Recognizing Reality

This Pentecost, a hermit in the diocese of Lexington, Kentucky, admitted that she was really a she and not a he. That is not how she put it, but that is what it was. Christian Matson, who was born Nicole Matson, said that she began to express herself as a male when she was 21. She has been taking synthetic testosterone since then, so that if you look at her face now, you will see someone who appears to be a very odd sort of man: bearded, with smallish features, soft-bodied, overweight. 

For many years, she has practiced a deception upon the Church, saying she was what she was not. I will grant that she was practicing a deception upon herself at the same time, so that when by her dress, her hair, and her voice-forcing she said to others, implicitly, “I am a man,” a part of her mind could allay any queasy conscience, saying, “Be quiet—I really am a man, so there.”

Let me get one matter out of the way. I will hear that sex is “nonbinary,” existing along a spectrum. That is nonsense. You’re going to get a puppy dog from a litter.  You check to see if it’s a boy dog or a girl dog. It never occurs to you that there is anything else for a dog to be. The doe gives birth to a fawn. That fawn is going to be another doe, or a buck. It is the same with man. 

Barring the exceedingly rare birth defect, what you have is a boy or a girl, and that’s it. There is no case of anyone having fully functional reproductive organs of both sexes. Even in the case of those birth defects, you will almost always have one sex or the other predominating in appearance, though it is likely that both will be nonfunctional. You are almost three times as likely to be born with a partial or wholly missing arm or leg than you are to suffer one of those defects (1 in 2,100 versus 1 in 5,800).

The first time I ever heard the word “binary” used in a pejorative way it was by an amiable feminist in the English department at Providence College. She used it to describe certain kinds of logic, implying that there was something peculiarly masculine and therefore reductive and even primitive about it. But, of course, some things are either true or not true: the middle is excluded. 

God exists, or He does not exist. Jesus rose from the dead, or He did not rise from the dead. You can either construct a regular heptagon with a straightedge and a compass, or you cannot (in fact, you cannot). A thing cannot be true and not true at the same time and in the same respect. Either the earth’s temperature is rising, or it is not; if it is rising, most of the rise is either due to human activity, whether alone or in synergy with other factors, or it is not.

Moral reality, too, is subject to the same analysis. We Catholics are supposed to be moral realists. We do not determine what shall be right or wrong. We recognize what is right or wrong, regardless of what anybody thinks about it. When we say, for example, that it is wrong to practice deceit, we imply that deceit harms both the deceiver and the deceived—the latter, by the deceit, but the former, both by the deceit and in the act of deceiving. You cannot escape the consequences of sin. It is like ingesting poison.  We Catholics are supposed to be moral realists. We do not determine what shall be right or wrong. We recognize what is right or wrong, regardless of what anybody thinks about it. Tweet This

The doctor who treated George Washington for strep throat believed that bleeding him would help. Of course, it did not; it made the body even weaker, and Washington died. The doctor did the best he knew. He was not malicious, only ignorant. But no one can plead ignorance of what we call the natural law, written upon the heart; and even if your mind and soul are befuddled or benighted, still the sin works its harm. Cannibals do not grow more human by feeding upon human flesh.

The sexual sins do not differ, in this regard, from sins of falsehood or violence. To say that fornication is wrong is to imply that it harms both those who fornicate and the society that accepts it or connives at it. Granted, when everybody around you is doing something bad, your joining in will likely involve no special degree of malice. 

How much to blame was Augustine’s friend Alypius, when he got hooked on watching the combats of gladiators in the arena, issuing in bloodshed and death? God alone knows. Alypius tried to resist, after all, while everyone around him took such combats as a matter of course, much as we now do with premarital sex. But who can deny that the Romans were worse for it? It hardened their hearts, it gave them a taste for cruelty, and it cheapened their view of human life.

It is one thing to get mixed up in a brawl. That is often the result of a quick temper, too much drink, an overflow of misdirected energy. It is another to make a practice of brawling; still another, to institutionalize bloodshed for sport.

So, too, it was one thing for a boy and a girl, in my parents’ time, to end up in a bad way because place conspired with time and desire with desire. It was another to make a practice of it, as people had begun to do when I was young. It has been still another to institutionalize every sexual sin, barring rape, which is what you have when your laws are supposed to respect “bodily autonomy,” when sins contra naturam are not only condoned but celebrated so far as to become, of all mad things, a centerpiece of American foreign policy, and, for the Catholic Church, the supposed next thing the “Spirit,” ever hip and careless of self-contradiction and chaos, is going to say.

There is, however, one thing that makes poison less harmful than sin. If you ingest arsenic, your stomach will let you know. But sin dulls the sense of sin; you get used to it; you ignore its effects; you become enmeshed in the lie, till you can no longer distinguish it from the truth. You begin by saying, “I know this is wrong, but I can’t help it.” You go on to say, “This is wrong, but it’s not as bad as other things are. At least I don’t,” and you add some other thing, something you don’t do, usually because you happen not to be tempted to do it anyway.  

But as long as you keep lying about the sin, there will be no end to it; it is a crater that keeps collapsing beneath you. For you then say, “This is not wrong for me,” and, “This is not wrong,” and “This is right,” and “This is wonderful,” and “This is wonderful and everybody must acknowledge it,” and “This is wonderful and everybody must not only acknowledge it but celebrate it and thus, to the extent they are capable, participate in it.”

Every lie is a sin, and every sin is a lie. Jesus says, “Let your yes be yes and your no be no,” because “everything else comes from the evil one.” As for Satan, he was “a liar and a murderer from the beginning,” indeed, a “liar and the father of lies.” It is a lie to say or even to pretend that a man can become a woman or that a woman can become a man. Sexual being is not ours to make. It was made by the Creator, from the beginning, who made us “male and female,” as Jesus says. 

We recognize that reality; we should accept it as a gift. Nor is the reality something interior and mysterious and ever-flitting. Nowhere in Scripture are we urged to say, “I must be true to myself,” as if we were self-fashioned, self-creating, and as if there were some “self,” existing in a splendid realm of unchanging and eternal selves, a “self” I must discover, and, having discovered it, the “self” I must honor as the lamp unto my feet, and a light to my paths.

No, the reality is humbler, and far more beautiful than any phantasm of an individualistic imagination. Adam is a boy. Eve is a girl. That is no more to be sneered at or looked on with disgruntlement than are their flesh and bones. It is high time we recovered a sense of that beauty. The mystery is not in what some poor soul, unfortunately muddled, dreams up about what he or she “really” is. The mystery is before our eyes: that there should ever be creatures so beautiful as boys and girls, men and women, in the first place.