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. The Death of the West:... Patrick J. Buchanan Best Price: $2.12 Buy New $12.46 (as of 06:40 UTC - Details)

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. The Paleolibertarian G... MERCER, ILANA Buy New $19.99 (as of 09:57 UTC - Details)

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.

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