Friends,
Welcome to the world of multi-sex army barracks and trying to figure out if your buddy next to you in the foxhole is either Gerry or Geraldine. That’s what our judicial system just decreed yesterday.
The news was widely reported Monday [December 11] by CNN, Fox, MSNBC and by other venues that a Federal judge had blocked President Trump’s directive halting the enlistment of transgenders into the American military that would have put their admittance into the armed services on hold. As CNN phrased it in its lead reporting:
“A federal judge on Monday declined the US government's request to put on hold an order allowing transgender individuals to join the military beginning in January. The decision means transgender people will be free to enlist in the new year…So far, two federal judges have blocked key provisions of President Donald Trump's prohibition on transgender individuals serving in the military, which was announced in August. Last month, Marvin Garbis in Maryland wrote in a 53-page ruling that currently serving transgender service members were "already suffering harmful consequences" and prohibited the administration "from blocking those challenging the ban from completing their medically necessary surgeries." Another federal judge had blocked portions of Trump's directive in October.
“This Man’s Army” is not going to be what it once was. And let’s add: It’s not specifically about women—traditionally, they have been grouped in their own military corps—WACS and WAVES, made famous by feats during World War II. Women in the foxhole or in a scorchingly hot desert oasis is one thing—at least you know that the person next to you is a female, born and bred, and you take the proper actions as dictated by military law and the traditions and customs of our Christian view of such things.
No; this time you can’t be certain…and as the court ruling overthrows the president’s directive, there is nothing essentially at all preventing so-called “gender fluid” enlistees, either. Just imagine: this morning the guy who partnered with you in the foxhole was a definable man, but later today he—or, rather, she—“feels” like a woman. Maybe she has a skirt hidden away in “her” locker for alternative displays?
But more seriously: This process of “expanding gender rights” is not new; indeed, to be exact historically, it dates back at least to the mid-19th century and to the early campaign for women’s suffrage. Of course, back then most advocates of expanding the franchise would have been shocked had the term “sexual liberation” been employed. For such activists as Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) the primary objective was to broaden the franchise and change certain legal inhibitions, including notably Anthony’s campaign to expand married women’s property rights.
Anthony, born of a Quaker family in the “Burned-Over” district of upstate New York and northwestern Massachusetts known for its zealous “reformist” movements, was raised by parents who believed that men and women should work, study and live together in some degree of equality. And that included the eradication of injustice and cruelty not only in the United States but worldwide.
Like Anthony, Elizabeth Stanton came from a Quaker family, and with another leading activist, Lucy Stone (1818-1893), all three were fervent abolitionists who worked for the end of slavery. Anthony, despite her membership in the American Anti-Slavery Society and her speeches in favor of abolition, after the end of the War Between the States, unlike some other advocates of women’s suffrage, “she refused to support any suffrage amendments to the Constitution [for former slaves] unless they granted the franchise to women as well as men.”
In his classic study of Puritanism, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), historian Perry Miller traced the history of the “reformist theology” that had sprung from the zealous Pilgrims who arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Like certain religious cults that arose during the Reformation, for example the German Anabaptists, the creation of “a shining city of the hill” and a concentration on eschatology and the “end times” dominated the ethos of these groups. Unbound from established Lutheran, Anglican, Calvinist and Catholic confessions and adrift from inherited traditions and creeds, there was a radical perfectionism and universalist reformism implicit in the teachings of these sects, which foreshadowed a fanatical New England Abolitionism, Prohibitionism and incipient feminism. Indeed, there is a genealogical connection between the Puritans and later generations of philosophical Pragmatists and Unitarians, as well as to pacifism and civil rights activism, with these movements discarding eventually the “Heaven after death” belief for a “create Heaven here on Earth” template, and thus stressing the imperative to work for creation of the “kingdom of God” here and now—a “kingdom” where soon God became merely a symbol for social and political progress.
About the time that women’s suffrage was triumphing nationally in the United States (under President Woodrow Wilson), Sigmund Freud, in Austria, in his writings and teachings, was deconstructing the traditional integrity of the personality. Through his widely-dispersed and expounded theories of psychoanalysis and psycho-therapy (and the birth of Freudian psychiatric analysis), in a real sense, “another shoe” had dropped in what would eventually become the “sexual revolution.”
In his new and massively-documented biography, Frederick Crews dismantles Freud’s theories and demonstrates that he was very simply a vicious charlatan and a “fraud”:
The rot seems to have set in during Freud’s childhood, when the family moved to a lower-class Jewish enclave in Vienna, instilling in him a ruthless determination to distance himself from his origins and an unquenchable thirst for wealth and fame. Crews deduces that while his parents were away and he was left in charge of his younger siblings, the teenage Freud sexually abused his younger sister. He was in love with his mother, admitting later to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess: ‘I have found, in my own case, the phenomenon of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood.’ … An early adopter and promoter of cocaine as a medical drug, Freud was a lifelong cocaine addict himself, and this, Crews thinks, must have marred his ability to think straight. Freud liked to diagnose his patients with whichever ‘ailment’ was currently preoccupying him.… [I]t becomes ever-clearer that the real problem was inside Freud’s own head — what Crews calls ‘his interior house of horrors’. Not only did he think all boys were in love with their mothers and wanted to murder their fathers, in accordance with his own Oedipus complex, he also had a weird theory that women — all women — were sinister creatures whose vagina threatened to castrate any male who crossed its threshold. He divined that the secret ambition of every female was to acquire the ‘envied penis’ by severing it. His mind, Crews tells us, ‘conjoined illogic and bizarre ideas with misogyny, prurience and cruelty.’
It is but a short leap from Freud to author Havelock Ellis and his influential works, including Analysis of Sexual Impulse, Love and Pain, or Sex in Relation to Society and, perhaps most importantly, The Psychology of Sex. And then to Margaret Sanger and the American Birth Control League and the eventual foundation of Planned Parenthood and the modern movement not only for greater sexual freedom, but for the extension of newly-created “civil rights” for same sex marriage, the non-nuclear family, and to transgenderism and “gender fluidity,” so-called.
There is a fascinating correlation between the apparent triumph of the movement for “sexual liberation,” and more specifically, the deconstruction and destruction of traditional male/female roles and positions in society, and the movement for “racial equality.” Both employ the vocabulary of “civil rights” and appeal to a “higher law” of conscience. But arguably that “conscience” is not based in traditional Christian theology and philosophy, despite repeated attempts to construe it thusly. Indeed, both the movements for racial and for sexual “liberation,” while couched in the language of “equality” and “rights” somehow “discovered” in the Constitution, have become handmaidens—a kind of penumbra—of what is termed “cultural Marxism." And they now profoundly characterize it and configure it and its revolutionary goals in a manner that in many ways would be unrecognizable to an earlier generation of Communists. True, some of the rhetoric of the first Soviets after the Bolshevik Revolution included such radical visions, but the realities of statecraft and inherent effects of Nature, itself, plus the ineradicable pressures of nationalism and economics dictated that for much of the Soviet period such ideas would remain mostly sloganeering.
Yet, in the United States of 2017, twenty-six years after the fall of the Soviets, the fanatical Utopian Progressivist vision of an unbridled sexual liberation and what is called the complete elimination of “racial oppression” and “white supremacy” are nearer to success than ever before—but it is a goal, let us add, that is and will be unrealizable, but may bring down our civilization and cause the death of millions in the process.
At the very same time that we witness the triumph of sexual liberation progressivism in the United States—all in the name of equality and the necessary expansion of evil rights—increasingly contrary and formidable voices in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe take an opposing view. Ironically, there is a veritable rebirth in historically-based national patriotism, traditional faith and stout resistance to sexual revolution in those countries that were once oppressed by Soviet Communism.
Just recently Dmitri Kiselyov, the major television anchor on Russian state television, denounced US government, tax paid “sex reassignment surgery”:
“Recently, a soldier of the U.S. Army underwent a sex reassignment surgery. The Pentagon issued a special statement on the matter which was aired by NBC. Importantly, the surgery was paid for from the U.S. military budget…The whole concept of love has been reduced by mass commercial culture to just sex. Complete replacement. That's how we got the expression 'make love'. And the thing that used to be called love before is now falling into oblivion.
…all these stories have a certain civilization filling. It's an explosive mixture of political correctness, hypocrisy, tolerance, consumerism and an expanded understanding of freedom. Liberation of the body, from liberalizing recreational drug use to sexualizing everything, from fashion and cinema to architecture and even food, let alone musical culture.
Radical feminism started with fighting for equal rights for women but has since moved further—to domination of all things male which are made to look almost disgusting. Women's equality is now also at its limits. First, they tried to prove that women are just like men but then it turned out that the same medicine affects them differently and their sicknesses are also different. Statistically, men are more prone to cardiovascular diseases while women are more likely to get Alzheimer's. But there are other differences too. Differences between sexes have been found even in the brain….
On this, let the Americans commit suicide if they wish, but we won’t follow along. We prefer to follow centuries of time tested traditional teaching, belief and practice.”
Would that we had more such voices like that in positions of national prominence in the United States!
The late Rachel Trickett (1923-1999), don of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University, has warned of the consequences of absolute equality between the sexes. It entails effects that are “inevitably anarchic,” and places basic civilization as we have known it in the cross hairs:
When all ideas of a code of conduct collapse, when the concept of courtesy disappears, a condition of primitivism prevails, and its principle is, inevitably, brute force. There is no other way in which to assert some sort of predominance, some sort of pack leadership. And in this situation men will inevitably prevail for the simple, biological reason that they are stronger than women. So that women, without some code of deference or respect, become increasingly victims, however much they try to compete with their superiors in strength.
Perhaps the door to recovery was slightly opened, slightly cracked with the election of November 2016? Is it too much to believe that a single political event would offer us one small glimmer, one tiny chance at real cultural counter-revolution? In such times as these we can—and must—hope.
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