By J.B. TONER
(J.B. Toner studied literature at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. He is the son of Deacon James H. Toner, a frequent contributor to The Wanderer.)
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On January 21, 2017, women marching for the dignity of women donned cloven pink hats like albino flames, ostensibly named for a cat. No one, perhaps, could have foreseen this latest move in the degradation of womankind; but as Milton’s Satan remarks, “And in the lowest deep, a lower deep / Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide.” It’s conceivable that with some prognostication, we may forearm ourselves against the next devouring gambit.
First, of course, we must chart the minotaur-haunted paths that led us here. Tracing the whole progress of dehumanization back to the loss of Paradise is beyond the scope of this analysis (although we may return to the Tree and the Serpent before the end), so let us begin on January 22, 1973.
On that day, those who argued from the profoundly true premise of the sacrosanctity of the female body achieved the opposite of their convictions and legalized the liquidation of undesirable elements. From that (last) true premise, the divorce of sex from procreation was established, and that divorce became the next premise.
From there, homosexuality was an easy and obvious step, and from that premise the irrelevance of gender was deduced. That irrelevance, accepted, became the premise of the next step: transsexuality, or the belief that womanhood is reducible to the part whose name is borne by the pointed pink hat. Once that physical organ (not even called by its scientific title, but by the ugly terminology of frat-boy slang) has been replaced, a woman is simply a man — insofar as those terms retain any meaning at all. There in brief is the prehistory of genital haberdashery.
Now, the ultimate reduction of the feminine to the organ of sex reveals the impending end game. The progression has been jagged, but also circular: the viper coils around and begins to gnaw itself. Note that each step in this process has involved the tacit betrayal of the foregoing premise. Because the female body is sacred, therefore we shall allow it to be used for meaningless sex and incised with instruments of death. Because two women may love each other in a sexual way, therefore they are no longer women but merely partners in sex. Because a person is now free to select his or her gender at will, therefore womanhood is an easily dispensable commodity. And here we see the pale logic undermine itself: The female body’s sacrosanctity is no more.
But it no longer matters. The deductions from that one true premise are now grandfathered (so to speak) in the cultural consciousness, and the responsibilities attendant on it need not be maintained. The power behind the pink hat now has it both ways.
Mind you, this comes at some cost to its constituency. Gavin Hubbard, New Zealand weightlifter, has become Laurel Hubbard and dominated women’s weightlifting. Fallon Fox, mixed martial artist, has shifted genders and dominated women’s MMA. Those who concern themselves with consistency are thus hoisted on their genderless petard — how to support the cheated female competitors, yet also support the transsexuals whose bone and muscle structure obviously remain those of men?
But, of course, the answer is simple: Only an enemy of human rights would raise the question in the first place, and so it can be conveniently dismissed. Likewise, the repeated studies linking contraception with breast cancer must be doggedly ignored, since the cause of women trumps the welfare of actual women. Likewise, little girls sharing bathrooms with leering men who “identify as women” are acceptable casualties in the great game. Not every pawn becomes a queen, after all.
Still, it is crucial to remember that despite anti-woman positions held by individual leaders — Margaret Sanger’s hair-raising malice against black women, Planned Parenthood’s flagrant exploitation of women at their most vulnerable, etc. — the women’s rights movement has grown powerful because, fundamentally, it deserved to. Women were indeed abused and neglected for centuries. By the missteps and outright iniquities of many whose charge was to uplift the oppressed in the name of Christ, perdition’s portals were unsealed. In consequence, any who would take up that charge again are greeted with a reflexive hatred so entrenched as to be all but insuperable.
In short, the very movement that is now industriously reducing womanhood to a detachable body part is prevailingly viewed as the only trustworthy safeguard of female dignity.
And with that we come to the hazardous business of prediction. Always hazardous, because (God willing) time may prove one wrong; doubly hazardous today because this matter makes us name things of which St. Paul says, “Let them not be so much as named among you” (Eph. 5:3).
Sadly, adultery and fornication are far from novelties in our culture; but there remains one line that no one has yet ventured to cross: one perversion so foul that even the most thoroughgoing relativism still pulls up short. And yet, already we see its shadow in the aforementioned problem of the bathrooms. The normalization of child sex is the final step in the abolition of American morals.
As is so often the case, the vast majority of those who are laboring to bring this about would greet the fruit of their labor with infinite horror. Logic, however, is logic, for Truth is Truth. Milton tells us that after the Snake had tricked Eve into eating the Fruit, “from the Tree her step she turned, / But first low reverence done.” Or as C.S. Lewis puts it in his Preface to Paradise Lost, “She who thought it beneath her dignity to bow to God now worships a vegetable.” As we noted at the outset, those who rightly fought for the sanctity of Woman have nearly brought about her ultimate desecration. The logic they have embraced, once set in motion, cannot lightly be recalled.
Like the proverbial frog in a pot, they have accepted each incremental step until no firm ground remains from which to gainsay (for instance) a nine-year-old girl who “identifies” as sexually mature. Already the parents of a Canadian child have legally left the gender blank on their birth certificate so that little Searyl may decide for him- or herself.
How is a child to decide, such people may well ask, without sexual experimentation? The younger the better, perhaps. And if Christians and Republicans step forth to denounce grown men who prey upon experimenting nine-year-olds — how dare they? Who are they to judge the sexual orientations of others? The reflex of denouncing the denunciations of traditional morality may carry a disastrous momentum.
The whole demented movement already carries a momentum like a freight train. How long before someone coins a validating word like “pedosexuality” and the inevitable corollary, “pedophobe,” to demonize anyone who objects? Those who retain a pestering ember of sanity may fight a rearguard by such arbitrary measures as a slowly declining age of consent, but in the end there is simply no working basis in their ideology from which to defend the innocence of children.
Innocence itself has become a reproach to the perverted, and no such reproach can be allowed. To point out sin is the only sin left.
Logic’s revenge is such that those who seek to have it both ways end up with nothing; but the supernatural, no less than its younger sister, abhors a vacuum. Something will slither into the space once held by the dignity of the women’s rights movement. The dried bones of its respect for women will fill up with an antithetical element that holds its outer shape like a fossil, while altering its essence: a dark transubstantiation. Indeed, this has already happened to such an extent that the nominally atheistic “pro-choice” lobby in Missouri is openly working with the Church of Satan to keep abortion legal on “religious” grounds. The goal is nakedly, unabashedly, no longer the empowerment of the woman but the objectification of the child. There can be no greater treason against the movement’s own core principles than this.
So: What is to be done? Perhaps — to begin with — a tiny symbol, the symbol of a small but growing movement, to fill the vacuum with something good. Perhaps the symbol of a real Pentecost. A little red shape like a tongue of flame — a flat-bottomed teardrop — bright red, made of cloth or felt, construction paper, silk, wood, or metal or plastic, whatever comes to hand. No bigger, maybe, than a rose petal — worn on the lapel or the breast pocket, the ball cap, the shoulder, wherever the wearer likes — to celebrate the creative power of the female body and the woman’s soul. To proclaim in silence (for now) the solidarity of the Holy Spirit. A Secret Fire.
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