Pride Bocce With The Pritzkers

Hello from a London airport. It’s been really hard to keep the blog up this week of toggling between Oxford and Cambridge. I’m headed back to Vienna a day early, to get caught up on work before going to France next week for research. You readers of my Substack, expect a rich post later tonight.

I sat next to Cardinal Gerhard Müller at dinner last night in Oxford. He’s the former doctrine chief in the Vatican, sent down by Pope Francis. A German giant! If that mighty oak were pope, a lot of people would be sorted with a couple of sweeps of those massive bear claws. Mostly, though, I enjoyed meeting ordinary Christians and political conservatives, as well as some writers and activists. Had lunch yesterday with Mary Harrington, Calvin Robinson, Father Daniel French, James Orr, and Father Bernard Randall, a former school chaplain reported to UK anti-terrorism authorities because he questioned LGBT ideology, in a gentle way. The school destroyed his ministry and career. Here we were at lunch in James’s back garden. From left, not including me: Calvin Robinson, Bernard Randall, Daniel French, James Orr, and Mary Harrington:

I had such a great sense of camaraderie and good cheer, from these friends and from those I met in both places, especially young people. I met more than a few young Christian converts, undergraduates who complained that now that they believe, they struggle to find churches where priests and pastors seem to believe. They are eager to find solid ground. Pastors and laymen of my generation and older need to be more courageous and forthright. In one of my talks, someone in the audience, a Christian, said that I’m too harsh here on this blog (versus my books, talks, and Substack). But another young Christian told me afterward that the boldness here is what signaled to him and his friends that I’m serious.

I see that the Evangelical pundit Michael Gerson, former G.W. Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist, today, against all clear Biblical teaching, celebrates LGBT Pride. Excerpt:

Among religious young people, certain questions are growing more insistent: Why should we assess homosexuality according to Old Testament law that also advocates the stoning of children who disobey their parents? Isn’t it possible that the Apostle Paul’s views on homosexuality reflected the standards of his own time, rather than the views of Jesus, who never mentioned the topic? There is little wonder that, according to a Pew Research Center poll, over half of White evangelicals 50 and older oppose gay marriage while over half of those under 50 years old in the same group support gay marriage.

It is still possible for the gay rights movement to destructively overreach — as in denying the right of religious schools and charities to shape their own institutional standards. But in the meantime, I’m up for some Pride bocce.

He’s no Bernard Randall, that’s for sure. This is what it means to be tamed and assimilated by the ruling class. It’s useful to get that learned.

Meanwhile, I wonder if Michael Gerson would consider that the superrich Pritzker family of Chicago is pushing LGBDT too far? From an astonishing investigative piece by Jennifer Bilek in Tablet magazine:

One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

I first wrote about the Pritzkers, whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call “transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

It’s very, very creepy — Eyes Wide Shut stuff. More:

With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

Through investments in the techno-medical complex, where new highly medicalized sex identities are being conjured, Pritzkers and other elite donors are attempting to normalize the idea that human reproductive sex exists on a spectrum. These investments go toward creating new SSI using surgeries and drugs, and by instituting rapid language reforms to prop up these new identities and induce institutions and individuals to normalize them. In 2018, for example, at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at the University of California Los Angeles (where the Pritzkers are major donors and hold various titles), the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology advertised several options for young females who think they can be men to have their reproductive organs removed, a procedure termed “gender-affirming care.”

This family, whose number includes male-to-female transsexual Jennifer Pritzker, throws its money everywhere in the movement. Read this, especially the part about Martine Rothblatt. Emphasis mine:

Pritzker’s philanthropy is also active in Canada, where Jennifer has helped fund the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, a teaching institution invested in the deconstruction of human sex. An instructor in the Bonham Centre and the curator of its Sexual Representation Collection—“Canada’s largest archival collection of pornography”—is transgender studies professor Nicholas Matte, who denies categorically that sexual dimorphism exists. Prtizker also created the first chair in transgender studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The current chair, Aaron Devor, founded an annual conference called Moving Trans History Forward, whose keynote speaker in 2016 was the renowned transhumanist, Martine Rothblatt, who was mentored by the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil of Google. Rothblatt lectured there on the value of creating an organization such as WPATH to serve “tech transgenders” in the cultivation of “tech transhumanists.” (Rothblatt’s ideology of disembodiment and technological religion seems to be having nearly as much influence on American culture as Sirius satellite radio, which Rothblatt co-founded.) Rothblatt is an integral presence at Out Leadership, a business networking arm of the LGBTQ+ movement, and appears to believe that “we are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful, and beneficent.”

This is literally satanic. You know that, right? I interviewed in Oxford a young Anglican ordinand who used to work in elite advertising in London. He said that he didn’t know any other Christians in his office, but knew no atheists either. Everybody was into New Age and the occult, he said — even satanism, which they defined as living up to your fullest potential and most authentic self.

One more quote:

While many Americans are still trying to understand why women are being erased in language and law, and why children are being taught they can choose their sex, the Pritzker cousins and others may be well on their way to engineering a new way to be human. But what could possibly explain the abrupt drive of wealthy elites to deconstruct who and what we are and to manipulate children’s sex characteristics in clinics now spanning the globe while claiming new rights for those being deconstructed? Perhaps it is profit. Perhaps it is the pleasure of seeing one’s own personal obsessions writ large. Perhaps it is the human temptation to play God. No matter what the answer is, it seems clear that SSI will be an enduring part of America’s future.

Read it all. Really, do — it’s very important.

Love is love, right? Look what we are opening the door to. Have fun playing Pride bocce while Western civilization burns. I’ll take my stand with the Bernard Randalls against the Pritzkers and the medical and media elite.

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