“Major hospitals and liberal states are making it possible for minor children to choose to have hormone therapy and other interventions to change their sex without their parents consent, or even knowledge! If you aren’t morally panicked by this, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” —American Orthodox writer Rod Dreher, 55, author of the very important books“The Benedict Option” (2017) and “Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents” (2020), in an extraordinary piece yesterday published on The American Conservative website. Dreher sees parallels between the effort today to divide parents from their children with similar efforts made by the Soviet Communist regime in the 20th century, and he asks for Christians to stand against this evil. Excerpts are published below, but the entire piece is worth reading at this link
“If the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without hope … We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” —Prof. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 263, Notre Dame Press, 1981. This sentence inspired Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. Explaining what he meant by that one sentence, MacIntyre in 2017 stressed that it was only inadvertently that St. Benedict had founded a new social order. This new social order was largely independent of the feudal order because of a symbiotic relationship that developed between monasteries, which provided schooling and liturgy, and local communities, which provided novices, without which the order of monks would die out. “This is not a withdrawal from society into isolation of a certain sort; this is actually the creation of a new set of social institutions that then proceed to evolve,” MacIntyre wrote. “So, when I said we need a new St. Benedict, I was suggesting we need a new kind of engagement with the social order, not any kind of withdrawal from it.” The work of the “new St. Benedict” would be the “creation of a new set of social institution” to replace the ones which are now evidently collapsing all around us
“Better that only a few Catholics should be left, staunch and sincere in their religion, than that they should, remaining many, desire as it were, to be in collusion with the Church’s enemies and in conformity with the open foes of our faith.” —St. Peter Canisius (1521-1597) (link)
A reading from the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (34:1-11), from today’s Mass readings:
“The word of the Lord came to me: Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, in these words prophesy to them: Thus says the Lord God: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing themselves! Should not shepherds, rather, pasture sheep? … You did not strengthen the weak nor heal the sick nor bind up the injured. You did not bring back the strayed nor seek the lost, but you lorded it over them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered for lack of a shepherd, and became food for all the wild beasts. … Therefore, shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: As I live, says the Lord God, because my sheep have been given over to pillage, and because my sheep have become food for every wild beast, for lack of a shepherd … hear the word of the Lord: Thus says the Lord God: I swear I am coming against these shepherds. I will claim my sheep from them and put a stop to their shepherding my sheep so that they may no longer pasture themselves. I will save my sheep, that they may no longer be food for their mouths. For thus says the Lord God: I myself will look after and tend my sheep. The word of the Lord.”
[End of today’s reading from the prophet Ezechiel.]
Letter #100, 2022, Wednesday, August 17: Dreher
The American writer Rod Dreher, 55, who converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy some years ago, partly as a reaction to the crisis of clerical sexual abuse which he covered as a journalist, has just published a very long, very detailed, very passionate report on the rapidly growing movement to encourage young children to question their sexual identities, and to begin medication and therapy to change their gender without any involvement of the parents of the children — something Dreher thinks echoes the separation of children from their “ideologically retrogade” parents under Soviet Communism.
“I am perhaps more sensitive to this than most because I am extremely focused on child protection,” Dreher writes. “As longtime readers know, I became so engrossed in writing about the systematic sexual abuse of children within Catholic clerical circles, and the systematic cover-up of same, that I burned out, and lost my ability to believe as a Catholic. I am grateful to be an Orthodox Christian now, but I wish I had managed my anger better. But I don’t regret my outrage itself, because it was entirely appropriate to the scale of the moral horror.”
I met Dreher in 2010 in Dallas, Texas, at a concert of music composed by Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, who was also present on that occasion. I believed then, and believe even more strongly now, that Catholics and Orthodox needed to work together, to create an alliance that would unite their forces, then join with all other men and women of good will to prevent the types of oppression of individuals and families and religious groups which occurred under Soviet Communism, but which also now threatened us in the West in a “post-Soviet” but also “post-Christian” time, causing profound misery to many while claiming (falsely) to liberate them from all misery.
Dreher, after spending months in Eastern Europe to write his great book “Live Not By Lies” about the Christian resistance under Soviet Communism, is not living in Budapest, where my good friend Cardinal Peter Erdo is the Catholic archbishop of Budapest and Esztergom, and Primate of Hungary, and where Metropolitan Hilarion, whop had been serving his Church for many years in Moscow, is now the Russian Orthodox Archbishop of Budapest.
Dreher suggests the following steps for Christians, and all others of good will, to take in order to maintain and privilege the relations of parents with their children, especially in these most delicate and important matters for the life and health of the children:
1. “What can we do?” Dreher asks. “First, spread the word. Educate yourselves and others. Your family is not safe, and if you think it is, you are lying to yourself.
2. “Second, pressure leaders to get active. Are your pastors or bishops staying silent? Ask them why. What about your school board member? We have to elect politicians who have been red-pilled on the issue, and who are willing to use the power given to them by the people in our democracy to fight this tooth and nail.”
3. Dreher writes: “Finally, we absolutely have to start preparing for the long resistance to this totalitarianism. For example, forming an underground railroad for parents to protect their children from these ghouls, and get them out of states where Child Protective Services can legally seize the kids and administer hormones. There seems to be a misunderstanding among some conservatives, who think that preparing for resistance in defeat undercuts our commitment to fighting trans totalitarianism politically. This is dangerously wrong. To repeat: we absolutely should throw ourselves passionately into fighting this child-abusing madness! But we should also be working on a Plan B, in case we lose this fight, which, I regret to say, is likely.”
The initiative we at Inside the Vatican magazine and Urbi et OrbiCommunications, the non-profit publisher of the magazine, have now launched under the title “Unitas”, is intended to help begin the resistance to any and all ideological totalitarianism, any and all oppression of that human freedom of thought and belief conferred on all by our creator, and any and all division of parents from their children due to the decisions of any state authority. Together with a small group of bishops, priests and lay journalists, we have launched this initiative of gathering and rebuilding in view of the decades ahead, and we will send further information about it to any who desire it. Simply reply to this email if you would like further information. (Our “Friends of Lebanon” project is one initiative of Unitas.)
Here below are excerpts from this important article by Dreher. The entire article, including very graphic photos, may be viewed here.—RM
Note: All support for this free Moynihan Letter is welcome. Some readers are making a small monthly gift. Thank you.—RM
“LIVE NOT BY LIES”
Trans Totalitarianism: Time For Moral Panic
People have been propagandized out of having a healthy reaction to a moral horror — the colonization of children’s minds and bodies — overtaking our society
By Rod Dreher
Aug 16, 2022
The phrase “moral panic” refers to a fear-driven mass overreaction to a phenomenon that is either false or minor. Witch hunts are the usual manifestation of a moral panic. There are no witches (well, technically not true, at least these days, but the witches didn’t poison the well), so to freak out and persecute women because they might be a witch is a classic example of moral panic. The Satanic abuse craze of the 1990s is another. Again: a “moral panic” ensues when there is a mass freakout over something that doesn’t exist, or is extremely minor and in no way justifies the size and intensity of the reaction.
The other day, I saw on Twitter someone saying that they are a good liberal and all that, but they are really worried about what they’re seeing regarding the emerging culture of the medical and teaching professions encouraging children to transition to the opposite sex. “But,” said this person, “I don’t want to surrender to a moral panic.”
I submit to you that a moral panic is precisely the correct response to this egregious phenomenon. That is, what is happening is so hideous, and so widespread, and the reaction by most people to this point has been so muted to non-existent, that if you are not panicking, you are not paying attention.
Most people are not on Twitter, and if you’re one of these people, you may not be aware of the extent of the insanity. The media are not covering it, of course. It falls to badasses like Matt Walsh, Chaya Raichik (who runs the Libs Of Tik Tok account), Christina Buttons, and Chris Elston, the guy who runs the Billboard Chris website and Twitter account, to sound the alarm.
The things they document are not nut-picking (the practice of finding extreme weirdos, and falsely using them as an example of the whole). They are completely mainstream. These are things that, if we had a functional media instead of a Narrative-massaging industry, would be widely reported, and discussed intensely. (…)
Libs of TikTok has an important essay about the Left’s attempts to sever the relationship between parents and children. This phenomenon is one of the clearest and most alarming examples of the totalitarian nature of the contemporary Leftist project. When I was researching Live Not by Lies, people who escaped Communism kept telling me that one of the characteristics of the totalitarian regimes they escaped was the State inserting itself between children and their parents. This is well known to historians, as a matter of fact. The theory was that the State is the true parent, and as such, needs to defend the rights of children against their parents, who are carriers of old, oppressive values. This was necessary to liberate children from the past, and from its evil values.
I remember first learning about this aspect of Communism many years ago, and thinking that this is one thing that would never, ever be accepted in America. People would go to the mat to defend their children, and the sacred relationship between parents and children. But now it’s here. (…)
Various states across America have begun implementing laws and policies to allow children to make healthcare decisions without a parent or guardian’s consent — and the medical industry is promoting it. Many of these states are using these new laws to allow for drastic medical decisions to be made without parental consent including hormone therapy, gender reassignment surgery, and medicated mental health treatment.
More:
New York has hopped on the bandwagon of removing parents from the treatment room as well. New York-Presbyterian recently sent out emails to their patients explaining that accounts for 12-17-year-olds must be updated to reflect the adolescent’s personal email address as the primary contact as New York State law allows children “to keep their sensitive medical information private and to consent to some of their own medical treatment.”
Do you get what they’re doing here? Major hospitals and liberal states are making it possible for minor children to choose to have hormone therapy and other interventions to change their sex without their parents consent, or even knowledge! If you aren’t morally panicked by this, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
(…)
Why haven’t you read about this stuff in the media? Well, why do you think? Ideological capture by the illiberal Left in the USA is all but total.
And children are being heavily propagandized in some classrooms, from the earliest age, to doubt that their body tells them anything meaningful about their sex. One of the most frequent kinds of posts on LOTT are of teachers who brag about how they’re queering their classrooms, and introducing doubt about gender categories into the minds of their captive child audiences.
(…)
Believe me, I could go on. They are castrating boys. They are chopping the breasts off of girls. They are mutilating young women to create pseudo-phalluses. They cover it all up in Orwellian neologisms like “gender affirmation surgery,” but here is the reality, from a medical site’s photo of what surgeons do to a woman’s forearm to get the tissue they need to make her a Frankenpenis:
[Horrifying photo not included]
[Explanatory Note: In the text not included here, Dreher shows the photo of the forearm of a girl whose flesh is being removed from her forearm to be used to create a pseudo-penis to be grafted onto her genital area. He writes:]
“Oh, Rod, why did you have to gross me out with these pictures?” you might be saying. Well, maybe your complacent self needs to be grossed out. The answer is because I am sick and tired of these Mengeles hiding behind euphemism. You have to see this stuff to believe how horrible it is. This is what they are setting children up for. This.
Once again: you are not going to learn about this stuff in our mainstream media. Even Fox News uses the loaded term “gender affirmation” to describe this stuff. Thank God for people like Matt Walsh, Billboard Chris, Libs of TikTok, Christina Buttons, Chris Rufo, and others who are taking the lead, and taking a hell of a lot of heat for it.
What can we do? First, spread the word. Educate yourselves and others. Your family is not safe, and if you think it is, you are lying to yourself. Last summer, a Slovenian Catholic father told me his 12-year-old daughter was mired in severe depression over her gender identity. The year before, he and his wife got her a smartphone, like all the other kids in her class had. The girl made contact online with some older American teenagers, who convinced her that she might not be a girl. The dad was gobsmacked. He had thought they were safe in little Slovenia. There are no safe places. If you buy your kid a smartphone, you are opening up doors for them that should not be opened. And it’s beyond smartphones. It’s in the classroom. Did you know that more and more schools are installing “gender affirmation closets,” in which clothing is stored for kids who believe they are transgender, so they can change into cross-sex clothing when they get to school, then get back into their normal clothes before going home — this, to keep mom and dad in the dark.
Do you know what your kids’ teachers are saying in the classroom? Do you know what your kids’ school’s policies are regarding transgender identity and the parents’ right to know? Do you know what your family doctor’s practices are on this front? You had better!
Second, pressure leaders to get active. Are your pastors or bishops staying silent? Ask them why. What about your school board member? We have to elect politicians who have been red-pilled on the issue, and who are willing to use the power given to them by the people in our democracy to fight this tooth and nail. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been a good example, but we need much, much more of this from Republicans. Do not listen to normie Republicans who blather on, like sweet summer children, about “small government” and “free markets”. The only power capable of stopping this monstrous exploitation of children is the State. The Left has captured every major institution in America now with its insane gender ideology (DEI too, but that’s another story).
This is what soft totalitarianism is: the implementation of a single illiberal ideology within a society within a liberal, free-market society, through total capture of its institutions. As I explain in Live Not By Lies, you don’t need to threaten people with the gulag when the schools, big business, the media, academia, medicine, law, the military, and everyone else are all on the same ideological page.
We still, for now, have the power to fight this, if we can gain political power, and are not too squeamish to use it. But trust me, we would be total fools to put all our trust in political victory. The political scientist Eric Kaufmann has shown using survey data that Americans under the age of 30 prize cancel culture’s values more than liberty. Either we are going to have to see a massive generational shift in attitudes, and soon, or the window is closing on traditional American liberties — and that means they will be able to come after your kids, permanently. If that’s not worth panicking over, what is?
I am quite pessimistic about the long term, because of the woke ideological takeover of all of society’s institutions, especially its culture-forming ones. I hope I am wrong, but I don’t see middle-class culture ever rising up meaningfully against this stuff. Few people overall are going to risk their status in bourgeois society to stand against this evil.
(…)
The latest piece of insanity is the claim made by trans advocates that very small children “know” that they are trans, and show it by playing with toys associated with the opposite sex. Once again, these claims are not being made by a loony-left fringe: they are endorsed by the top medical authorities in the field
(…)
Finally, we absolutely have to start preparing for the long resistance to this totalitarianism. For example, forming an underground railroad for parents to protect their children from these ghouls, and get them out of states where Child Protective Services can legally seize the kids and administer hormones. There seems to be a misunderstanding among some conservatives, who think that preparing for resistance in defeat undercuts our commitment to fighting trans totalitarianism politically. This is dangerously wrong. To repeat: we absolutely should throw ourselves passionately into fighting this child-abusing madness! But we should also be working on a Plan B, in case we lose this fight, which, I regret to say, is likely.
I dedicated Live Not By Lies to the memory of the late Catholic priest Tomislav Kolakovic, who in 1943 escaped the Nazis and hid out in his mother’s homeland, Slovakia, teaching in the Catholic university in Bratislava. The good news, he told his students, is that Nazi totalitarianism was going to be defeated. The bad news, though, is that Soviet totalitarianism was going to be ruling over them when the war ended — and that the first thing the Communists would do is to persecute the Church. As I explain in the book, Father Kolakovic knew he had no time to waste to prepare the unready Catholics of Slovakia for the coming persecution. Excerpt from the book:
Father Kolaković knew that the clericalism and passivity of traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing, he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the church by subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.
“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.
Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. The total destruction of the First World War opened the eyes of younger Catholics to the need for a new evangelization. A Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn, whose father had been killed in a mining accident, started a lay movement to do this among the working class. These were the Young Christian Workers, called “Jocists” after the initials of their name in French. Inspired by the Jocist example, Father Kolaković adapted it to the needs of the Catholic Church in German-occupied Slovakia. He established cells of faithful young Catholics who came together for prayer, study, and fellowship.
The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility, he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists became the motto for what Father Kolaković called his “Family”: “See. Judge. Act.” See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.
Václav Vaško, a Kolaković follower, recalled late in his life that Father Kolaković’s ministry excited so many young Catholics because it energized the laity and gave them a sense of leadership responsibility.
“It is remarkable how Kolaković almost instantly succeeded in creating a community of trust and mutual friendship from a diverse grouping of people (priests, religious and lay people of different ages, education, or spiritual maturity),” Vaško wrote.
The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.
The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. “By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate.”
In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolaković had predicted. Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolaković’s top two lieutenants—physician Silvester Krčméry and priest Vladimír Jukl—quietly set up Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.
The underground church, led by the visionary cleric’s spiritual children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty. The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.
I should add here that Father Kolakovic faced initial opposition from his own bishops, who accused him of what we now call “moral panic.” They could not see, and they did not want to see, the dangers that lay ahead. They thought everything would be fine if Catholics simply kept quite still and waited. That kind of complacency was deadly — and Father Kolakovic knew it.
The people who escaped Communism to the West, who talked to me for the book, know it too. That’s why they are trying hard to warn us about what we are living in, and what’s to come. It is not hard to find these people. If you know someone in your own life who emigrated from a Communist country — not only the Soviet bloc, but also China, Cuba, or Venezuela — ask them what they think of what’s going on in America today. Live Not By Lies has become a bestseller since its initial publication in September 2020. Last week, we crossed the 170,000 sales mark in the US; it is now either in print, or soon will be in print, in ten other languages. It has been by far the biggest seller of my career, selling almost twice as many copies as my next biggest book, The Benedict Option. This has been a heavily word of mouth success story, because the mainstream media, which covered The Benedict Option heavily, has totally ignored this one. It’s a word of mouth success story because a lot of people know what time it is, and they know that the ideologically-captured media are lying to us all. They also know that most religious leaders are like the fraidy-cat 1940s bishops of Slovakia: afraid to face the reality of what’s happening around them, and to jeopardize their respectability by actually protecting their flocks from the gathering wolfpacks.
In the year 2000, I wrote a piece for The Weekly Standard about the courageous stand two Massachusetts parents, Brian Camenker and Scott Whiteman, took against the stealth introduction of radical sexuality into the lives of public school students in that state. What we now know is that gay activists had already captured the educational bureaucracy in Massachusetts, as well as the media and other institutions. Here’s what the men documented in a state-sponsored educational seminar:
Furthermore, Whiteman was called a “slanderer” by a member of the Board of Education, he says. “I knew I wasn’t lying. I knew I wasn’t making it up. I knew I wasn’t an alarmist.”
Frustrated by official indifference, Whiteman secretly took his tape recorder along to the 10th annual conference of the Boston chapter of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, at Tufts University on March 25. GLSEN (pronounced “glisten”) is a national organization whose purpose is to train teachers and students and develop programs to, in the words of its Boston chapter leader, “challenge the anti-gay, hetero-centric culture that still prevails in our schools.”
The state-sanctioned conference, which was open to the public but attended chiefly by students, administrators, and teachers, undercut the official GLSEN line — that their work is aimed only at making schools safer by teaching tolerance and respect.
The event, backed by the state’s largest teachers’ union, included such workshops as “Ask the Transsexuals,” “Early Childhood Educators: How toDecide Whether to Come Out at Work or Not,” “The Struggles and Triumphs of Including Homosexuality in a Middle School Curriculum” (with suggestions for including gay issues when teaching the Holocaust), “From Lesbos to Stonewall: Incorporating Sexuality into a World History Curriculum,” and “Creating a Safe and Inclusive Community in Elementary Schools,” in which the “Rationale for integrating glbt [gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender] issues in the early elementary years will be presented.”
Whiteman sat in on a “youth only, ages 14-21” workshop called “What They Didn’t Tell You About Queer Sex & Sexuality in Health Class.” If “they” didn’t tell you about this stuff, it’s probably because “they” worried they’d be sent to jail.
The raucous session was led by Massachusetts Department of Education employees Margot Abels and Julie Netherland, and Michael Gaucher, an AIDS educator from the Massachusetts public health agency. Gaucher opened the session by asking the teens how they know whether or not they’ve had sex. Someone asked whether oral sex was really sex.
“If that’s not sex, then the number of times I’ve had sex has dramatically decreased, from a mountain to a valley, baby!” squealed Gaucher. He then coaxed a reluctant young participant to talk about which orifices need to be filled for sex to have occurred: “Don’t be shy, honey, you can do it.”
Later, the three adults took written questions from the kids. One inquired about “fisting,” a sex practice in which one inserts his hand and forearm into the rectum of his partner. The helpful and enthusiastic Gaucher demonstrated the proper hand position for this act. Abels described fisting as “an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be that close and intimate with,” and praised it for putting one “into an exploratory mode.”
Gaucher urged the teens to consult their “really hip” Gay/Straight Alliance adviser for hints on how to come on to a potential sex partner. The trio went on to explain that lesbians could indeed experience sexual bliss through rubbing their clitorises together, and Gaucher told the kids that male ejaculate is rumored to taste “sweeter if people eat celery.” On and on like this the session went.
When the men made the tape public, they became instant pariahs in Boston. The media and the legal establishment turned on them as alarmist bigots. I wrote at the time in that piece:
But will their expose ultimately make a difference? GLSEN/Boston boasts the most advanced programs of its kind in the nation. As goes Massachusetts, in time, so may go the rest of America.
And so it has.
What are you doing to prepare yourself, your family, and your church, synagogue, or mosque community? (By the way, though Live Not By Liesis written from a religious perspective, it has been embraced and promoted by left-wing atheists like Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, who understand that its anti-totalitarianism message and advice are universal.) Here’s some good news, maybe: Live Not By Lies will finally be out in paperback on October 11 — you can preorder it here. This will make the book more affordable for group study. I hope you won’t simply read the book, but will act on the advice the anti-communist dissidents give for how to prepare for resistance. For those who have bought the book, or who intend to do so, here is a link to a free, downloadable study guide I prepared to help guide group discussion.
I am perhaps more sensitive to this than most because I am extremely focused on child protection. As longtime readers know, I became so engrossed in writing about the systematic sexual abuse of children within Catholic clerical circles, and the systematic cover-up of same, that I burned out, and lost my ability to believe as a Catholic. I am grateful to be an Orthodox Christian now, but I wish I had managed my anger better. But I don’t regret my outrage itself, because it was entirely appropriate to the scale of the moral horror. Part of what drove me over the falls with anger was the obstinate complacency of so many in the Catholic laity, in the face of revelations of what some priests did to children, and what many bishops did to keep the public from finding out about it. Far too many lay Catholics preferred to keep their peace of mind, even though it was based on sheer denial of the reality of evil in their midst, than to take a stand.
We are at this place again, except the monstrous child abuse is not happening behind closed doors. It’s happening out in the open, in major hospitals, schools, and other institutions. Like eugenics in the early 20th century, it is celebrated by all the most progressive institutions in our society. All of us are propagandized daily to accept and affirm it. What the criminals in clerical collars who violated the innocence of children never dared to do openly, the trans-totalitarians in doctor’s coats and other symbols of authority now shout from the rooftops. As Chris Rufo recently documented, these activists have infiltrated schools with an army of sex-and-gender radicals. Meanwhile, from the rest of us? Aside from resistance here and there, nothing.
What are you going to do about it? What are you going to tell your children one day? Chris Rufo, Matt Walsh, Christina Buttons, Chaya Raichik, and Billboard Chris Elston will be able to hold their heads up in honor, if they will have been allowed to keep their heads, that is. How about you, pastor? How about you, doctor? How about you, Mom and Dad?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rod Dreher
Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative. A veteran of three decades of magazine and newspaper journalism, he has also written three New York Times bestsellers—Live Not By Lies, The Benedict Option, and The Little Way of Ruthie Leming—as well as Crunchy Cons and How Dante Can Save Your Life. Dreher lives in Baton Rouge, La.
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