Written by R. R. Reno |
Thursday, October 27, 2022
We have deliberately deregulated our culture. The old, culturally ­reinforced pathways to normalcy have been dismantled. We have restructured our society to cater to the “sexually marginalized.” The normal has been recast as “repressive.” This project has been sold as noble. Many progressive Christians have declared it to be a fulfillment of the gospel. But it has meant transferring resources, social prestige, political power, and legal privileges to those whose desires are disordered. H.R. 8404 is one example.

Our ruling class seems determined to drive our country into a ditch. H.R. 8404, the Respect for Marriage Act, is a case in point. Ostensibly, the bill is meant to codify the right to same-sex marriage that was discovered by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges. In view of present realities, it serves little purpose other than to flaunt the power of the Rainbow Reich.
Gay marriage is a luxury good in our society, largely the province of professional men and women. Meanwhile, among Americans without college degrees, marriage is collapsing. The decline is not happening because heterosexual men and women are co-habiting in stable relationships. Recent studies show that the number of individuals between the ages of twenty-four and fifty-four who are living alone is increasing, and now approaches 40 percent. Not surprisingly, fertility and family formation are declining as well.
These hard numbers point to a reality only the willfully blind refuse to see: the increasingly dysfunctional relations between men and women. Why the male–­female dance has broken down over the past generation is not easy to explain. But it does not take a graduate degree in psychology to recognize that children need clear pathways toward adult life as men and women. Nor does it take a degree in sociology to see that those pathways are precisely what we have systematically denied to children, often in the interest of making our society more “inclusive.”
Gay marriage is not an innocent innovation, a ­win-win for society that, as many claimed, would strengthen the institution of marriage by making it more available. It was always implausible to imagine that our society could celebrate homosexuality and honor it with the institution of marriage without undermining the socialization of children into healthy patterns of male–female reciprocity. Given the ambition of the Rainbow Reich to restructure social attitudes, transgender ideology and the current epidemic of gender dysphoria were entirely predictable. Gay liberation was never solely about legal rights. It undermines the normative status of heterosexuality. As the more honest activists always insisted, the goal was to “queer” society.
Well, we’ve gone a long way toward achieving that goal. Spend a few hours with mainstream media, and you’d think a third or more of people were ­homosexual. The messaging has been effective. The rate of people identifying as LGBT has risen dramatically, especially among the impressionable young. A recent Gallup poll has more than 20 percent of Gen Z checking the LGBT box.

No doubt the severe decline of norms that privilege marriage, family, and heterosexual coupling has been beneficial for a small class of people whose desires are abnormal. But for the majority of Americans these changes have come at a great cost.

Family offers a safe harbor in the rough seas of life. For most, it’s a reliable place of comfort and a source of profound satisfaction. Public health officials scratch their heads, trying to explain the extraordinary decline in life expectancy in the United States, a shocking trend for a country so rich. Their captivity to progressive ­ideology makes them invincibly ignorant. They cannot acknowledge the obvious truth, which is that ­isolated, disoriented individuals deprived of the norms that would guide them toward marriage and family have dim prospects. They are more likely to stumble through life and engage in self-destructive behavior.
Count me among those who are no longer willing to pretend. We need to reckon with a harsh reality: Their premature deaths are by design. That is, our elites have destroyed the structures that foster healthy lives. Our educational ideologies celebrate critical methods that “disorient” and “deconstruct.” That’s what “queering” means. Our elites applaud Drag Queen Story Hour, believing that putatively stultifying “stereotypes” are being shattered and children are learning to be more “open-minded.” As the data accumulate, showing how bad life has become for ordinary Americans, those who repeat progressive platitudes are complicit in their neighbors’ misery.
Things will get worse, I’m afraid. We have deliberately deregulated our culture. The old, culturally ­reinforced pathways to normalcy have been dismantled. We have restructured our society to cater to the “sexually marginalized.” The normal has been recast as “repressive.” This project has been sold as noble. Many progressive Christians have declared it to be a fulfillment of the gospel. But it has meant transferring resources, social prestige, political power, and legal privileges to those whose desires are disordered. H.R. 8404 is one example.
No man is an island. We respond to incentives and social signals. Our cultural elites cheer Rachel Levine, the Biden administration’s assistant secretary for health. A man with two children who was divorced in 2013 and refashioned himself as a woman, Levine is held up as an exemplary American, heroically loyal to himself and a pioneer of liberation. Are we surprised that increasing numbers of people, especially those who lack social capital or are psychologically vulnerable, are now living dysfunctional and self-destructive lives?
Sexual minorities are people, made in the image and likeness of God. But we must not remain silent about the great costs that the imperatives of “inclusion” have imposed, often on the most vulnerable.
In the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, St. Paul gives an account of our descent into bondage to sin. ­Verses 18–32 draw upon the Wisdom of Solomon, which gives an extended account of the spiritual, moral, and social disaster of idolatry. In his compressed version, Paul explains how humanity turned away from the invisible nature and eternal power of God, which is clearly manifest in ­creation. Our minds darkened; we became fools. Claiming to be wise, we raised up graven images, exchanging worship of the living God for devotion to dead idols.
The Bible often uses the term “vanity” to denote the spiritual import of idolatry. We assume that “vanity” refers to a conceited self-regard. But in its literal sense, vanity means emptiness or nothingness. Idol worship is thus vain in a metaphysical sense, a spiritual project oriented toward emptiness, a dead end that sucks the life out of us.
In his perfect justice, God honors our choice to exchange worship of the source of life for worship of dead idols. As Paul explains, “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity [patheatimias—­dishonorable passions].” We get what we want, an emptiness that we fill with disordered desires. Paul goes on to specify, playing on the theme of exchange: “Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and their men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”
Paul, who goes on to list a host of vices, is not saying that homosexual acts are the sole form of impurity. He is identifying same-sex eroticism as emblematic. For just as idols are lifeless, homosexual acts are intrinsically sterile. The life-giving potential of our instinctual drive to act upon our sexual desires is perverted, made vain, which is to say empty and fruitless. In this way, homosexual acts typify the dead end of sinful transgression.
It is important to read this passage correctly. Because of the power of instinct, in most instances sexual sins are far less grave than those committed with premeditation and malice. Homosexual acts are, however, metaphysically singular, serving as a “condensed symbol” of our fallen condition.
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Written by R. R. Reno |
Friday, June 10, 2022
What we are witnessing in today’s transgender mania is the next step of “progress”: securing our freedom, not from inherited inhibitions and social censure, but from nature, and, indeed, from reality, which is why so much energy goes into controlling what people can and cannot say. This ambition to transcend the constraints imposed by nature sends transgenderism down the same spiritual grooves as transhumanism and doctor-assisted suicide. Both are body-freedom projects. If we see this connection, I believe we can better understand why transgenderism has gained so much ­influence so quickly.

The progressive imagination envisions a limitless future. Karl Marx thought that modern industrial production marked a new epoch in human history. Amid explosive growth during the industrial revolution, he thought we were on the cusp of material abundance. Marx argued that if we rejected the artificial scarcity of competitive capitalism (revolution!), then the curse of Adam, the necessity of hard labor to ensure survival, could be overcome. In a world of limitless plenty, each would be free to develop every aspect of his personality without limits. In the communist utopia we could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,” while adopting the critical pose of the philosopher after dinner.
In 2022, our societies produce more wealth than Marx ever imagined. But few still believe the promise of communism and its dream of freedom from material limits. Aside, perhaps, from proponents of Modern Monetary Theory, most of us accept the enduring role of scarcity in economic life. Yet the dream of a limitless future has not gone away. By my reading of the last half century or more, it has migrated out of economics and class politics into dreams of a cultural revolution. Put simply, having given up on class war as a way to achieve a classless ­society, progressives now devote themselves to a bio-­cultural war on the limits imposed by our bodies.
The 1960s were a key moment in this pivot from what was then called “the Social Question” to concerns about our bodies. For millennia, sex was bound up with marriage and children. This cultural link is rooted in biological reality: the intrinsic fertility of sexual intercourse. But the Pill and new moral norms in the Sixties severed the connection between sex and reproduction. Why, our cultural revolutionaries asked, should sex be limited by fertility? Second-wave feminism reinforced this trend, as did gay liberation. The first insisted that a woman’s body must not limit her professional and personal choices. The latter insisted that the biological reality of our sexual organs should not limit our choice of sexual partners.
In traditional cultures, society justifies itself by appealing to memory. Leaders claim to remain true to ancestors, origins, and divine laws. Modern culture is different. “Progress” is central to the story we tell about ourselves. And in this story progress means overcoming limits. For this reason, the power of the Pill to free women from fertility was widely embraced, and it served as the technological foundation for women’s liberation. The expansion of options for women, along with changes that freed homosexuals from censure, was welcomed as an extension of our long tradition of promoting political freedom from arbitrary power.
But overcoming our bodies is not the same as rebelling against kings or protesting against racial discrimination. In its essence, the American Revolution was a political act, as was the Civil Rights Movement. Neither one redefined marriage, altered what it means to be a parent, or rethought the natural family. By contrast, the sexual revolution, which is still unfolding, is metaphysical in character. As a rebellion against nature’s constraints, it touches on every aspect of what it means to be human.
Some people wonder why transgender issues got added to the agenda of gay liberation. Not a few feminists, and some outspoken lesbians, raised their voices in protest. I think they are naive. “­Progress” is a wheel that must keep turning. John Dewey was perhaps the most influential progressive American intellectual of the twentieth century. At every step, he championed “boundless possibility.” Dewey recognized that progress must be open-ended. It seeks ever to overcome “fixed limits.”

In view of this conception of progress as the never-­ending quest for “boundless possibility,” we should not be surprised that we are being stampeded into affirmations of transgender ideology. It is the next step that overcomes the constraints imposed by our bodies. If our sexual organs should not limit our freedom to have sex with whomever we wish—and please note this assumption underwrites a permissive sexual ethic for heterosexuals, not just homosexuals—why should ­biological facts limit our understanding of ourselves as men or women?

Unlike earlier stages of the sexual revolution, which can be framed as liberations from traditional cultural constraints rather than as metaphysical rebellions, transgenderism concerns our bodies in an open and direct way. The hormones at work in the Pill operate invisibly. The hormones used to block puberty effect changes that all can see, and gender-reassignment surgeries even more so. For this reason, transgenderism has tremendous metaphysical significance as a symbol of successful rebellion. Its open warfare on the body promises final victory.
This fact explains why progressives are so fiercely loyal to transgender ideology. By forthrightly and blatantly denying that our bodies can and should limit our sentiments, feelings, and choices, transgenderism puts an exclamation mark on the sexual revolution. It also brings into the open the theological ambition of progressive cultural politics. At Woodstock and Stonewall, the push to revise moral norms aimed to achieve sexual freedom. But hormonal therapies applied to children have nothing to do with sexual desire, and subsequent surgical interventions mutilate the organs that are capable of sexual stimulation. Except in the case of middle-aged men who “transition,” the transgender phenomenon is not about sex (and I argue below that even for the middle-aged men it’s not, finally, about sex). Instead, what we are witnessing in today’s transgender mania is the next step of “progress”: securing our freedom, not from inherited inhibitions and social censure, but from nature, and, indeed, from reality, which is why so much energy goes into controlling what people can and cannot say.
This ambition to transcend the constraints imposed by nature sends transgenderism down the same spiritual grooves as transhumanism and doctor-assisted suicide. Both are body-freedom projects. If we see this connection, I believe we can better understand why transgenderism has gained so much ­influence so quickly.
Death is the greatest limit. And by this I do not mean simply our final moment. Rather, I take “death” to mean the downward spiral of life toward lifelessness. As someone on the far side of sixty, I’m aware that my body’s vitality is waning. Given my own experience, I’m rather confident that Bruce Jenner and other aging men embrace transgenderism as a therapy. Like Viagra, getting breasts is a technological way of revitalizing the body. Like Botox and cosmetic surgeries, it seeks to hit the pause button on aging. Very few progressive men or women want to mutilate themselves. But they are enchanted by the symbolism of transgenderism. This is especially true of Baby Boomers, for whom agelessness has become a singular preoccupation.
Boys can become girls and girls can become boys! This claim is now obligatory, and contradicting it brings opprobrium. As an assertion, it promises to liberate us from our bodies, allowing us to wiggle free of nature’s limits, of which death is the most dire. Transgender ideology says that gender is not our bodily sex—it is merely “assigned at birth.” This conceit encourages us to imagine that our bodily demise, too, is “assigned” rather than a given, and thus death can be “reassigned” rather than suffered. Doctor-assisted suicide should be understood as mortality reassignment. Our bodies do not determine when we die—we choose, just as a man can determine that he is a woman. Although transhumanism remains a techno-utopian dream, it promises more than “reassignment.” The ambition is to secure the indefinite deferral of death.
The promise of immortality is alluring, especially to educated, rich, and progressive Americans who imagine that they deserve every advantage in life, including the freedom to manage their mortality, if not escape it altogether. To my mind, this allure explains why activists, doctors, mental health protfessionals, politicians, and other adults countenance the mutilation of young people. Like Aztec elites, they sacrifice others to keep alive their theological ambition of overcoming all limits, even and especially those imposed by their own bodies, which are doomed to wear out.
I have emphasized the modern belief in “progress,” which underwrites never-ending efforts to overcome limits. Yet, the collective imagination of the West is shifting. Today’s watchword is “sustainability,” not progress. This preoccupation concerns more than the climate. Lots of responsible people anguish over populist and authoritarian threats. They establish websites and write endlessly, urging us to commit ourselves to the singular task of sustaining liberal democracy and the “rules-based international order.” This decidedly non-progressive call to conserve seems merited, given shifting public opinion. Polling suggests that young people believe their lives will be worse than their parents’ have been. Some are convinced that environmental catastrophe is around the corner.
The upshot is paradoxical. On the one hand, our collective mood is sour. The most we seem able to hope for is that tomorrow won’t be worse than today. That’s the spiritual meaning of “sustainability.” On the other hand, progressivism cultivates explicitly metaphysical and theological ambitions. Yes, liberals press for ­increases in the minimum wage and other traditional goals. But the lawn signs in university towns announce, “Hate has no home here.” This sentiment amounts to reversing the fall of man and proclaiming the kingdom of God. And as I have argued, today’s progressive cultural politics seeks to overturn the authority of nature. Thus we have at once widespread resignation—and God-like ambition.
It’s really very strange. One hundred thousand people die of opioid overdoses in a single year, and elites throw up their hands and do nothing. Meanwhile, they put untold millions into transgender activism and insist that the fullest resources of the medical-industrial complex must be employed to attain its goals.
I could go on with other strange paradoxes. But to my mind, the weird way in which American progressivism has been swallowed by a cultural politics that now revolves around transgender ideology is revealing. It makes evident that powerful elements of our society are engaged in an open war on reality. Ze and Zir are easy to mock and ridicule. But the now-ubiquitous use of “them” as a singular pronoun shows how deeply all of us are now implicated in the rebellion against bodily reality.
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