(The audio version of this essay can be found here.)
Western civilization is like an old building that is slowly falling into ruin. It declined gradually, and in ways that were not always obvious. Wrecking balls can hammer the building from the outside, just as foreign wars, unchecked immigration, and increasing debt tear away metaphorical walls that have long protected our civilization. Termites and rot can eat away at the internal structure of a building in the same way that our culture has been poisoned against future generations. The most damaging ruination of a building, however, is a faltering foundation. Once the foundation cracks and breaks, the building will fall, no matter how strong the walls or structure that remains. The family is the foundation of community and of our civilization, and it is the family that has faced the greatest assault in our time.
Last month I had the privilege of attending to the birth of my third child. Delivery went smoothly, and the baby and his mother are both doing well. It has been fascinating to watch the journey of life for this new child. From the moment of conception, my wife’s body began altering itself in order to grow a baby. Her internal organs moved around and changed size to accommodate the growing fetus. When we saw his image in an ultrasound just a few weeks into pregnancy, he was barely bigger than a grape but had little legs and arms and a head. Just a few weeks after that we were able to hear his heart beating, strong and steady. There were aches and pains and morning sickness, of course, but my wife soldiered on with the knowledge that a new life was growing inside of her.
It’s amazing how well designed our bodies are. Immediately after birth, my wife’s internal organs began moving again, getting back to normal. A few minutes after birth and she was ready to nurse, and the new baby quickly figured out how to get his milk. It’s not something that we had to teach him, it just came naturally. Whether you believe in an ordered world created by God, or a world that came about by random chance, it is clear that there is a rational process in nature. Rebellion against our nature can only lead to disharmony and destruction. No matter how much a man might identify as a woman, his body cannot grow and nourish a baby. Any attempts to do so will only bring about sickness and death.
Nothing has been more divisive over the last two generations than discussion over the natures of men and women. As I’ve said before, modern dogma holds that everyone is born a blank slate, that there are not only any physiological or genetic differences between ethnic groups but that even men and women are simply socially-engineered distinctions. This is obviously absurd, yet belief in this absurdity has spread from cloistered college campuses to mainstream journalism and media today. Sex is written into every human being at the chromosomal level, and influences a great number of physical, mental, and emotional attributes. There are a very small percentage of people who are born with chromosomal disorders, but these cases are extremely rare, and it is foolish and dishonest to define the whole by the margins. Just because there are shades of grey does not mean that black and white do not exist.
Once you accept that men and women are different, a logical social order emerges. If you want civilization to continue into the next generation, then you need to have children. Men cannot bear children, so it falls upon women to carry out this task. On the other hand, men are generally physically stronger, so historically the tasks of building, hunting, and fighting have fallen upon them. The basic family structure of husband, wife, and children was not something that was invented one day when our ancestors had nothing better to do, but is simply the result of millennia of trial and error. Feminists like to say that the patriarchy was built for no other reason than a few priests were scared of supposedly strong women, but what if our traditions are what they are because they have stood the test of time? Feminists and other social justice warriors are attempting to tear down the family structure and replace it with who knows what, without even taking the time to see what works.
The destruction of ten thousand years of tradition has been sudden and swift. In 1960, the average American family consisted of a married father and mother who had several children. Fewer than sixty years later, and there is no average family anymore, but our media lauds all sorts of alternative family structures – single mothers, two dads or two moms, polyandrous relationships, and worse. Despite numerous scientific studies that confirm that time-tested idea that children do best in a family with a married father and mother, our media still generates enormous amounts of propaganda that tries to convince us otherwise. The results of two generations of this propaganda is a country full of broken families, depression, and suicide, but we are still told that there is no connections to be made. We are repeatedly told that we are backwards, bigoted, homophobic, patriarchal, and misogynistic if we speak even the slightest criticism of the new normal. Even silence is condemned, as anything less than full-on endorsement and celebration of homosexuality and transgenderism is now evidence of evil bigotry in the eyes of our media. Look at how every corporation is celebration homosexuality in the month of June. Anyone who doesn’t change their avatar to a pride flag is threatened by social justice warrior activists.
Last week, as I record this, a technology journalist for the website Ars Technica named Peter Bright was arrested for child pornography and soliciting sex from a child. The charging documents that transcribe his statements and chat logs are downright sickening. Posters from 4chan meticulously screenshotted posts from his twitter account going back ten years and found hundreds of examples of Bright joking about pedophilia and complaining that the age of consent was too high. His Twitter biography, in his own words, calls himself “poly/pan/pervy” which is, in the modern language of degenerate practices, means he wanted to have sexual relations with anyone, anything, anytime. Despite these obvious red flags, however, news articles and forum posts at Ars are filled with people who knew Bright saying “I could never have predicted this, he seemed like such a good guy.” How many other Peter Brights are there out there flaunting their evil for all to see, feeling protected by the zeitgeist?
The modern secular left is open and unapologetic about their desire to tear down the time-tested traditions and family structure that is the foundation of our society, and replace it with something that is untested and unknown. The question is where do you draw the new line? In the old society, we could argue over definitions at the margins, such as when should divorce be permitted, or how should a wife deal with a husband who has become physically abusive. But in our new society, it’s an entirely open question on where the boundaries of proper behavior lie. These anti-family activists want to open up morality to endorse homosexuality, licentiousness, infidelity and adultery, incest, polyandry, exploitation of children in the name of transgenderism, and every other degenerate sexual practice one can imagine, but they still at least pretend to draw the line at pedophilia. The problem is, once you remove the family structure, once you demolish ten thousand years of time-tested tradition, then who gets to decide where the new lines are drawn?
We, the backward misogynistic homophobic patriarchal Christians, believe that anything outside of matrimony between a man and a woman is wrong, and will surely lead to other sins and have negative consequences. They, the enlightened prophets of a new age, preach that you can do anything you feel like, that sin does not exist, and then they are completely surprised when their degenerate behavior leads to bad results. How can anyone say that they are surprised when a creepy man who jokes about being a pedophile turns out to be a pedophile? It is because our media is working very hard to create propaganda that will convince us that degenerate sexual practices are not degenerate at all, but are instead healthy and good, and should be celebrated. They are trying to convince us that A is not A, and two generations have grown up with this propaganda. It is even more subtle and insidious than simple propaganda, as English author Theodore Dalrymple explains:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
When the puppet-masters of our society are able to make a room full of athletes celebrate Bruce Jenner putting on a dress and makeup and calling himself a woman, I think their job is nearly complete. The assault upon our civilization has come from all sides, but the most insidious has been the way they have made us complicit in the destruction of the family, which is the foundation of our civilization. What replaces the family in our new society is not going to lead to utopia, as social justice activists believe. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for a society that has traded strong families for the mess of depression and broken people left behind by endless propaganda for homosexuality, transgenderism, and pedophilia. If we, the heirs of western civilization, are to survive this attack, we must first disconnect from the media tentacles that feed that propaganda. Homeschool your children. Turn off Netflix and cable TV. Don’t subsidize your own destruction. Raise your boys to be strong men and your girls to be honorable women. The destruction of the family has made the decline of our country nearly terminal, but remember that you are raising the generation that will build Christendom anew.
The Decline and Fall of the United States of America 