Nobody will get hurt. That’s what they said when sex education was brought into schools and churches. “We are sexual from birth, so let’s get comfortable with it!” Five decades later, communities are brimming with “nobodies” who were denied their childhood; who know a lot about sex but very little about manhood and womanhood; who are cohabitating, pregnant but unwed, fearful, depressed, relationally dysfunctional, discontent, insecure, and paranoid about “sexual identity.”
Nobody will get hurt. That’s what they said when abortion was legalized. Today, mothers, fathers, and grandparents grieve lost relationships with 56 million “nobodies.” Our nation is poorer economically because 56 million “nobodies” do not pay taxes, buy products, or invest in communities.
Nobody will get hurt. That’s what they said when girls were told that “equal means being the same.” In the effort to equalize the “playing field”—in sports, the workplace, and the bedroom—girls were taught that the two genders, male and female, are interchangeable. Today, three generations of “nobodies” are at odds with their own bodies and minds.
Nobody will get hurt. That’s what they said when gay and lesbian advocates began to circulate the schools. That’s what they said when same-sex “marriage” was legalized. That’s what they said when restrooms were changed from “men” and “women” to “whatever” so that people who have trouble identifying themselves can use whichever they please. How many “nobodies” will have to suffer the consequences? How many impressionable “nobodies” will believe the unnatural is “normal?”
Do we really think that nobody will get hurt when we tamper with God’s design?
Camille Paglia is a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is a feminist, social critic, and a lesbian. She is also surprising. When it comes to “identity politics” and transgenderism, Paglia says, “This hyper-self-consciousness about ‘Who am I? Where exactly am I on the gender spectrum?’ is mere navel-gazing while, in the Middle East, ISIS is beheading people. It is a kind of madness of self-absorption.”
Paglia says she pities “young people today” because “it’s one thing to feel, ‘I’m not quite comfortable in the gender I was assigned at birth,’ but the pressures are to change, change, change, and to telegraph it to the world. People are pushed into making choices about surgical interventions and taking hormones, which is dangerous, and they will have all kinds of medical problems in the long run.”
Paglia believes “there are authentic transgender people who had a genetic issue from the start” and points out that “medical science is still developing to help these people.” But transgenderism has “become a fashion statement, or a mask [for other problems]. People are being induced to think that all their unhappiness—in family life, in school, in relation to society—is to do with this gender issue. Well, maybe it isn’t. Maybe there are other issues a person needs to deal with.”
In a way, Paglia is speaking about the “nobodies that won’t get hurt” or, in this case, today’s college students. She says, “They have no sense of the great patterns of world history, the rise and fall of civilizations like Babylon and Rome that became very sexually tolerant, and then fell.”
She continues, “If you’ve had no exposure to that, you can honestly believe that ‘There is progress all around us and we are moving to an ideal state of culture, where we all hold hands and everyone is accepted for what they are … and the environment will be pure … .‘” This is their “magical utopian view,” explains Paglia, that “we are marching toward perfection.” But what is the “sign of this progress?” They believe it is “toleration,” observes Paglia, “for homosexuality, or for changing gender, or whatever.”
But to Paglia, “[I]t’s a sign of the opposite, it’s symptomatic of a civilization just before it falls.”
Babylon and Rome did fall. They fell because men and women shaped themselves after the imaginations of their own heart. They exchanged the natural for the unnatural and were foolish enough to believe that nobody would get hurt.
Our civilization may be rushing toward the abyss, but the Christian can blaze trail away from destruction. We do this when we believe that there is no such thing as a “nobody” to God. Every child—born or yet to be born—is already redeemed and called by name (Is. 43:1). Every child—born or yet to be born—will be affected by what we do or do not tolerate.
We may wrestle with our identity and, therefore, the way we choose to live. But, the Lord identifies us in His Prayer when He invites us to pray: “Our Father who art in heaven.” We are not “debtors to the flesh.” We are not slaves to our own fear. What we are, in Christ, is God’s adopted heirs! Tolerating no other identity, we and our children’s children can navigate out of hopelessness and away from the abyss.
Quotes of Camille Paglia are excerpted from an article by Carolyn Moynihan
(“Navy-gazing about gender while the world burns,” Mercatornet)
and an interview with Camille Paglia by Ella Whelan of Spiked
Graphic: Etsy
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