Pride in What?
It is clear from President Biden’s Pride declaration that unreality must be on the march against reality not only here, but anywhere that unreality goes unrecognized.
President Joseph Biden issued his Pride Month declaration on June 1.
The so-called struggle for “ LGBTQ+ rights” in America is actually the story of the enforcement of the rationalizations of the various moral and other disorders encompassed in the alphabet soup moniker. Biden claims he is “taking historic actions to finally deliver full equality for LGBTQ+ families.” But what does the equality so far achieved by this dysfunctional group mean for others? It appears that LGBTQ+ “equality” professionally and socially jeopardizes those who refuse to accede to the imposition of the unreality in which the LGBTQ+ group is engaged in imagining and acting out. As a result, the refuseniks lose their equality.
Take this recent, illustrative case. Physical education teacher, Tanner Cross, has been placed on leave by a Loudoun County Public School in Virginia for saying the following:
It’s not my intention to hurt anyone, but there are certain truths that we must face… We condemn school policies [that] would damage children, defile the holy image of God. I love all of my students but I will never lie to them regardless of the consequences. I’m a teacher but I serve God first and I will not affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it’s against my religion. It’s lying to a child, it’s abuse to a child, and it’s sinning against our God.
Cross has met his Thomas More moment with clarity and courage. Now he’ll pay for it.
Here is the school policy he violated. According to Policy 8040 of the Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS):
LCPS staff shall allow gender-expansive or transgender students to use their chosen name and gender pronouns that reflect their gender identity without any substantiating evidence, regardless of the name and gender recorded in the student’s permanent educational record. School staff shall, at the request of a student or parent/legal guardian, when using a name or pronoun to address the student, use the name and pronoun that correspond to their gender identity.
So you must call a boy a girl, and a girl a boy, if that’s the identity their parents choose for them. It’s mandatory. How’s that for equality? It appears that reality is not equal with unreality.
Biden’s Pride declaration gets loopier as it proceeds. He says that, “I am particularly honored by the service of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the first openly LGBTQ+ person to serve in the Cabinet.” Open is an understatement. Buttigieg is the man, or rather woman (see below), who said, “I’m gay as a—I don’t know, think of something really gay—that’s how gay I am.” How’s that for out-and-out, so to speak, pride? At the end of 2019, Catholic World Report published the article of mine, titled “A Buttigieg Hallmark Christmas”.
When I briefly returned to public service as the director of the Voice of America late last year through early this year, the liberal press became hysterical over this piece. According to them, I displayed all the symptoms of homophobia and hate speech, along with downright “weirdness,” by simply referring to reality. However, I confess I did get one thing wrong in the article. I had thought that Buttigieg was the “husband” in his imaginary “marriage” with Chasten Glezman. It turns out that Pete thinks he is the “wife.” But Chasten now goes by the last name of Buttigieg, which is somewhat baffling. Doesn’t the wife go by the last name of the husband? So, shouldn’t it be Pete Glezman? Or shouldn’t it, at the very least, be: Mrs. Pete Buttigieg? No?
Oh, well, unreality can be so confusing.
Biden also gave a shout out to another role model, “Assistant Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine, the first openly transgender person to be confirmed by the Senate.” Rachel is actually Richard Levine, who underwent sex reassignment surgery and hormonal treatment in order to pretend that he is Rachel. Richard had two children with his wife Martha, before he self-discovered that he is a woman, with the help of the surgical excision. Of course, it’s too late for Rachel to become the mother of Richard’s children because that’s Martha. But how do the children introduce Rachel as their father, or is he now the former father? I said unreality is perplexing.
It is clear from the Pride declaration that unreality must be on the march against reality not only here, but anywhere that unreality goes unrecognized. Therefore, the United States must export the array of artificial LGBTQ+ rights and enforce them internationally. Biden states: “My Administration is also working to promote and protect LGBTQ+ human rights abroad.” Aside from the laughingstock this makes us in places such as China and Russia, it does further grievous harm.
Reverend Ladi Peter Thompson, a Lagos-based special adviser on security threats to the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, said: “It’s a fact that the global resurgence of terrorism is tearing Africa apart. There is a dark cloud on the horizon, and the meltdown of Africa’s most populous nation is a specter that nobody wants to imagine. The Biden administration, however, holds forth as the flagship of its policy toward African nations the threat of financial muscle to promote the LGBTI (sic) community in Africa.”
He added, “President Biden would do humankind a great favor by globalizing the American Dream, of which the essence is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Africans love that. But one thing Africans don’t want is the American nightmare, where the rights go rogue, and the rights are wrong.” Rev. Thompson could almost be quoting Lincoln, who said that no one “has a right to do wrong.”
The LGBTQ+ movement will not succeed in the long run. Dream worlds do not last. Such dreams invariably turn into nightmares from which people eventually try to wake themselves. After all, reality still exists and cannot be banished, no matter how hard Joseph Biden tries. It will reassert itself one way or the other. How long that takes and how much damage the rationalizations incur in the meantime will depend partly on us.
In other words, counter-principles to reality must be confronted with the real principles of existence. Reflecting upon his experiences in Nazi Germany where he had been imprisoned, Heinrich Rommen wrote: “When one of the relativist theories is made the basis of a totalitarian state, man is stirred to free himself from the pessimistic resignation that characterizes these relativist theories and to return to his principles.” He then went on to articulate those principles in his great work, The Natural Law, which could serve as an antidote to our present troubles from relativist theories.
Like him, we must stir ourselves. We have the means at hand to do this from our own country’s foundation: they are called “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” This restoration is also necessary for the reestablishment of the integrity of language – so that words are reconnected with reality. For Joseph Pieper, according to the late Fr. James Schall, “the essential thing in philosophy is that not one single element of reality be suppressed or concealed – not one element of that unfathomable reality the vision of which is synonymous with the concept of ‘truth.’”
In other words, tell the truth, the whole truth, and be willing to pay the price that it will exact.
Speaking of Solzhenitsyn and the experiences of spiritual recovery in the Soviet Gulag, the late great Dr. Gerhart Niemeyer, said, “These examples teach that ‘a return’ is possible, but also that no return may be possible without something like an annihilating situation… no recovery of order can be had by a merely intellectual tour de force: nothing short of a soul-shaking experience can stir up the ashes of lost truth.” We may be approaching such an annihilating situation. Rather than letting such a prospect depress us, we should see and prepare for it as an opportunity for the recovery of order. Recall that Cardinal George’s full remarks about his successor dying in prison, and his successor dying a martyr, ended with this sentence, “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”
I close with these comforting words from philosopher Eric Voegelin: “The closure of the soul in modern Gnosticism can repress the truth of the soul, but it cannot remove the soul and its transcendence from the structure of reality.” The flight from reality cannot last forever. It will surely fail. We can help make sure it does by something as simple as telling the truth, like this courageous young man, Tanner Cross, has done.
(Note: Portions of this essay are adapted from the author’s chapter in Challenging the Secular Culture: A Call to Christians [Franciscan University Press, 2016].)
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