This isn't just a tussle between human constructs

The latest phase of the collapse of our civilization is spiritual at its root

Scenes from the front lines of this year’s Pride Month:

The Human Rights Campaign has declared a national state of emergency for people with unorthodox notions of human sexuality (sometimes known as the LBGTQ+ community).

A protest outside a meeting of the Glendale Unified School District board in Los Angeles turned into a melee between parents who didn't want their kids indoctrinated and people with unorthodox notions of human sexuality. It involved several hundred people. Cops struggled to get control. The livestream of the meeting inside the building went dark.

Citizens of Westfield, Indiana, an Indianapolis exurb, are concerned, doncha know, after the city’s mayor took a Pride Month statement down from the city’s website. The mayor explained that it was not the place of government to weigh in on sociocultural matters.

While some policy-level moves to stop the mutilation of adolescents (“gender-affirming care”), both here in the US and in Europe, have been instituted, the official backing by the heavy hand of government for this obliteration of formerly commonly agreed-upon parameters of reality still holds sway.

This isn’t on the same level of consideration as even recent developments in race-related controversies. Arguments - which, are, by the way, correct about the matter - that school districts around the country are not eliminating teaching about race from curricula, but rather a particular lens through which that’s viewed - namely, the views of Ibrahim X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones et al that America is systemically racist - have to do with sociology and education theory.

This is spiritual, and I don’t even need to add “at its core.” The spiritual dimension is in everybody’s face.

And let’s dispense right now with the you-bet-it-does-it’s-of-spiritual-importance-that-everybody-be-able-to-anatomically-express-what-he-or-she-or-whatever-feels-to-be-his-her-or-whatever’s-essential-identity rejoinder. Anybody with an understanding of spirituality beyond that of an infant knows there’s nothing spiritual about such a position.

The speed with which this thing has permeated every last institution in our society is evidence of how this is different. Both slavery and racial animus have been unfortunate aspects of human existence for thousands of years. But until five minutes ago, it was assumed by anyone and everyone that you could tell by the pitch of someone’s voice, by patterns of hair growth on someone’s face and body, and by determining the DNA of any given cell in someone’s body, which of the two genders ordained by God someone belonged to.

There are givens to the contours of reality. Damn near every species in both the plant and animal kingdoms, save for a few that Nature’s God designed to be hermaphroditic, comes in two types: male and female.

I’ve written somewhat extensively - examples can be found here, here and here - about the roots of the impetus toward human self-invention.

Another aspect of what’s currently happening is the morphing of the Left’s notion of what it champions. It began, in the sentiments driving the French Revolution, and then in the development of Marxism and the taking up of that banner in various twentieth-century revolutions, as concern with economic class. Muckety-mucks at the top vis-a-vis the masses living from one meal to the next.

But Marxism-Leninism also wanted to render the family obsolete as a basic human institution, so as to replace it with the state.

This created the space for the rise of feminism. And, in the heady atmosphere of the fabled 1960s, the question of how far we can take this notion of individual autonomy was thrown wide open.

By taking the view of the family as outmoded, we no longer had a substantive answer to the question of what belonging means. To what, if anything, does a human being belong, beyond categories of his/her/its choosing?

And what kind of value is there in belonging to anything anyway?

That’s what all this talk of “community” and “allies” is really all about. People with unorthodox notions of human sexuality find validation for forms of identity that they’ve made up out of whole cloth. And it helps them to see themselves as a cohesive group to juxtapose themselves against a perceived power structure - you know, patriarchal, cisheteronormative, white, Judeo-Christian institutions - and raise their fists against it.

But on what basis are they going to find a sense of belonging in a deep, rich sense that will sustain them the way families have sustained people throughout times of travail and real danger? On what basis are human beings going to construct viable societies under this new arrangement?

Where are tenderness, nurturing, loyalty, trust, humor, encouragement, the setting of examples, courtesy, respect going to come from in the post-family world? How will we identify people who are found in earthquake rubble for purposes of notifying - what, next of “kin”?

Who is going to deal with the nuclear brinkmanship with which global forces with military expertise confront us? Do you really want to trust a transgender joint chiefs of staff chairperson?

Pride Month raises existential questions that we’d better be grappling with. History doesn't wait around on our silly little notions to land apocalyptic scenarios in our laps.