As For Me and My House

At the beginning of his autobiography, Witness, which tells of his intellectual, spiritual, and political passage into communism and then out of it, as by a hair’s breadth escape from Hell, Whittaker Chambers addresses his children directly, trusting that someday they will read about their father and understand him, even if he is gone. He writes with deep affection, but also with warning. For he has pierced through to the heart of communism. It is not, he says, the state’s ownership of the means of production. It is not the dictatorship of the proletariat. These may be its expressions for the age. Communism, he says, is none other and no less than the prime temptation to which man fell in the beginning: “Ye shall be as gods.”

What is its expression for our age now? To drop Karl Marx’s name now is to focus upon the economic sphere, as if you could raise up human life by utilitarian means alone. It is also to recall a battle royale that has long been won. The Soviet Union is no more. The old communist puppet-states of eastern Europe have been free at last to ruin themselves in their own ways rather than to have the ruination determined from Moscow. 

Their own ways, I say, but actually, they are ways determined for them by a plague of self-hatred coming from the West, along with a false liberation that rots out family life and makes the land bleak with loneliness. These are backed up by the immense power of those who write the algorithms we now depend on for our information, a “tyranny over the mind of man,” to use Jefferson’s apt words.

“Ye shall be as gods.” I think of the ads I have been seeing for the governor’s race here in New Hampshire. The Democrat nominee, a woman, has accused the Republican nominee, also a woman, of opposing in vitro fertilization. By no means, cries the Republican nominee. She says it is wonderful, and she knows many women who have profited by it. And I consider to what depths of farce, ineffectuality, and effete sentimentalism American politics has descended. 

It makes me long for a wheeler-dealer who might skim some profit to get bad highway exits widened (we have a few that need it), or to fill old mill buildings with new industry (we have a lot that could so be used), or to found trade schools, or something that takes imagination and farsightedness. But no, the race will be won by which candidate is more enthusiastic about getting a child out of a petri dish, and to hell with every moral consideration implied by the ghastly procedure. For if you can get a child that way, it surely must be permissible to tailor it to your specifications. Is that not already done, by weeding out unwanted embryos?

“Ye shall be as gods.” I see marriage fading and a birthrate in the West that has crossed over from precarious to suicidal. I see young people lonelier than even I could have believed possible, I who was lonely enough in school; but at least I had three siblings to compensate for it, and thirty-nine first cousins. I see the sexes mired in mutual recrimination, suspicious, disheartened, “and neither self-condemning,” as Milton described the snappishness of Adam and Eve after the fall. I see the peculiar drive and genius of boys neglected, smothered, or traduced. 

But not everything is fading. There used to be but two venereal diseases. Now there are more than thirty. Some of them are precursors to deadly cancers of the uterus, the colon, and the liver. But not everything is fading. There used to be but two venereal diseases. Now there are more than thirty. Some of them are precursors to deadly cancers of the uterus, the colon, and the liver.Tweet This

And what is the leadership of our Church doing? Gently returning people to sanity, to mutual love between the sexes? Helping to protect the innocence of children and to guide their imaginations toward marriage after the ordinary way of nature, ordained by God? Hardly. We must, we are told constantly, attend to the desires of those afflicted with one or another form of sexual confusion.  

The moniker LGBTQ+ gives the game away—and the thoughtlessness with which certain Catholics use it. You might think the initials would raise questions. What, for example, is the B doing there? Anyone who so identifies himself admits that he can be attracted to someone of the opposite sex. So why not behave according to the obvious nature of the human person? 

What is the T doing there? It is not possible to change your sex. That is a fantasy, and to engage in it, whether by mimicry or surgery, is to vandalize or mangle the beautiful human form. Why should anyone be encouraged to do so? Yet again, what is the Q doing there? That implies a willful presentation of oneself as neither male nor female but some self-determined status to which others must defer. But why should they do so? With what benefit to the common good?

I have left the L and the G because in those cases alone do some people claim that they are what they are by birth and that they cannot change. The first of these claims is not true; the second largely depends upon whether and how the person has acted on the temptation. Granted, it is a heavy cross to bear: this failure to grow into the fullness of one’s sex—as by nature, male and female are meant for one another. 

Charity demands of such sufferers that they not make it easier for children in confused or difficult situations to fall to the wrong side. If you are a Catholic man and you say you are gay, the last thing you should want is to confuse the imaginations of boys in trouble because of fatherlessness (Dan Savage), a pathologically controlling mother (Clifton Webb), homosexual rape (Dirk Bogarde), cruelty from other boys on account of physical appearance (Raymond Burr), cruelty from girls for the same (Greg Louganis), seduction, gay pornography, and so forth.

Why must the whole world be turned inside out, to the harm of the most vulnerable (for the poor have enough of family dysfunction as it is), and even to risking nuclear war, for the sake of people who do not conform their sexual habits to the demands of physical nature, social good, and the moral law? What is the attraction of colorectal cancer and gonorrhea of the throat? Why parade drag queens, ghoulish as they are, in front of little children? “Ye shall be as gods,” that is why.

People who fight cancer hate cancer, not those who suffer from it. I hate nobody.  Even if I were so inclined, I have not the time or the energy for it. My sins lie elsewhere, and I must attend to them. But to treat cancer is not to foster its spread or its growth. It is to check it, confine it, weaken it, root it out, or at least palliate its effects. 

After all the miseries of the sexual revolution, after none of the promises the revolutionaries made—as to sweeter and more enduring relations between men and women—have been realized, after the only just criticism of Humanae Vitae is that Pope Paul was insufficiently pessimistic, what can we say of Catholics who cheer the latest instantiation of wishing to be as gods? They may be fools, and folly is not as bad as malice; but when it comes to destruction, folly will do just as well. 

In the end, we must choose; and there is no compromise. To choose the moral law is to align yourself with the created order of bodies, male and female; it is to return to common sense. It is also to invite hatred. “Ye shall be as gods.” When that temptation grips an entire society, everyone must go along with it or else; the Soviet Union is instructive. Hatred of God, hatred of nature, hatred of any lone person who will not corrupt his language to keep away the informants and spies; that hatred energized the Soviet Union to its destruction. It now energizes the West.

“As for me and my house,” said Joshua to the children of Israel, “we will serve the Lord.” The people cheered Joshua then. They will not cheer any Joshua now. Yet the choice is the same.