Revealing, Truth-Assaulting Sentence of the Day

Perhaps someone with more time and a stronger stomach than myself will take the time to wade through the dark depths of this NPR article, "The End of Gender?", which is the sort of "news piece" that causes me to ask myself: "In the great scope of things, faced with the vastness of the cosmos and the grand mystery of life, how warped must a person be to spend their time obsessing over 'gender' as if it is some sort of Rosetta Stone that will bring everlasting peace, joy, and beatitude?"

In fact, the piece has a sentence that at least hints, in many ways, at some answers to that question; here it is:

"Sex differences are real and some are probably present at birth, but then social factors magnify them," says Lise Eliot, an associate professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School and author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It. "So if we, as a society, feel that gender divisions do more harm than good, it would be valuable to break them down. " (emphasis added)

Here is what I see proposed in this short but disturbing sentence:

1. The foundation of reality and moral authority is not God, but "we, as a society". Man is self-made, self-defined, and, well, selfish, and that is not only agreeable but necessary for enlightened transgenderists such as Eliot. If humanity is self-defining, it will only define itself down into inhumanity. And this often is facilitated with an appeal to some vague but intimidating entity such as "society" or "the state" or "the experts".

2. The basis for making subjective but radical decisions about human nature and purpose is emotional; the use of the word "feel" is apt, even if Eliot might insist this is a logical, scientific choice. This is ideology dressed up in science and airbrushed with the rhetoric of choice and self-actualization.

3. The differences between men and women are not, according to the ambitious god-makers, natural and complimentary and benefitial, but are a source of division and discord. But, then, isn't this the very tactic of the serpent, who upon seeing that man and woman have become one flesh (Gen 1:22-25), seeks to sever them from one another and from God (Gen. 3)? The two severings, in fact, always go hand in hand. Always. Take it to the bank. (This, you might recognize, is a key theme in Blessed John Paul II's theology of the body.)

4. Further, the attempt to deny and destroy the created and good differences between men and women is presented as a triumph of unity ('break them down"), while the complimentarity of male and female is presented as harmful. The "logic" of this is frightening, because it is not merely asserting that people should be able to decide what "gender" they are (which is bad enough), but it is insisting that the very realities of male and female are harmful. Ponder the ramifications of that mentality for a few seconds.

Many of the great heresies of the early centuries of the Church sought to force union where distinction were needed (for example, collapsing the divine and human natures of Christ, or rejecting the distictions between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), while tearing apart what should be properly united (as in modalism, for example, or Arianism). Put one way, heresies flow from an incorrect understanding of a particular relationship. The modern assault on traditional sexual morality and human nature is quite similar, I think, in its distortion of right relationship—between man and woman, sex and procreation, love and marriage, etc.—and disregard for proper ends.

As Eliot's remarks about suggest, the "end" is merely whatever seems or feels good for a group of people at a particular time. It is not different, really, than two teenagers deciding to have sex because it feels good or they "love" one another. But taken an infantile, selfish desire and have it wrapped in scientific lingo and presented by a professor and—Ta-Da!—it's taken as a deeply meaningful and intellectually daunting act of inevitable progress.

I'll close what was supposed to be a short post with this great quote from Pope Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week:

The world is "true" to the extent that it reflects God: the creative logic, the eternal reasons that brought it to birth. And it becomes more and more true the closer it draws to God. Man become true, he becomes himself, when he grows in God's likeness. Then he attains to his proper nature. God is the reality that gives being and intelligibility. ... God is the criterion of being. ... The functional truth about man has been discovered. But the truth about man himself—who he is, where he comes from, what he should do, what is right, what is wrong—this unfortunately cannot be read in the same way [as mathematics]. Hand in hand with growing knowledge of functional truth there seems to be an increasing blindness toward "truth" itself—toward the question of our real identity and purpose. (pp. 192, 193).