Who Would Have Known…?

A few days ago, the Nashua Public Library hosted a Drag Queen Teen Time starring the soi-disant Monique Toosoon, a gay man whom the once-conservative Manchester Union Leaderin a short puff-piece—denominated as “she.” Over 130 people attended, mostly women and teenagers. When one girl asked the transvestite Toosoon whether a girl could be a drag queen, he said that would be no problem. But what if her parents were against it?  Then you have to get yourself new parents, he replied.

He is “married” to another gay man, and they have a son, but when he was asked whether he would let the boy attend the event, he declined, saying that he was afraid it would confuse him.

“Bringing happiness to people is what drag queens do,” he said, in the sentence that ends the piece.

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Toosoon had almost canceled the event because of “bashing” on Facebook. I know the people who were so accused. There was no bashing; there was opposition. Some Lutherans whom I esteem very highly have been dogged in putting up some resistance to this stuff as well as the “bathroom bill” recently signed into law by—cough—conservative Governor Chris Sununu. The bill allows men and boys who say they are women or girls to use women’s bathrooms and showers.

Drag queen story-time is quite the rage these days. What makes librarians and schoolteachers fall over themselves in a cloud of lavender, gushing over transvestite men who reduce the female sex to a caricature, I have no idea. Sometimes I do not understand at all our women today. The unnamed woman in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a Christian girl with whom the “patient” falls in love, is a danger to Screwtape and Wormwood because she has a woman’s immediate grasp of reality, and a healthy sense of the absurd, making it difficult to turn her head with philosophical and social fads. It is quite the contrary case when it comes to ours, it seems.

Or maybe it is simply that this fad—the homosexual one—does not visit the female sex with the same array of deadly diseases and the same depth of moral depravity and so they do not take it seriously. It is a far greater danger to the boy, and nobody gives him and his plight the time of day. Or maybe it is the single or divorced woman’s vengeance upon the sex that has hurt her, so that when her son, having grown up without a father for most of his life, declares to her that he is gay, she is not entirely displeased. Maybe it is ressentiment. Maybe it is the latest enthusiasm, as temperance once was. Women will have to explain this to me.

I cannot imagine any librarian thirty years ago, not even the most “liberal” in the land, retaining her job after having a man in drag come and encourage young people in his favorite degeneracy. What changed? What have we learned since then that would cause us to change our minds?

Here are some things I did not know thirty years ago when I could still entertain the idea that a man with a man is no different in emotion and behavior than a man with a woman:

I did not know then about libertine priests abusing boys and girls. I did not know that the minority of priests in my Church who were attracted to males were abusing boys at a rate ten to twenty times that of those who abused girls. (You have to put two rates together: the 85 percent of victims who were male, and whatever percentage of the priesthood was homosexual.) I did not know that such a thing could prey upon a boy and ruin his life. I do not mean to make light of the harm done to girls. It is just that that does not bear upon the matter here, i.e., the drag queen as a model for boys.

I did not know—no one knew—that there would be Gay Pride parades in cities everywhere, in all their sad hideousness, with public nudity and simulated sex. I did not know that parents would take their children to see them. I did not know that the media would celebrate it. I did not foresee that newspapers would, all of them, become pom-pom girls in the movement. I did not foresee that all the public schools would do so, too.

I did not understand that the syndrome as it shows up in males is caused by trauma, terrible neglect, loneliness, or the use of porn, and that there is nothing natural about its etiology. I did not understand that the etiology would make sense of its being correlated with other pathologies, such as compulsive sex, obsession with death, “bug chasing,” pedophilia, transvestitism, exhibitionism, group sex, and drug abuse.

I did not foresee that the marriage rate would sink through the basement floor. I did not foresee that four out of ten children in the United States would be born out of wedlock. I did not foresee, no one could have foreseen, the unrelieved suspicion and animosity that now blacken relations between the sexes.

I never expected that gay men would want to recruit in the schools or that they would have anything to do with the education of other people’s children. I did not expect, if what they said about their suffering was true, that they would be eager for others to share it.

I did not foresee “Queer Studies” or the “queering” of arts and letters.

I did not foresee the four-alarm fire of unreality that is the “transgender” movement. I did not expect, and no one could have expected, that mere children could “discover” what their inner dream gender really was, and that a corrupt medical profession would be happy to oblige them with irreversible surgeries and a lifetime of tissue-growing, and therefore carcinogenic, pharmaceutical cocktails.

I did not foresee that churches would all go rainbow, even while their denominations were dwindling to nothing.

I did not know that bishops were sticking their hands down the pants of seminarians. I knew nothing about the creepers of influence peddling, threats, and evil compromises that grew out of those hothouses.

I did not know at the time that homosexual men who engaged in the mirage of a wedding would have no intention of keeping themselves exclusively to one another. “Monogamish” is what the gay activist Dan Savage, a celebrity in public schools, calls it. I had supposed in my foolishness that they would conform to the Christian heterosexual norm. Pause for much laughter, and weeping.

I did not foresee a time when ladies’ magazines would chirp about new forms of marriage, which are either old and primitive forms of marriage, or just new forms of debauchery. The United States made Utah’s admission to the union conditional upon the Mormon rejection of bigamy; it had been under severe scrutiny for decades. But now bigamy is returning.

Nobody cares overmuch, because serial polygamy is everywhere. We are supposed to “accompany” the person who dumps the spouse and latches on to somebody else. The abandoned spouse can go hang.

I certainly did not foresee the manufacture of children to please the sexual vanities of adults. I did not foresee that ghastly thing with the ghastly name, that crime against creation and the Creator: reproductive technology.

I did not foresee a time, and nobody could, when almost every teenage boy in the country would be an habitual user of pornography, and not just of pictures but videos, staggering in their inhumanity and wickedness, and that people would shrug about it. But then, I also did not foresee the all-out “War on Boys,” amply catalogued by the courageous feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers.

I did not expect the Boy Scouts of America to capitulate to the madness, and then to find that it had won them nothing but bankruptcy. I did not expect that liberal-run cities, whose mayors must know how miserable are the expectations for boys growing up without fathers, would prefer to please well-to-do gay men rather than allow the Boy Scouts to use city facilities. In Philadelphia, this included a park that the Boy Scouts themselves had made and donated to the city.

I did not foresee a time when masculinity itself would be sneered at and called “toxic.” I would never have supposed that young men would one day say that no one but a secular psychologist in Canada had ever told them that they should be proud of their manhood.

As rotten as mass entertainment at the time already was, I could not have foreseen the coarseness and filth of today’s popular culture. I did not expect that girls one day would swear like sailors, but not aboard ship.

I did not foresee the sheer despotism that the gay movement would inevitably engender. I did not foresee that ordinary shop owners could be sued into submission lest they dare to decline, politely, to assist in the celebration of sodomy. But of course, when you have what is radically unnatural, or logically, biologically, and anthropologically incoherent, as if a man could give birth to a child, or a woman beget one, the only way to get everybody to agree is by sheer force. I had no idea that a man could lose his job when in a moment of confusion and frustration he unintentionally gave the pronoun “she” to a girl pretending to be a boy.

I did not foresee “twerking,” i.e., dirty dancing for little kids. I could never have predicted that women would pimp their own sons, getting them up in drag for the delight of gay men.

I’ve learned a lot in thirty years. I was never in any doubt that people of bad sexual habits might be morally decent in other ways, such as paying taxes, or keeping their dogs off your lawn. I am sure that even criminals may be morally decent in some ways. Pornographers may be very nice people, outside of their sewers. Very niceness and a smile or two can send any one of us on the primrose path to hell.

And only the promise of Jesus Christ has kept our Church from going on that same pleasant pilgrimage, because our leaders have mainly been silent, while some have been passing out the banners.

Wake up, O leaders. You don’t have the excuse of ignorance.

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