Truth Under Assault

Flannery O’Connor, who had an admirable propensity for being honest, made the remark that “the truth will make you odd.” She would not be surprised, if she were around today, to learn that a dubious student-led protest was sufficient for authorities to remove her name from one of the residence halls at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore. More than 80 scholars and authors signed a letter protesting the change. But in the end, truth was sacrificed to political correctness. 

Miss O’Connor was understating the matter. The truth not only makes you odd, it makes you vulnerable. Stating the truth can ruin you financially. A former school board trustee in British Columbia was fined $750,000 for persistently saying true things about the LGBTQ+ coalition. If the truth offends, it must be counteracted. Popular comedian John Cleese cancelled his appearance in British Columbia, fearing that he might be fined for anything he might say.

New York State, in full support of the transgender movement, and with virtually no opposition, passed a law that applies to all long-term care facilities in the state. What it means to the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne New York is not something that they can accept without violating their Catholic faith. They are dedicated to the Galilean who proclaimed that the truth will make you free and not to the untruth approved by New York State legislators.

The law prohibits single-sex rooms and bathrooms, and it requires the care providers to use patients’ preferred pronouns. The Hawthorne residence has operated for nearly 125 years without experiencing any need for what the new mandate requires of them. Superior General Mother Edward has stated that

it is an untruth to say that a male should go into a female patient’s room. You’re just trying to contort things, for whatever reason. So we have to stand by the truth of what has been taught to us in the natural law. It is not to be changed. 

That truth accords with both Scripture and common sense: a male is a male, and a female is a female.

The New York Assembly passed the bill by a 144-2 count. Governor Kathy Hochul saw the bill as a way of avoiding discrimination, though she was not particularly concerned about discriminating against the Catholic faith of the Hawthorne sisters. “Hate, she exclaimed, “will never have a place in New York.” This is the same governor who told 5.4 million New York State Republicans to “Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong O.K.? You are not New Yorkers.”

If this is not hatred, let alone discrimination, it can surely pass for it. It is clearly an abdication of a governor’s responsibility to all the citizens of New York. Was she not aware that some New York Republicans might be transgendered? She could be a little kinder to the dedicated Dominican sisters.

On June 18, 2025, the United States Supreme Court, in United States v. Skrmetti, ruled 6-3 that the Tennessee bill that bans doctors from providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to transgender minors does not violate the Fourth Amendment Equal Protection Clause. Therefore, the state of Tennessee—and 25 other states that shared this ban—can continue to outlaw these procedures without fear of governmental intrusion.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the Court’s majority, indicated that it is ill-advised for minors who are confused about their sex to choose a procedure that is potentially dangerous.

“It was not improper,” he wrote,

to conclude that the kids benefit from additional time to “appreciate their sex” before embarking on body-altering paths. Nor is it improper for the state to protect minors from procedures that “encourage them to become disdainful of their sex” and thus at risk for serious psychiatric conditions.

In other words, minors should take the time to know the truth about their sex.

Senator Tom Cotton commended the decision for “upholding a state’s rights to protect kids from barbaric transgender procedures.” Senator Mike Lee said that the ruling was concerned about “protecting kids from surgical mutilation.” Attorney General Pam Bondi also agreed that the ruling would “protect children from genital mutilation.”

In his book The Truth of Things, scholar, critic, and award-winning poet and novelist Marion Montgomery decries the fact that people are given social encouragement to invent their own reality: “Not I am I by the grace of God. . .but I am I by the grace of my own self-intent to be independent of all existence; I am this which I name.” The late nationally-syndicated political columnist William Murchison applies this unrealistic approach to self-identity to the transgender issue:

In declaring children and teenagers reliable enough to assess their own sexuality with parents and white-coated doctors standing ready to approve their choice, the trans movement has embraced a kind of personal autonomy unknown to, and unthought of by, virtually any who ever have inhabited this planet.

It is sobering to return to a view of life that respects truth and a way of thinking that assigns a higher place to truth than to personal vanity or political power. For St. Thomas Aquinas, “The purpose of the study of philosophy is not to learn what others have thought, but to learn how the truth of things stands.” In following the truth of things, we discover a path to a better life. Anything else is confusion and tumult.