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the imposition of external, prior, or static categories is nothing other than an act of imperialism, an attempt to restrict my freedom or to make me inauthentic.
a movement is emerging that is pressing for the abandonment of terms such as lesbian, gay, and bisexual as too rigid
formulated in 2006,
The principles are presented as setting forth the bases for framing SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) laws around the world.
Victimhood is the presenting cause; freedom, equality, and dignity are the moral presuppositions that carry with them imperatives for action.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. All human rights are universal, interdependent, indivisible and interrelated. Sexual orientation and gender identity are integral to every person’s dignity and humanity and must not be the basis for discrimination or abuse.
The previous paragraph refers to “consensual sexual conduct,” which would implicitly exclude such sexual inclinations or acts, but the problem is that the consent of children or of animals is not a transcendental imperative recognized by law or custom around the world: adults routinely make children do things to which they do not consent, from eating their greens to going to school, and cows do not consent to being turned into hamburgers. This is not a robust foundation on which to build a comprehensive sexual ethic.
the reality of the body is not as real as the convictions of the mind.
The committee gets real prudish real fast when it has to deal with sexuality outside its feminist frame of reference:
the limits of sexual tolerance are really the limits of cultural taste.
As a political entity, it is truly an anticulture: it is defined negatively, by its rejection of past norms and the destruction and erasure of the same.
To separate gender from sex or to define marriage as a union between two (or more) people of the same sex is not to expand the traditional definitions of these things; it is to abolish them in their entirety. And the most honest advocates of LGBTQ+ thought are very clear about this.
Victimhood and destabilizing the heterosexual norms of Western society provided sufficiently strong glue to bind the alliance together.
the movement claims to be able to bend reality to its will,
perhaps more accurately, denies the existence of a natural authority and thereby arrogates to itself the right to create that reality.
“I claim the right to choose my ultimate gender.”
Transgenderism is a symptom, not a cause.
the expression of emotional preferences.
It is striking, for example, how much the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective depends in their standard text, Our Bodies, Ourselves, on personal anecdotes and narratives for establishing particular points. Not discursive reasoning but individual stories of suffering and of affirmation carry the book’s overall arguments.
What is clear is that those feminists (and others) who deny the claims of transgenderism will find that they will be dismissed on the basis of alleged animus, not on the basis of argument. The agreed rational basis for debate is gone.
All that is left is emotional preference.
The result is a world that has accepted the challenge of Nietzsche’s madman, to remake value and meaning in the wake of the death—indeed, the killing—of the Christian God, or, indeed, of any god.
lamentation and polemic always run the risk of being less prophetic and more therapeutic in their motivation and their effect.
And thus I come finally to my concluding chapter, which, as is clear from its title, is intended not so much as the final word on the subjects discussed in this book—as if any word on the human self could ever be “final”—but rather as a prologue to future discussions.
When it comes to how we think of ourselves, we are all expressive individualists now, and there is no way we can escape from this fact. It is the essence of the world in which we have to live and of which we are a part.
None of this is to argue that we should simply lament the situation, for expressive individualism is not an unmitigated evil.
inherent dignity of the individual.
The idea that all human beings are of equal worth is rooted in the idea that all human beings are made in the image of God.
The problem with expressive individualism
is the fact that expressive individualism has detached these concepts of individual dignity and value from any kind of grounding in a sacred order.
Our world really is starting to look like the brave new world described by Aldous Huxley, a place where life is lived merely for the present, where the pleasures of the immediate moment—whether produced by artificial means
or by sterile sex—are the only things that truly matter.
it is interesting to note how much of the debate about sexuality in Christian circles likewise tends to operate in terms of personal narratives isolated from any larger metaphysical or theological framework.
a very practical level, the way Protestantism has often failed to reflect the historical concerns of the church in its liturgy and practice, most obviously in the megachurch movement and the manner in which it has frequently adopted the aesthetics of the present moment in its worship, is arguably a sign of the penetration of the anticulture into the sanctuary of historic Christianity. Christians today are not opponents of the anticulture. Too often we are a symptom of it.
To abstain from sex in today’s world is to sacrifice true selfhood as the world around understands it.
Human nature may not change in the sense that we are always made in the image of God, but our desires and our deep sense of self are, in fact, shaped in profound ways by the specific conditions of the society in which we actually live.
When we apply this to the sexual revolution, it should be clear that in the age in which we live, we are taught to be authentic in such a way that identity, recognition, and belonging are now deeply connected to the sexual desires we have and the manner in which we express them. It is, for example, not a surprise that the number of children and adolescents reporting gender dysphoria has grown rapidly in the last few years.9 This does not necessarily mean that for centuries there have been significant numbers of transgender people who have been unable to express themselves, any more than the
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the collapse of the authority of traditional institutions, most notably the church in all its various forms, would suggest that any return to a society built on a broad religious, or even a mere metaphysical, consensus is extremely unlikely.
then we currently face an indefinite future of flux, instability, and incoherence.
the morality of the sexual revolution is itself in trouble at the present moment.
as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective pointed out in 1970, the kind of promiscuity promoted by the sexual revolution tended to favor men and actually turn women into playthings under the guise of liberating them.
These alienating, inhuman expectations are no less destructing or degrading than the Victorian puritanism we all so proudly rejected.
The pill and access to abortion may have freed women from the consequences of promiscuity, but even feminists realized that the overall situation was far more complicated than that.
A slap violates the body; a rape violates the person in the deepest way possible.
the #MeToo movement has both pinpointed the difficulty of defining
consent
Soap operas and movies may portray individuals hopping from one partner to another or recovering from infidelity in a moment, but reality has a way of catching up with us all.
If the AIDS crisis demonstrated anything, it is that the discussion of problems generated by sexual behavior has been moved decisively from the realm of personal morality to the realm of technical solutions and civil legislation.
It seems likely that gay marriage as an institution is here to stay.
The general cultural tide has been turning against the most radical pro-abortion policies, and this is not the result of abstract philosophical pro-life reasoning winning the day but rather the effect of sonograms showing that the baby in the womb looks like a small person. Such images pull at the heartstrings and elicit an intuitive, emotional reaction.
