Whither Purity?
“Canada is a sick country.” Tucker Carlson on the Yaniv case, July 2019
In a pair of columns in the National Post last month, Rex Murphy lambasted the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal for considering a case now reverberating around the world. Variously identified on the Internet, the case revolves around Jonathan – or, if you will, ‘Jessica’ – Yaniv, an LGBT activist, who has made more than a dozen complaints against multiple cosmeticians for refusing to perform a procedure against their will.
The cosmeticians were unwilling to “wax” Yaniv’s still-male genitalia, prompting the 32-year-old to file complaints against all of them and claiming she’s – he’s – a victim of discrimination. The result, according to Murphy, has been to turn Canada into a laughingstock around the world while at the same time epitomizing yet again the wretchedness Progressivism has produced after more than fifty years of subverting, confusing and corrupting the moral assumptions of Canada’s once healthy society.
So much for the nobility of the UN’s original concept of human rights, lamented Murphy, as laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, following the atrocities of World War II.
And so much for Canada’s much-invoked Charter of Rights and Freedoms, intended to protect the individual rights of Canadians. Somewhere along the line the UN Declaration and Canada’s Charter have become cudgels by which individual Canadians are allowed to bludgeon other Canadians into performing services that violate their own rights and consciences. All further enabled by this nation’s Human Rights tribunals whose job it once was to protect those Canadians in real need rather than what they now appear to be doing: upholding the imagined ‘rights’ of deeply troubled persons to bully anyone who won’t bend to their will and perform services they demand.
Where’s the harm?
Just as parents are now being pressured by the cultural forces bombarding them daily into accepting as perfectly normal that drag queens should visit their local libraries and entertain their pre-school children, as has been happening recently in small town Ontario libraries, prompting ‘enlightened’ parents to wonder out loud: “Where’s the harm?”
Georgia Kijesky, a pro-family activist, has the answer: “The goal is to normalize abnormal, sexually deviant homosexual behaviour by enticing children to first question their sexuality,” she told LifeSiteNews in a recent interview. “The more children see men dressing up as women, the more normal it will become.”
And indeed, the evidence supporting Kijesky’s view is now ubiquitous if Canadians bother to pay attention to what’s going on around them. Never mind that the lifestyle itself has no future because, by definition, it is anti-life, as observed as far back as five years ago by Catholic theologian Father Cormac Burke who questioned the heritage today’s parents are handing on to their children, despite their good intentions.
“There is no real future for a society of self-absorbed individuals,” he told a crowd at a lecture in Nairobi.”Without any true and shared values held in common, there is less collective glue to hold it together. It ends in disintegration.”
Father Burke was also referring to an ideology that has since been imposed from the top down with particular force in the U.S. under the Obama administration and with the full cooperation of the media whose poster ‘person’ at the beginning of the campaign was Bruce Jenner. Since then, this ideology, popularly known as Gender Theory, has had the cultural power to have ‘conversion’ therapy banned. This has occurred in Canada too where gender identity has recently been added as a protected ground under human rights law. And even Amazon has boycotted sales of any books or other materials related to conversion therapy.
Gender Theory
Never mind that Gender Theory has no basis in biological fact, as stated by two foremost psychiatrists.
On such, Dr. Richard Corradi of Cleveland, Ohio, has called transgenderism a “contagion of mass delusion.” His comments came in response to a 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine which selected a trans-activist boy named Avery Jackson for the cover of its ‘Gender Revolution’ issue.
According to Corradi, like it or not, there are two sexes only: male and female who, since the beginning of creation, have joined to form the foundation of family. And any permutations of this fundamental order are themselves disordered. And against nature.
Nor do sympathetic transgender promotionals as National Geographic’s help anyone, Corradi said, because they fail to address the 41 percent of the transgender population who at some point will attempt suicide. Even when affirmed, accepted, and loved, the research on transgender individuals shows that a high percentage of them struggle with suicide, indicating that the issues that torment them run deeper than an outer change in gender identity can rectify.
Nor has sex reassignment proven to be effective in resolving gender dysphoria for nearly half of this diverse population of gender-troubled individuals. A review of 100 research findings concludes that sex changes are not effective long term, and that many transgender people after surgery remain traumatized.
Why? Because the outer changes now afforded them have no basis in biological truth, a fact from which no one can hide indefinitely.
Dr. Paul R. McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and its Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, agrees. McHugh has long said that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, that sex change is “biologically impossible,” and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.
Five years ago, Dr. McHugh, the author of six books and at least 125 peer-reviewed medical articles, made his views public in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal, where he explained that transgender surgery is not the solution for people who suffer a “disorder of ‘assumption’” – the notion that their maleness or femaleness is different than what nature assigned to them biologically.
No surprise, however, that McHugh’s views have been in direct opposition to those of the Obama administration, Hollywood, and major media such as Time magazine which in recent years have treated transgenderism as normal, as occurring spontaneously in nature.
Dr.McHugh disagrees: “Policy makers and the media are doing no favours to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.”
His views have not withstood the oncoming deluge, however. Johns Hopkins has since decided to move on. Which means that, in 2017, nearly four decades after he originally derailed a pioneering transgender program at Johns Hopkins Hospital with his views on “guilt-ridden homosexual men,” the psychiatrist witnessed his institution come full circle by resuming gender-reassignment surgeries.
After a 38-year hiatus, Johns Hopkins has moved beyond McHugh, having once been at the forefront of gender-identity science and the site of the U.S.’s first ‘change-of-sex operations’ as headlines announced in 1966, only to halt the surgeries in 1979. And, that summer, the hospital formally opened a transgender health service and resumed an accompanying surgical program,
So the question now is: what happens to any society that promotes a lie as truth? That promotes harm as help? Disease as health? Tolerance as treatment? Vice as virtue?
A Century of Rebellion
None of this has occurred in a vacuum, of course. For more than a century, western culture has been entertaining permissive notions in direct opposition to all traditional moral teachings on human sexuality and any corresponding virtue that would temper it.
And, in turn, the resulting attitudes of permissiveness gave rise to the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and its primary facilitator – the birth control pill which has forever divorced sexual gratification from its fundamental purpose of human reproduction – unleashing amidst a long list of false promises and false freedoms a host of unexpected consequences.
Not the least of these, according to retired prison psychiatrist, Theodore Dalrymple, has been an ever-increasing sexual confusion fuelled by a lust-driven culture he describes as “All Sex All the Time”. It’s this climate which has unleashed many unintended consequences on subsequent generations who are without either understanding or responsibility for what’s been happening to them psychologically. Is this not reminiscent perhaps of the biblical admonition from Exodus 20 warning that the Lord God is a jealous God Who visits the iniquity of fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of those who hate Him? Does this explain what’s actually been happening? Does this explain the profound sexual confusion, widespread mental illness and general misery of so much of today’s populations? Or is that too, y’know, Old Testament?
Yet sad as this is, it explains the corresponding need for virtue which exists and must exist and must be practised in any society that hopes to live and thrive in an environment of mental, physical and spiritual order as the Lord God – not social engineers – designed it.
Freud in 1900
Nevertheless, the current culture could not have developed without avatars such as Sigmund Freud who at the turn of the 20th century was upending traditionally-held moral teachings with new theories on human sexuality. In his view, it was repression, not sin, in which human unhappiness was rooted. In the most simplistic terms, Freud convinced himself and countless others that it was the repression (read: self-control) of human sexual impulses that caused neurosis and unfocused psychological misery. It was also Freud’s hope that the loosening of the traditional prohibitions against sexual activity outside marriage could produce widespread happiness.
He was wrong. As were the many who followed him, including a growing intelligentsia eager to believe the answer to all human unhappiness was not God and religious adherence to Christian teachings but doing what feels good at the moment, that is, succumbing to one’s baser instincts as the recipe for true inner freedom. And that suppressing sexual impulses, via self-control and quaint notions of ‘sin’, might distort the human personality and emotions so badly as to cause psychological and even physical illness.
What got lost, rejected and even buried in this confusing mix – and intentionally so – were the traditions and teachings about sin and virtue, as taught for nearly 2,000 years by the Roman Catholic Church and as practised by the great saints. With devastating consequences for western culture.
Catechetical Truth
The truth has always been that the human soul does not belong to itself but to God. And that to deny the consequences of sin is to create a proclivity to sin within the human soul. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, this proclivity to sin also engenders vice by repetition of the same acts, resulting in perverse inclinations which cloud conscience and corrupt the concrete judgment of good and evil. “Thus sin tends to reproduce itself and reinforce itself, but it cannot destroy the moral sense at its root,” the Catechism teaches.
Sin cannot destroy the moral sense at its root. Indeed, it is this profound truth that troubles today’s loudest voices trying to shout down their own Creator-installed consciences. All in vain, of course, though that doesn’t stop them from trying to relieve the anxiety such denial creates. Nor does their trying to deny the destructive reality of vices – pride, avarice, envy, wrath, gluttony, sloth and lust – the latter of which gives rise to unchastity and impurity which, if entertained, addict the human mind and soul and proliferate, creating a moral condition which can only be counteracted by the very virtues they oppose. Virtues such as purity, which the great saints practised not only to counteract temptation but also for the graces such virtue bestows.
“Sin is a personal act,” the Catechism teaches. “Moreover, we have a responsibility for the sins committed by others when we cooperate in them …including by ordering, advising, praising or approving them and by protecting evil-doers.”
There’s more: “Thus sin makes men accomplices of one another and causes concupiscence, violence and injustice to reign among them. Sins give rise to social situations and institutions that are contrary to the divine goodness. ‘Structures of sin’ are the expression and effect of personal sins. They lead their victims to do evil in their turn. In an analogous sense, they constitute a ‘social sin’.
Does the above not accurately and succinctly describe so many of the operating structures of western society today? And in such uncompromising language too. The kind of language the human conscience must turn somersaults to hide from. Yet it is these very teachings fuelling all the public outrage, argument and denial. Denial that all sexual practises outside a sacramental marriage are intrinsically harmful and may be exactly what’s generating all the unanticipated fruits of the sins of the fathers of our era. To the third and fourth generations.
Bombarded by Lies and Temptation
Nevertheless, ordinary people created by God and offered salvation through the Blood of Christ are bombarded daily by deceitful distractions and outright lies about the ‘rights’ afforded individuals across this porn-saturated western world. Which is why they are arguing with themselves and with others in the public square and elsewhere over how they have the ‘right’ to do what they know in their heart is wrong. Sinful. Unacceptable to God and to the world in which they live and to which they have a responsibility, though they work furiously to deny this.
In their heart of hearts, they know that to reject the Christian virtue of purity, which demands respect for the human body and that understands that to commit carnal sin is to profane and violate the human body which, as St.Paul says, is ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit’ and therefore a sin against Life itself.
Yet even after decades of moral devastation, the marvel remains that anyone living in today’s world could still believe that all the aberrancy and depravity is normal, natural, spontaneous and organic. And that they can still be seduced by the monstrous lies that created this now very unhappy world. But perhaps this is exactly the result that any widespread “habituation to sin” produces. Every time it’s tried.