism and cultural exchange. It’s a long story, but in a nutshell, ISIS, Al Qaeda and the modern Salafist movement are one product of Muslim thinkers’ efforts to fuse Islam with Enlightenment ideas about reason. Even as they claim to reject modernity, they can’t escape it because it permeates their mindset. But that’s another story.

Fantastic letter! Back in 2009, our Jeremy Beer wrote an essay focusing on Philip Rieff’s concept of the “anti-culture”, and how it applies to the clash between same-sex marriage supporters and traditionalists. Oh, how long ago it all seems from the vantage point of 2016. You should be aware that Rieff considered our culture to be an “anti-culture” because it denies the things that any culture needs to sustain itself. Excerpts:

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece on Philip Rieff for the American Conservative. One of the themes of Rieff’s work on which I focused was his concept of anti-culture—the idea that in the twentieth-century West there had risen to social dominance not any particular culture but a suspicion of all cultures, which consisted in authoritative institutions and internalized psychological demands—you know, guilt. Nothing any longer regulated individual conduct except for the idea that nothing should regulate individual conduct.

I’ve been ruminating on this idea of anti-culture ever since I first encountered it. At first I found it to be one of those insights that is incredibly illuminating. I still think that it’s a useful conceptual tool, but I also think that Rieff had missed an important point, which is that in order to persist, even a therapeutic anti-culture needed to become, well, a culture. And that is what has happened.

The truth is that we have a culture that is growing in its psychological power, and increasing its sociological foothold, everyday. We have our thou-shalt-nots. We live within a web of mutually reinforcing nos, taboos, do-not-discusses, and impossible-to-think-otherwises. This web is the harder to see, sometimes, because it is rooted in an ideology that claims to be content-free, neutral, procedural—liberalism (in the deep philosophical sense, needless to say). This is the point of Jim Kalb in his The Tyranny of Liberalism, and I think that he is substantially right. Kalb sums up the ideology of liberalism as the enforcement of “equal freedom.” But it is important to understand, as Kalb does, that this ideology does not simply issue in a set of political or social doctrines, but in a culture in the profoundly anthropological, Rieffian/Freudian sense. And the culture of liberalism—like all cultures—is essentially subrational.

More:

I think that we are seeing this play out concretely in the case of gay marriage. More and more, it has been noticed, proponents of gay marriage find it impossible to believe that they share the globe, much less the same nation, city, or (God forbid) neighborhood, with people who cannot see that gay marriage is an obvious right and cause of justice. Gay-marriage proponents appear to be irrationally angry, but think of it this way: they are disgusted by the fact of opposition to same-sex marriage much in the same way that, say, American pioneers on the prairie were disgusted by the culinary habits of the American Indian (eating dogs, digging in to a freshly killed buffalo and eating its raw organs, etc.). The ways in which the cultural Other thinks, the things he believes, if they are intelligible at all, are usually simply abominations, and that is that.

And:

I recently attended an evangelical Christian wedding in Indiana. The celebrating pastor spent a good five minutes excoriating the concept of same-sex marriage. It seemed strange, and viewed in isolation it was clearly out of place. But in cultural terms, it was understandable. The resurgent populism that we see so much of lately, and that is proving to create pliant material for power-seeking right-wing demagogues, represents the desperate cry of a culture under siege. This populism is the inchoate yelp of people whose cultural terms are failing them and are no longer validated by their social and political institutions. Like cornered Indians pushed into mountain retreats, many of our Middle Americans are retrenching, engaging in ancient rituals now out of anger and dismay as much as piety, lashing out, and with all of this thereby confirming to the dominant coastal Other their basic inhumanity.

Eradication or education—these are the only two choices, bellowed the editors of pioneer newspapers, referring to the heathen wild Indians in their midst. How much more humane to educate than to eradicate? replied the good-hearted liberals who heard the question, and accepted its terms. And so they saved the Indians by ripping their babies out of their mothers’ arms at gunpoint and marching them off to schools to learn the ways of their culture, or How to Be Human.

Now we know how it feels. A powerful new culture is asserting itself. We are reprising a very old story, indeed.

Read the whole thing. It appeared in 2009, and is as fresh as the day it was published — even fresher, in light of the way public school officials are interposing themselves between parents and children who say they are transgender (see the updates on this post from earlier today). As the “pioneers” have become far more powerful on this front than they were in 2009, the “Indians” have become far weaker. Does this mean that the Benedict Option will be the Christian equivalent of self-defined reservations?

Maybe — and anybody looking at quality of life statistics on Indian reservations today cannot take any comfort in that metaphor. On the other hand, I was reading something this week — maybe one of you posted it, but I can’t find it right now — talking about how during the pioneer days, European settlers noticed something strange about their interactions with the Native Americans. Europeans who had been kidnapped by Natives and who grew accustomed to living tribally only very rarely could be persuaded to return to civilization. Many of them, when dragged back, longed to return to live in the more primitive way — and if given the chance, they returned to the tribe. Conversely, Natives brought to live among Europeans usually failed to thrive. This puzzled European Americans, who thought the benefits, material and otherwise, of their civilization was perfectly obvious. And yet.

Is there a lesson in this for us orthodox Christians in the Benedict Option age? Talk to me.

UPDATE: A reader points out that the Native American anecdote came from yesterday’s excellent David Brooks column, which is correct. Thanks! Excerpts:

In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one.

This struck them as strange. Colonial society was richer and more advanced. And yet people were voting with their feet the other way.

The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. Benjamin Franklin observed the phenomenon in 1753, writing, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”

During the wars with the Indians, many European settlers were taken prisoner and held within Indian tribes. After a while, they had plenty of chances to escape and return, and yet they did not. In fact, when they were “rescued,” they fled and hid from their rescuers.

Sometimes the Indians tried to forcibly return the colonials in a prisoner swap, and still the colonials refused to go. In one case, the Shawanese Indians were compelled to tie up some European women in order to ship them back. After they were returned, the women escaped the colonial towns and ran back to the Indians.

Even as late as 1782, the pattern was still going strong. Hector de Crèvecoeur wrote, “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European.”

I first read about this history several months ago in Sebastian Junger’s excellent book “Tribe.” It has haunted me since. It raises the possibility that our culture is built on some fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled.

The native cultures were more communal. As Junger writes, “They would have practiced extremely close and involved child care. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others. They would have almost never been alone.”

Please read the entire Brooks column. This information is going to be important to me as I revise (again) the Ben Op book.

The Cult Of Transgender

A reader comments on an earlier thread; emphases below are mine:

As a parent living the nightmare of having a teen who suddenly announces she’s transgender, I can tell you there are NO doctors who will do anything but agree. There is NO science behind this. There is NO way to medically “diagnose” her. Her therapist knows that she is not transgender but fears there’s no way we can stop her. Three of her closest friends have already had full transition, paid for by their parents, so it is difficult for her to understand why we won’t do the same. It is no different than having your child captured by a cult, only this time the cult is a societal bandwagon which wants to do permanent physical harm to her perfectly healthy female body, all in the name of “love”. As one of Rod’s sisters in the ancient faith, I ask for your prayers.

You might recall earlier this summer I posted this piece that included an excerpt of a conversation I had in Baltimore earlier in the year:

She said, “I know people accuse you of being alarmist all the time, but let me tell you that they aren’t raising teenagers in this culture.”

The woman told me that at her kids’ high school, a shocking number of students are going to their parents asking to be put on hormones and asking for surgery, because they are transgender. This is the cool thing, and the school is falling all over itself to be supportive, and to encourage an “ally” culture.

“What about the parents?” I said.

“They’re going along with it,” she replied.

“Why on earth?!” I said.

“Because they don’t want to lose their kids. Because everything in the culture tells them they should. Because they think that’s how they love their child. And these parents usually become the fiercest LGBT advocates.”

She told me that the high school kids are now sorting themselves by where they are on the gender spectrum. She added that her brother is a liberal Democrat, an atheist, and a biologist. He tells her that he’s extremely worried about this trans thing. The science simply isn’t there to justify these radical interventions, but scientists are terrified to speak out because of the general atmosphere in academia around these issues now.

Earlier this year, I contacted a scientist about a strictly scientific question related to biology and homosexuality, but he refused to comment. I found that strange, because my question wasn’t ideologically loaded at all. It was just scientific, and his answer presumably would have been too. He said that in academia, there is among professors now such fear of the mob that many of them figure it’s safer to keep one’s mouth shut rather than say something that one of these young Jacobins will take as offensive, no matter how absurd that reading is, and then set about ginning up the mob to destroy the scholar’s professional life.

If this isn’t McCarthyism, what is? It doesn’t become any less McCarthyist because it’s done by the cultural left.

God help the poor parents living this nightmare with their children, because the kind of professionals — doctors and others — who ought to be there reining in this insanity appear to have been totally compromised.

It cannot be the case that there are so many truly transgendered young people in the country. To call something with such severe physiological consequences a “fad” is too trite, but the transgender thing seems to be a faddish way for teenagers struggling to figure out how to relate to the world sexually to resolve the normal stresses of the maturation process. My belief is that there are and always have been teenagers who question their sexuality, and maybe even their gender identity, but most of them resolve these questions conventionally. We know for sure that this is the case with transgenders. A 2008 medical study found that most gender dysphoric youths had resolved their dysphoria by adulthood, without transitioning. Most of that group turned out to be gay or bisexual. Had they been put on high doses of hormones or even had surgery, they would have done potentially or actually irreversible damage to their bodies.

But today we live in a cultural climate in which to have ordinary questions about one’s sexuality is to be drawn into a powerful cultural movement that is celebrated by the media, and that demonizes anyone who challenges its radical claims. They have torn down the cultural and psychological barriers that in the past would have guided young people through the often difficult psychosexual terrain of adolescence and early adulthood. Now there is no road map. To be lost is to find yourself, they say.

As longtime readers know, we homeschool our kids, so they are not exposed to the usual American pop culture trends. We do not fully shelter them from the culture, not at all, but we curate what they are allowed to see. We have zero participation in American television culture, except for old things we choose to watch with Netflix and Amazon Prime. Point is, we are blissfully unaware of how the cult spreads through the culture. Lately I’ve been hearing parents who are fully part of the culture complaining that LGBT messaging is very strong in pop culture now, and that to disagree with the party line, so to speak, is becoming literally unthinkable for their kids’ generation. Which is precisely the point.

We are going to have to take radical steps to withdraw from this popular culture if we are going to spare our kids its madness. I was talking last night over dinner with my friends about how completely clueless most parents are about the nature and pervasiveness of the threat. As Catholics, they were talking about how so many of their pastors, including bishops, desperately want to believe that everything is going to be okay, and that nobody should rock the boat. Meanwhile, the boat is about to go over the falls. This is not just pastors and bishops, though; this is most parents. Why do they do this? Because if what we are warning them about is true, then they are going to have to take drastic steps for the sake of their children’s faith and moral sanity. That is something most people would prefer not to do, so they deal with the tension by denying the threat.

Back in the late 1990s, PBS broadcast a Frontline documentary called “The Lost Children Of Rockdale County.” It begins with a syphilis epidemic in an upscale high school in suburban Atlanta. When public health officials began to investigate, they uncovered a culture of teenage promiscuity within the school that beggared imagination. How did this happen? Watching the show — and I urge you to follow the link and do so — revealed that these relatively affluent parents were disengaged, and trusted the culture to form their kids. It was too much bother to dig in deep with their kids, and guide them. The parents were laid-back, so the kids followed popular culture and their own instincts, straight into hell. Excerpts from the transcript:

NARRATOR: State health officials, fearing a widening epidemic, called in Claire Sterk, a Dutch-born professor at Emory University’s School of Public Health. It was to Sterk that some of the children began to reveal the details of their sexual activity.

Prof. CLAIRE STERK, Emory Univ. School of Public Health: It was not uncommon, when all the young people would get together, to engage in group sex. There was group sex going on in terms of one guy having sex with one of the girls, and then the next guy having sex with the same girl. There was group sex going on in terms of one girl having sex with multiple male partners at the same time, multiple females having sex with each other at the same time. I would say that the only type of group sex that I did not hear about in this overall context was group sex between just guys.

NARRATOR: In the end, 17 young people tested positive for syphilis. More than 200 others were exposed and treated. Approximately 50 of them reported being involved in extreme sexual behavior.

CYNTHIA NOEL: You don’t expect to see a 14-year-old with 20, 30, 40, 50 or 100 sex partners. You expect that of someone who is more into the line of being a prostitute or something. And these girls were not homeless. They were not abused in any way. These were just normal, everyday, regular kids.

More:

Prof. CLAIRE STERK: A lot of the adolescents had parents who worked, were at home alone, had parents who put in 40, 60, 80-hour work weeks and were doing that to insure that all the resources that they wanted to give to their children were available.

BETH ROSS, Dir. Counseling, Rockdale County Schools: The activities they were involved in, whether it would be sexual or otherwise, the majority of their behavior was taking place between right after school and right before parents came home from work, like between 3:00 and 7:00, and some of it late at night then, after midnight, after the parents would go to sleep. [www.pbs.org: More on the state’s investigation]

NICOLE: Most of my friends’ parents were not the kind of parents that really cared. They cared what went on, but if it interfered with their lives they didn’t really- wouldn’t- they didn’t want to bother with it.

More:

INTERVIEWER: When you came home from being out with all these kids and you saw your parents, what did you think?

AMY: I felt ashamed because I was just- I was, like, “Oh!” You know? I’ve been around some bad people, and coming home, and I would just- a lot of times, I would try just to go down to my room and not have to talk to them. A lot of times I would be high when I came home, so I really tried not to talk to them or look at them or anything.

FRANK: I knew it was possible that it was happening, you know, that she was sexually active. But we didn’t sit down and talk about the diseases and dangers that are out there, either. And I know it’s there. I guess we could have talked more about what she was doing then, and we didn’t. You know, we didn’t talk that much about what was happening when she was not with us.

I’m not a George Bush fan, but when he talked about the family unit and the breakdown of the a family unit, that’s the way it is. And as much- I do as much to destroy it as anybody else. We got T.V.’s in every room of the house. I watch my programs. My wife watches her programs in another room in the house. You know, the kids watch it or play on their Ataris, their video games.

You mentioned a while ago about the time we spent together. Yeah, we would spend time together, but much of the time that we had in the house together was not together.

Even more:

Dr. KATHLEEN TOOMEY: What was so extraordinary to me is these parents started looking for externally who to blame. “This has caused this,” “T.V. has caused that,” “External groups have caused this.” But few of them – none of them that I can recall – ever looked to themselves. And the minister turned to me and said, “They don’t see. It’s them. It’s the parents. They have done this. The kids don’t talk to them.”

What was extraordinary to me, a year after this outbreak, was here was a community in total denial about what happened.

And finally:

For some kids, the message has stuck. Before the morning bell rings at Heritage High, a Christian prayer service can be heard echoing down the hallways.

JENNIFER: I know where I stand. I know who I am in God. And nobody on this earth is going to be able to pull me off of that.

NARRATOR: Jennifer is 17. Her friends, Penie and Kira, are 16. They are devout Christians.

INTERVIEWER: Are you guys all virgins?

JENNIFER, KIRA, PENIE: Yes. Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Why? Why have you stayed virgins?

KIRA: Because that’s- that’s my morals that I live by. My parents have taught me from- since I was little that that’s a good thing to do. I mean, it’s just always been a right to me. It’s always been right to save it.

NARRATOR: The girls say their way of life has isolated them from their peers.

KIRA: We got into high school, and high school’s a lot different than middle school. Sex is the cool thing, and drugs is the cool thing, and drinking is cool. I went to one party in 9th grade, and I just- I just didn’t like it after that. I mean- I mean, I wanted to go, I mean, because everybody wants to go to parties. And I got there, and I just knew that was not what I’m- that’s not what I’m about. I’m about something different.

NARRATOR: The girls all left the Conyers public schools for a private Christian school called Springs Academy. Their circle of friends has narrowed, too, to those who share their beliefs.

JENNIFER: Guys definitely seem to be intimidated- I don’t know by other Christian girls, but seem to be intimidated by me. Sometimes it’s hard, and it’s- like, you question yourself. It’s, like, “Why is this worth it?” It’s, like, “These guys are there afraid of me.” It’s definitely been lonely at times.

PENIE: It really is hard, you know, when you try to be good, and then people want to always tar you and say, “Oh, no. You’re a hypocrite,” you know? It’s really hard.

NARRATOR: At times, the girls say, they have even been harassed by their peers.

PENIE: People like to say things. You know, they said that I was sleeping with- around with a lot of guys, you know, and that’s not the case, you know? And they’d say I get drunk, and I was not doing that at all, you know? And drugs and anything else you can imagine. You know, none of that was true.

I bring up the Lost Children documentary as an example of how disengaged parents, a highly sexualized popular culture, and teenage peer pressure can conspire to destroy the spiritual, emotional, and bodily integrity of teenagers. The transgender fad strikes me as a different outworking of the same principle. Since the 1960s, we have built a culture around the valorization of disordered sexuality. What we’re living through now is not an aberration, but the fulfillment of the Sexual Revolution.

To be fair, I don’t think it’s always about disengaged parenting. I would not be the least bit surprised if the reader with whose comment I began this blog had been a fully engaged parent. I know a few parents who have faced this or similar things with their kids, and who have been engaged parents. It’s just that past the age of 14 or thereabouts, parental influence takes a back seat to peer culture. Their kids went to schools where the peer culture was far more sexually experimental than anything that would have been permitted in their home. And their folks lost them to the cult behind the culture.

One of these days, the madness will subside, but the damage to real lives will be catastrophic. Meanwhile, there will be a chorus of denial all around. The schools will not help you. The medical profession will not help you. Maybe your church won’t even help you.

UPDATE: This e-mail from a reader validates my point. I’ve slightly edited it to protect privacy:

I read your blog regularly and sometimes post. I was very much taken with your post n Transgenderism today. Rod, it is almost ubiquitous throughout high schools today. It is a thing. I know this through personal experience.

About 5 years ago my oldest daughter started school at a rather large public high school in a very conservative school district in [very red state]. She had previously spent her elementary years at a small Catholic School in the same county. The student population grades preK – 8th was about 325 kids. In 2011 she started at the public high school in the Fall. My wife and I had absolutely no clue what was coming at us.

The school year started off as any regular year would, orientation, supply buying, etc. It was not as if my daughter did not know other kids in the school; she did. She had friends from the neighborhood who had spent their lives in public school and many of the kids from her Catholic school had gone to the same school as well. Anyway, as the semester wore on, I started to a change in her. She had always been somewhat quiet and introspective as a child, but also very social, but she had begun to withdraw. She would complain about the sexual tension in school and she did not like it. She did not like how the boys acted semi predatory and she really hated how women were seen as sex objects and how many of the girls went out of their way to make themselves sexual objects . She would tell stories of how girls even her age were pressured into having sex…not necessarily by the boys , but by other girls. They would talk about their sexual exploits out loud. I, at first, dismissed it and tried to tell her that as she got older she was going to hear stuff like that and that coming from a family full of boys that there was a lot of bullsh*t associated with guys making those claims and given the world today probably from the girls as well.

Anyway, as the semester went on I started to notice major behavioral changes in her. She became withdrawn and very short with her siblings. Her mood became dark. She would tell me that she thought maybe she was gay. I told her that we would love her just the same, but I paid no attention to it, mainly because she had a boyfriend in 8th grade. By November of her freshman year I noticed a change in how she presented herself, she started dressing more and more like a bum.

Then she hit me with it. She comes in one evening and says that she believes that she is probably a man inside of a girl’s body. Naturally, as a father and a guy, I was like, “What level of ridiculous is this? You were boy crazy not six months ago. Three months ago I saw you flirting with some boys at a party, where does this come from?” This is crazy and she looked serious. I thought, OK she’s just trying to get one over on me and she’s doing a little rebelling. Then I got a call from her counselor a few days later.

“ You know, **** has been having trouble adjusting here” My wife and I agreed with this, we saw it. Then skipping over all of the other stuff, the counselor says, “ You know your son….. “ I stopped her, “ My son? My son is 7 years old, what does he have to do with this conversation?” “No, said the counselor”” I mean your son here at this school.” I was like, “I have one son and he’s in second grade, I have a daughter in this school.” The counselor leans over and in a very smug, self assured manner, “No **** identifies as a male, she — he says that he has always felt this way, but it is causing him a lot of anxiety.”

Anyway, I told her that I thought she was crazy and that just because my daughter may not be as sexualized as the other girls, it does not mean she is not a woman, it just means me and her mother must have done something right.

The next thing I know, over that weekend , **** takes all of her clothes that looked feminine and started throwing them in garbage bags. That Sunday night, she walks right past her mother and I and announces that she is now a boy and that we should call her _____. Obviously a real mindblower.

So now I am incensed. I told her, “No you are not throwing your clothes out, and no I am not going to call you anything other than your name that your mother and your father gave you and the one that is on your birth certificate.” So of course, now I am the hateful one.

Rod, this battle went on for all of high school and the more I explored it and the more questions I asked, I found that the gender fluidity thing was not all that isolated — itt’s kind of “encouraged”, if you will. I heard from a number of parents that their kids were coming home and telling them that they were transgendered or pan sexual or genderqueer. The kids always seemed to be the ones who were not as self confident, kind of the nerdy outcast who had not yet gained any type of true sexual or self confidence.

The stories all sounded the same too. Freshman year of high school, immense pressure to conform to a highly sexualized environment, then if your self confidence is not where the crowd thinks it should be, the name-calling and rumor-mongering. It was so bad a friend of mine told me that her daughter would come home in tears every day because the girls thought she was lesbian and the boys would too, and worse, make lewd gestures. This girl, the victim, told me that a lot of the girls that were picked on were doing this and identifying as male, she thought, as a self defense mechanism so that the rest would leave them alone.

The problem with this play acting is that everyone has to buy in and if you are the one trying to “transition” you have to do a sell job in all aspects of your life. There are books on it, there are sites on the internet that encourage the exploration of gender roles. They see this and they start to think they are. It was not until recently that my daughter finally decided or gave up the pretense and was a girl again. She has kind of told me that this transgender movement is something that is all the rage right now in the 15-21 year old age group.

It is so prevalent, so ubiquitous, that the schools have just given in. The counselors and psychologists have been instructed not to question the veracity of the claim that the individual is other than what they identify themselves as. The counselors are told that they must comfort and “support” the person going through this and be nurturing. If a kid has a sexual confidence problem, they are probably gender queer according to many counselors or psychologists. I learned that there is a whole network out there actively promoting transitioning and gender fluidity and that many of the psychologists have bought into it so much that they are skipping protocol and advocating for hormone therapy after only 2-3 visits. There are networks out there for these kids to get hormones without a prescription and that these networks are referred to these kids by then psychologists themselves.

It’s crazy.

How much longer can traditional Christians, Jews, and Muslims risk leaving their kids in public school?

UPDATE.2: This e-mail from a reader commenting on yesterday’s report I posted about how the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School district — that is, the public schools in Charlotte, NC — are going transgender-positive now:

I am a native Charlottean, as are my parents and grand parents before me, and on down the line to the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence in AD 1775. I am also a product of what was once an excellent school district, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. I graduated four years ago this June and was shocked beyond words when, on Saturday last, I heard the news channel my family has watched since I was nought but a child covering the District’s new policy recommendation as if it was as ordinary as claiming the sky is falling when a thunderstorm rolls through – our news channels can be a bit sensationalist with the weather, as I’m sure they all are nowadays.

Though my incredulity as a Christian and conservative man is I’m sure fairly unsurprising at this point, my father’s reaction may be more so. He is a legitimate deist and an old school economic liberal raised in a lower middle class family, but still fairly no-nonsense in terms of the “Progress” agenda as you call it. He himself is also a product of CMS and is a retired veteran of thirty years in the same district’s classrooms. His response may have been more visceral than mine: he nearly spat out the water he’d been drinking and sat there staring at the television, mouth agape and eyebrows furrowed before simply shaking his head and sitting back in his chair, commenting on his utter disbelief.

My father and I, along with many in Mecklenburg I am sure, are greatly distressed with this disturbing turn of events – to put it frankly, this is not the District we were educated in and grew up with; but then again, neither is the County nor City. Nevertheless, the true shock for me came not from what was done, as I have no faith in the Democrats running the city, despite coming from a lower middle class upbringing; rather, my shock stems from the rapidity with which this change has taken place. This would have been unthinkable when I graduated a mere four years ago, and though being away from home at engineering school has isolated me somewhat, I still never believed this lunacy would begin to sprout up here, in my native state. Truly, the Law of Merited Impossibility has been borne out. I can say with one hundred percent confidence that if I were to raise I family in Charlotte, which I pray God is not the case when such time comes, I would not even consider putting them in the public schools, and this, to me, is a true tragedy.

My apologies for rambling on so long, but I couldn’t help but reach out and give you some sort of view from one of the “bitter clingers” in North Carolina. I eagerly await your Benedict Option book in the coming year.

Note well, readers: This young man thought it could never happen there. But it has happened, and happened with staggering swiftness. Don’t you be dumb enough to think it cannot and will not happen where you live.

View From Your Table

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Last night I did something I had never done: had dinner at Ruth’s Chris steakhouse. I love steak, but rarely eat it in a restaurant, preferring to cook at home. But last night I was a guest. It was one of the more memorable meals of my life. I’m not kidding.

My host is a regular there, and says the Baton Rouge Ruth’s Chris is different from others in the steakhouse chain. He pointed out the owner of the BR restaurant, who was working the room, and said that man is a meticulous manager who leaves nothing to chance. And he said that the waiter who comes with the table (we were at my host’s regular table) is one of the best my host had ever seen.

On the waiter front, I can say it’s true. We had a level of service that I only associate with high-end New Orleans restaurants, and Europe. We started with drinks — bourbon on the rocks for my host, dirty vodka martinis for his two guests — and then ordered salads (well, two of us did; the third had the homemade beef carpaccio). Is there anything quite as refreshing as an iceberg wedge with bacon and blue cheese dressing? It was so old school, and it delighted me. The restaurant itself could have been straight out of 1958. The decor is pretty much all brown, there’s nothing on the walls except … brown, and the soundtrack is heavy on the Sinatra. There is nothing remotely modern about the joint — but boy, does that become an advantage, because it puts all the attention on the food.

And what food it was! You will notice above that we three male persons declined any further greenness, though I did order a side of mushrooms. In all my nearly 50 years, I have never had a steak as delicious as that medium-rare T-bone you see in the foreground. It was as if we were supping on the cattle of Helios. The friend you see sitting across from me (he had a ribeye) and I looked at each other with bugged-out eyes, not quite believing that such heights of deliciousness was possible. And the mushrooms were little butter bombs that detonated in our mouths with a burst of deeply satisfying umami.

It all went down with an exquisite Pauilliac, and lots and lots of conversation about Catholicism, Louisiana, and the Benedict Option. I passed around my smartphone highlighting this photo of the Godfather of the Opzione Benedetto, Marco Sermarini, standing in his olive grove on a hillside in the Marche, and said, “Gentlemen, this is the man we want to be.”:

It was a very, very good evening.

SB1146 Vs. Religious Liberty

The Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission issued a powerful public statement today denouncing the proposed California legislation that would dramatically affect the liberty, even the very existence of the state’s religious colleges — all in the state’s attempt to expand LGBT rights. From the statement:

We, the undersigned, do not necessarily agree with one another’s religious views, but we agree on the necessity of the liberty to exercise these views. At the root of the American experiment is the idea that conscience and religious conviction come before the demands of the state. Some of us disagree with the sexual ethics of orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims giving rise to this legislation, but we are unified in our resistance to the government setting up its own system of orthodoxy. As the American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin once said, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” No less is this true than on matters of religious liberty. Where the state can encroach on one religion’s free exercise, it can just as easily trample on any other religion’s free exercise. We therefore join in solidarity across religious lines to speak against Senate Bill 1146.

We call on the California Assembly to abandon Senate Bill 1146. To ensure the future of the free exercise of religion in higher education in California and across America, we respectfully call on the supporters of Senate Bill 1146 to immediately withdraw their support of this bill, with the commitment to disavow similar intrusions in the future. Opposition to this bill is not grounded in the protection of religious liberty only, nor for the special pleading of one religion in particular, but for the protection of American society and American democracy. Such protection requires a civil society welcoming of religious diversity.

It’s strong, necessary stuff; read the whole thing. The long list of signatories include well-known Protestants and Catholics, as well as some Jews and Muslims. The ERLC has been circulating this privately for some time, and is still taking signatories. All you have to do is go to the site and sign.

A friend writes to say:

Where is Baylor? Where is Calvin College? Gordon College? Wheaton? Pepperdine? Leaders of Christianity Today?

Note small Catholic schools, few majors — in terms of leadership.

I wonder why Brigham Young is not on here.

Maybe the list is still developing.

Though clearly this statement got around pretty widely, I don’t know how widely this statement circulated in advance of its publication, so the absence of anybody on this list is not necessarily evidence of a refusal of any person or institution to sign. It is now in the public domain, though, and signatories are invited through August 23. And before you ask, I cannot sign it as a TAC writer and editor because I cannot risk endangering the magazine’s tax-exempt status. Still, I leave it to the reader to discern where I stand on the issue at hand.

I do notice the lack of a single Roman Catholic or Orthodox bishop’s name on the list. In charity, I presume that they did not have a chance to see the statement prior to publication. There may be another good explanation for their absence, but one expects that oversight to be amended quickly. It would be noteworthy if the Southern Baptist pastor Russell Moore becomes the de facto leader of all American Christians in fighting for religious liberty, but if that’s how it’s going to be, that’s good to know. Grateful to God for courageous friends everywhere, Christian and otherwise.

A prominent Catholic engaged in the religious liberty fight in the medical field e-mailed today and mentioned how gloomy he is about the fight upon us now, and in the years ahead:

Unless our leaders (I come back to our bishops) take a leadership role it will be difficult to get the public to appreciate, first, and secondly to act on the dangers approaching in healthcare. I don’t hold out much hope.

Well, bishops? Well, leaders of Christian colleges not on the list? We either hang together on this one, or we hang separately. What’s happening in California is massively important, in part because if the #LoveWins haters win this one, they won’t stop in California. You have been warned. Stand up, don’t cower.

UPDATE: This just in from a Christian academician in California:

Many might see an email like this or a statement like the one released by the ERLC as something that we are sharing in order to secure power and privilege for Christians only – this is simply not the case. The precedent set by the passage of a bill like this leads to a very slippery slope – one that will permit for the removal of any and all rights simply because some legislator does not like something that someone else is doing, so a bill is written in order to forbid or constrict the disliked action or belief. I want to be clear that this is not just an issue of sexual ethics or sexual freedom, it an issue of soul freedom and an outright attack on the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms that are so important for the flourishing of all – people of all faiths and none.

Spengler Goes Trump

Now here’s something worth talking about. It’s from the latest column by David Goldman, writing as “Spengler.” David is not impressed by the list of 50 GOP foreign policy experts who say Trump is too dangerous to be president. Excerpts:

Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. “We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown” in July 2013, Hayden explained. “We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage.”

“General,” I remonstrated, “when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!”

“I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian,” Hayden replied, without a hint of irony. As Tommy Lee Jones said in “Men in Black,” Gen. Hayden has no sense of humor that he’s aware of. He repeated the same point verbatim a few minutes later in his speech: It was a shame that the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt was overthrown, by acclaim of the majority of Egypt’s adult population, which had taken to the streets as the country careened towards ruin. Hayden, like Sen. John McCain, the Weekly Standard, and the majority of the Republican foreign policy establishment, believes that America should try to foster a democratic version of political Islam. It lionized Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Washington, nurtured Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and armed “moderate Islamists” in Syria as a supposed democratic alternative to the Assad regime. Hayden’s specialty was signal intelligence, and by all accounts he was good at his job. He is clueless about foreign policy.

Gen. Hayden, Spengler points out, is the most prominent of the 50 experts to sign the letter denouncing Trump. Spengler then quotes Trump’s response, adding a line of his own:

Trump responded, “The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” That is exactly correct. He might have added that they are incapable of learning from their mistakes and doomed to repeat them if given the opportunity.

I’m not a Trump man, but I gotta say, Trump makes a great point here, and so does Spengler, who continues:

Trump is vulgar, ill-informed and poorly spoken. He has no foreign policy credentials and a disturbing inclination to give credit to Russia’s Vladimir Putin where it isn’t due. But he has one thing that the fifty former officials lack, and that is healthy common sense. That is what propelled him to the Republican nomination. The American people took note that the “experiment” of which Gen. Hayden spoke so admiringly was tough not only on the ordinary Egyptian, but on the ordinary American as well. Americans are willing to fight and die for their country, but revolt against sacrifices on behalf of social experiments devised by a self-appointed elite. That is why the only two candidates in the Republican primaries who made it past the starting gate repudiated the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Here is his devastating conclusion:

One can’t find many prominent national security officials to oppose the signators of the anti-Trump letter because a whole generation of functionaries has been bred from the same stable. America will have to learn foreign policy from scratch. For my money, I’ll take the rough-edged outsider over the recidivist failures.

Read the whole thing.

I can’t go as far as Spengler (and if I ever get to that point, I won’t be able to say so here), but on foreign policy, I believe there’s not much difference between those signatories and Hillary Clinton. And yet, when you read the letter, a lot of what they say about Trump is true: he really is a belligerent ignoramus on foreign policy. But many of them are belligerent smart guys who have led the nation into one disaster after another.

All of which just goes to show what a ghastly choice we have this fall.

Love Just Keeps On Winning

The State of New Jersey is trying to keep love from winning, looks like:

Despite her doctor’s assurances that insurance would pay for fertility treatment, Ms. Krupa’s provider, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, denied coverage. The company cited a state insurance mandate from 2001 that required most women under 35 — no matter their sexual orientation — to demonstrate their infertility through “two years of unprotected sexual intercourse.”

Now the Krupas [Marianne and Erin], along with two other women, are suing the commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance, claiming the mandate discriminates against their sexual orientation — essentially forcing infertile homosexual women to pay for costly procedures to try to become pregnant.

More:

Dr. William Ziegler, the medical director of the Reproductive Science Center of New Jersey, said the issue of insurance coverage had long weighed on the field of fertility treatment.

“I’m not sure if there was a lot of thought given to the implications of what this would cause and how many New Jerseyans it would exclude,” Dr. Ziegler said of the mandate. “It’s a double standard. It discriminates against same-sex couples because they don’t have the biological equipment to have a baby the way a heterosexual couple does.”

I’m just going to let Dr. Ziegler’s statement hang out there. Centuries from now, when historians are trying to figure out how, exactly, the most advanced nation on earth lost its mind and fell apart, Dr. Ziegler’s realization about the thoughtless bigotry grieving barren lesbians of New Jersey will be of interest.

Meanwhile, in Charlotte, North Carolina, the public school leadership has a new plan for love to win:

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District addressed transgender issues in their new recommended policies.

The recommendations ask principals to implement and enforce ways to reduce bullying.

If implemented, the policies also would allow transgender students to take part in extracurricular activities and overnight trips with the gender they identify with.

The policies also asks school officials to stop referring to children as boys and girls, and instead refer to them as students and scholars.

Members of the North Carolina Values Coalition called the rules radical, and said the policies take the focus off of education and puts it on “gender fluidity.”

Bigots, the lot.

By the way, the other night at an event in the city, I met a lawyer. We got to talking about politics, and eventually he said that his son is gay. The lawyer said he has been bowled over by the number of kids his son’s age who have embraced gender fluidity. “Oh, it’s a thing now,” he said, shaking his head. I told him this story, and he said, more or less, “Yep.”

Progress.

Love is even winning over military medicine. From a recent directive by the Secretary of the Navy:

b. No later than October 1, 2016.

(1) The DoD will issue a training handbook for Commanders and Commanding Officers, transgender Service Members, and the force; and medical guidance for providing transition related care to transgender members.

(2) The Military Health System will be required to provide transgender Sailors and Marines all medically necessary care related to gender transition, based on the guidance that is issued. [Emphasis mine. — RD]

(3) Reference (b) is effective October 1, 2016. Sailors and Marines will be able to begin the process to officially change their gender in personnel management systems. Once the Sailor or Marines gender marker is changed, the member will be responsible for meeting all applicable military standards in the preferred gender and will use military berthing, bathroom, and shower facilities associated with their preferred gender.

As one military blogger puts it, “If you want a sex change but can’t afford it, join the military.”

Like the public schools, the military has become a locus for advocating radical social change. It’s all the Law of Merited Impossibility, you know. They’ll tell you it will never happen, that you’re being an alarmist, and when it happens, they’ll say shut up, because only a bigot could possibly object.

Meanwhile, on the far edges of progress, here’s a screen grab from Rowman & Littlefield, an academic press, of a new volume in its catalog:

I can hear the howls of derision now: You Santorum-y monster! How dare you compare pedophilia to [whatever the Left wants today on the sexual progress front]! And it is true that nothing is equivalent to pedophilia. My point is not to make a moral equivalence, but rather to show that this is how it works. Once the barriers are down, things that were once unthinkable — the US Armed Forces paying for sex changes, for example, or public schools directing teachers and school staff not to call students “boys” or “girls” — first become thinkable, then become debatable, then become normative, then become mandatory.

Finally, a reader sends in this photo taken outside an outlet of the trendy furniture store West Elm:

Reader photo

Has there ever, in the history of selling furniture — especially trendy, high-end modern furniture — been a store that has not welcomed gay customers? Of course not. This is pure virtue signaling. And you know, posting this kind of thing in store windows is becoming the equivalent of the Greengrocer’s “Workers Of The World, Unite” store sign under communism. John Kay of the Financial Times explains the reference:

Václav Havel, the first and only president of post-communist Czechoslovakia, died last week. The central figure of his famous dissident essay, The Power of the Powerless, was a greengrocer with a placard in his window saying: “Workers of the World Unite!” Havel asked an apparently simple question: what is the purpose of this display?

The shopkeeper is not motivated by an intention to communicate his enthusiasm for unity of the workers of the world. Nor was his superior seized by such desire. And the leaders of the authoritarian system in which the sign is displayed know that their power would not long survive unity of the workers of the world. In fact, it is unlikely that anyone who sees the sign gives attention to its substantive content.

The real meaning is not conveyed by the printed words. The greengrocer’s intention is to signal conformity and avoid trouble. Havel translates the slogan as: “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.”

More from John Kay:

Thirty years before Havel, George Orwell identified the corrupting influence of discourse based on the repetition of pre-packaged phrases. A corrupting influence not just on language but on society itself. He described the speaker who “has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine”, observing: “The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.” We often hear such speakers at business conferences and on political platforms.

Havel also emphasised the mechanical nature of the process of effusion. “Part of the essence of the post-totalitarian system,” he said, “is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so they may realise themselves as human beings, but so they may surrender their human identity in favour of the system.” The empty exhortation of “workers of the world unite!” conceals the reality of the power structure that lies behind it. But the vacuous rhetoric traps the speaker as well as the hearer, the leaders as well as the led. [Emphasis mine — RD] “Both are objects in a system of control, but at the same time they are its subjects,” wrote Havel. They are inhabitants of a world whose assumptions are false, and self-descriptions fraudulent.

“Love wins,” and variations of this message posted in shop windows and disseminated through the culture, and made into a de facto test of conformity, is how conformity to the ideology of the Sexual Revolution is now enforced by the system it now controls.

What, you don’t think workers of the world should unite, comrade? Then why not put the sign in your window?

What, you don’t think that love is winning? Then why won’t you post the sign? Why won’t you wear the rainbow badge in the office? Why won’t you declare yourself an ally?

This form of social control is part of the mechanism that opens the door to the polymorphous forms of moral chaos highlighted above. We are just getting started. Below, from an earlier post of mine denouncing the culture of silence over abuse in churches, a Nobel Prize-winning anti-communist dissident explains part of what’s going on here:

We all understand, I think, the problem with leaders not wanting to lose what they have: power, wealth, fame, etc. The more difficult problem is explaining why people much farther down the power structure — specifically, those who are being exploited by the leadership — are willing to cooperate in their own exploitation. They too are unwilling to risk what they have — but what do they have, really?

Here’s an answer. The dynamic behind this phenomenon is what the Polish dissident writer Czesław Miłosz, in his classic study of intellectuals under Polish communism, The Captive Mind, called “the Pill of Murti-Bing.” The concept comes from a 1927 dystopian novel by Stanisław Witkiewicz in which an Asian army overruns Poland, and conquers its people in part by giving them pills to assuage their anxieties over their condition. From The Captive Mind:



Witkiewicz’s heroes are unhappy in that they have no faith and no sense of meaning in their work. This atmosphere of decay and senselessness extends throughout the entire country. And at that moment, a great number of hawkers appear in the cities peddling Murti-Bing pills. Murti-Bing was a Mongolian philosopher who had succeeded in producing an organic means of transporting a “philosophy of life.” This Murti-Bing “philosophy of life,” which constituted the strength of the Sino-Mongolian army, was contained in pills in an extremely condensed form. A man who used these pills changed completely. He became serene and happy.

For Miłosz, Polish intellectuals who capitulated to communism and Soviet rule had taken the pill of Murti-Bing. It was what made their condition bearable. They could not stand to see reality, for if they recognized what was really happening in their country, the pain and shock would make life too much to take.

This is why people who have no financial or status tied up in protecting abuse of corruption within an institution can nevertheless be expected to rally around that institution and its leaders. Those who tell the truth threaten their Murti-Bing pill supply, and therefore their sense of order and well-being. To them, better that a few victims must be made to suffer rather than the entire community be forced to wean itself from Murti-Bing.

Better that a (relative) few Christians will be forced out of their jobs or forced to lose their businesses than the entire community be forced to wean itself from our own Murti-Bing.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Along with these issues, very few people understand why religious liberty is important anymore. They just can’t see why anyone’s “private” beliefs should inform anything having to do with the public square.

Today I read where LGBTQ groups want BYU excluded from the Big 12 over their “discriminatory” policies, and I think it’s going to be increasingly hard for big schools like that to maintain a religious identity because, well, “Bigots!!”

And we (orthodox Christians) have lost the sexuality debates with younger generations. They buy into the whole fluid sexual identity thing, the whole paradigm of “this is how God made me”.

The late 20s/early 30s young people of my own church have no problem at all defining any discussion of transgender issues as inherently “transphobic”. To even suggest that there is a discussion to be had is to be on the wrong side of things. These are kids who went to Messiah and Gordon and were raised in orthodox Christian homes.

And what do you do when our own VP – that “good Catholic” – officiates at a gay marriage in his own home?

“Love wins” or whatever you care to call it – has won. It’s over.

Christians need to focus on making a strong public case for why religious liberty is important.

This is how gloomy I am: I think it’s way too late for that, even. I began advocating that in 2008, and was denounced by Maggie Gallagher and others for being a surrender monkey. We all know how well that worked out. I think there’s little left to do but prepare to live under “occupation,” so to speak, and do our best to keep them from capturing the minds of our kids. We can’t just hope for the best.

In other news, Italian Muslims demand polygamy rights, citing gay rights precedent. Excerpt:

Responding to a new law allowing same sex couples to enter civil unions, Hamza Piccardo argued that if gay relationships, which Muslims disagree with, are a civil right then Italians must accept polygamy as a civil right too.

The founder of the Union of Islamic Communities and Organisations (UCOII) in Italy took to Facebook to claim polygamy is a “civil right” and that Italy would benefit from the large number of Muslim births it would promote.

The UCOII president wrote: “When it comes to civil rights here, then polygamy is a civil right. Muslims do not agree with homosexual partnerships, and yet they have to accept a system that allows it. There is no reason why Italy should not accept polygamous marriages of consenting persons.”

What’s Arabic for “love wins”?

And there’s this exciting news: a mother and son pair of lovers — both consenting adults — say they are willing to go to jail over their relationship, and have become advocates for the next bleeding-heart cause: Genetic Sexual Attraction:

GSA is defined as sexual attraction between close relatives, such as siblings or half-siblings, a parent and offspring, or first and second cousins, who first meet as adults.

Mares said: ‘He is the love of my life and I don’t want to lose him. My kids love him, my whole family does. Nothing can come between us not courts, or jail, nothing.”

Love wins again! And it keeps on winning, as reader Robert tells us:

Another first in love winning: NPR [Southern California Public Radio, to be precise — RD] aired an uncritically sympathetic profile of an incestuous (brother-sister) couple this weekend. Pardon, apparently the term of art in cases like theirs is Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA).

Elegy For Normality

Hey folks, I’m really sorry that so many of you are losing your comments. It’s not just happening to you. I’m losing a lot of NFRs I append to your comments. I don’t know why it’s happening, though I assume it has everything to do with the way our website was rocked to the rafters by the viral response to my interview with J.D. Vance. Only this weekend, two weeks after it first appeared, did the traffic approach normal again. I deeply apologize to you for the problems. I’m having them too. We’re working on it, I promise. Let me suggest to you that you copy and save your comment to your clipboard before you hit “publish.” That way, if it doesn’t post, you will not have lost it, and you can try again. I’m going to start doing that. I’ve been doing it with my blog entries for a while now (good thing I did it with this post, because I almost lost the first one), and I’m so frustrated by losing comments that I’m going to start doing that too.

Every day I get amazing letters from readers who were knocked over by what J.D. had to say in the interview, and who decided from it to buy his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up poor and white in Appalachia. I’m used to that now. But every now and then, one will flop over the transom that makes me go Holy cow! Like this one:

Gosh, this was great. So helpful to me as a home care nurse from LA who now lives in [a rural southern California town] and sees patients mainly in [a nearby rural southern California town]. Oh, dear. So many things I have seen that I had no idea existed this close to LA. It unfortunately seems to me that a lot of the folks I see are not interested in change. They would like more benefits from the government. Meth addiction — I am shocked now to meet young white people here who are not addicted. And, something else: weird, weird sex stuff.  I am 53, from LA and have never heard of “gay for pay” but I hear about it all the time up here. Thanks again! I will buy that book.

Last night I was at the gym — woohoo, the Slug is exercising again! — and saw on the TV there a 60 Minutes segment about heroin use in small-town America. They focused mostly on Ohio. I wasn’t shocked by it, because I had read Sam Quinones’ great book Dreamland, on the same subject. I blogged about it here. Excerpt:

This is how heroin went from being the kind of scary big-city drug that only lowlifes used in the Seventies to being a drug of choice for Mayberry.

The most fascinating part of Dreamland is how Quinones examines the cultural roots of the opiate epidemic. He writes:

In heroin addicts, I had seen the debasement that comes from the loss of free will and enslavement to what amounts to an idea: permanent pleasure, numbness, and the avoidance of pain. But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior.

In fact, the United States achieved something like this state of affairs … in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. When I returned home from Mexico in those years, I noticed a scary obesity emerging. It wasn’t just the people. Everything seemed obese and excessive. Massive Hummers and SUVs were cars on steroids. In some of the Southern California suburbs near where I grew up, on plots laid out with three-bedroom houses in the 1950s, seven-thousand-square-foot mansions barely squeezed between the lot lines, leaving no place in which to enjoy the California sun.

More:

Excess contaminated the best of America. Caltech churned out brilliant students, yet too many of them now went not to science but to Wall Street to create financial gimmicks that paid off handsomely and produced nothing. Exorbitant salaries, meanwhile, were paid to Wall Street and corporate executives, no matter how poorly they did. Banks packaged rolls of bad mortgages and we believed Standard & Poor’s when they called them AAA. Well-off parents no longer asked their children to work when they became teenagers.

In Mexico, I gained a new appreciation of what America means to a poor person limited by his own humble origins. I took great pride that America had turned more poor Mexicans into members of the middle class than had Mexico. Then I would return home and see too much of the country turning on this legacy in pursuit of comfort, living on credit, attempting to achieve happiness through more stuff. And I saw no coincidence that this was also when great numbers of these same kids — most of them well-off and white — began consuming huge quantities of the morphine molecule, doping up and tuning out.

Dreamland is not really about being materially poor, but about being spiritually poor. If Hillbilly Elegy meant something to you, read Dreamland.  I couldn’t stop thinking about it today, reflecting on the fresh-faced young suburban Ohio woman and recovering heroin addict who told 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker last night about shooting up in the high school bathroom. Her name is Hannah Morris. It started with pot, then went to pills, then to smoking heroin, then shooting it up:

Bill Whitaker: So you were what, 15?

Hannah Morris: Yeah. And I was like, oh my gosh that was amazing.

Bill Whitaker: You remember it even now?

Hannah Morris: Oh yeah. Let’s say I’ve never done a drug in my life. I would normally be happiness at a six or a seven, at a scale out of 10, you know. And then you take heroin and you’re automatically at a 26. And you’re like, I want that again.

Hannah says the heroin was so addictive that rather quickly she and several other students went from smoking it at parties to shooting it up at high school.

Hannah Morris: Like, doing it at school in the bathroom.

Bill Whitaker: A syringe?

Hannah Morris: A syringe. I would have it in my purse, all ready to go.

Fifteen years old. Not the inner city, but an upper middle class Midwestern suburb.

What a country we’ve become.