Words matter immensely. Trans please note.

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Words matter immensely in law and where important topics are being considered. Definitions are usefully agreed upon at the start of a debates on contentious issues. Therefore, it's key to our personal and social health that we forge agreement on how to describe people whom we have to relate to or who  have crucial roles in our life.

Pronoun use has been getting a lot of attention recently, with activists within the micro-minority that is the trans community forcing the issue. Therefore, it was strange that the Catholic Church in the US was mocked for declaring that thousands of people were not baptised because a priest had adopted the practictice of saying "We baptise you..." instead of the prescribed formula "I baptise you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit". The AP reports:

The difference is theologically crucial, the Vatican ruled in 2020, because it’s not the “we” of the congregation doing the baptizing but the “I” of Jesus Christ, working through the priest.

Words matter when there is religious belief involved, and in many areas relating to the performance of important responsibilities. This is emphasised by one Australian commentator:

Institutions entrusted with the care and welfare of individuals and society appreciate that conceptual precision requires lexemic precision, because words hold power. 

The power contained in legal formulae or oaths of office results in a change in legal status or level of public authority for those to whom the words pertain in civil proceedings. The Australian Constitution instructs that a person elected to Parliament “must make and subscribe an oath or affirmation of allegiance before the Governor-General or some person authorised by the Governor-General”.

Any departure from the approved formula places into question the liceity of the oath/affirmation and means that the elected person may not take part in any proceedings of the House. The federal government guidelines include no provision for altering the official wording of the oath/affirmation. The words we use matter.

On 24 February 2022, Victorian Police Minister Lisa Neville announced that more than 1,000 police officers were incorrectly sworn in due to an administrative oversight. For the past eight years, acting assistant commissioners have been swearing in police officers and protective services officers invalidly, which means they have been undertaking their duties without having the legal powers to do so.

These officers must now be sworn-in again and emergency legislation must be enacted to ensure the legality of arrests they made and legal proceedings involving them. Validity of administrative authority and validity of wording results in the valid performance of duties. The words we use — and the valid authority to execute the power contained in those words — matter.

Before going on to argue that the efforts within the transgender world to claim ownership of socially important words are deeply detrimental to the health of society, I want to dwell on the mistake by the American priest, using it as a case study of the significance of the language we use.

The Australian commentator, a professor at the Australian Catholic University, writes:

Catholic liturgy is regulated from the highest authorities in the Church — namely, the Pope and, as laws may determine, the local episcopal conference or local bishop — and “no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority”. The Second Vatican Council taught that liturgical rites are not private functions, but celebrations which pertain to the whole church because they “manifest it and have effects upon it”.

Why does the Catholic Church insist on getting liturgical words right? Because the faith of the faithful is at stake when we celebrate liturgy. An ancient axiom expressing the rationale of the church’s liturgy is, lex orandi, lex credendi (attributed to Prosper of Aquitaine, circa 370 – circa 465) which is generally translated as: “let the law of prayer establish the law of belief”. What we do and say in liturgy both effects and affects our faith. The Church’s rites are privileged expressions of what we believe, distilled and polished over time, and performed by the faithful in the presence of God.

The Church’s ritual texts are linguistic facts — they do what they say they will do and have the power to change lives: from unbaptised to baptised, from lay person to ordained leader, from unforgiven to forgiven. The ritual words that effect such changes in people are considered sacred because God’s power is enacted when they are spoken. Changing these sacred words also changes the theological tenets they contain and convey.

Father Arango’s error was a small but significant one: in an attempt at inclusivity he said “We baptise you …” instead of “I baptise you …” which, according to Church law, invalidated the baptisms he performed. When the “I” of Christ who has the power to sanctify someone through baptism is replaced with “We”, the end result is that the assembly is led to worship itself rather than to worship God who is the only source of sacramental grace.

“We” as an assembly — with all our human flaws and tendency to sin — have no power to baptise anyone; the priest as a man has no power to baptise anyone. As an ordained representative of Christ standing in persona Christi when enacting a sacrament, the priest speaks Christ’s words over the candidate as Christ’s power effects the sacrament in that individual.

In a similar way, the complexities of human life shine through when we look at the terms "woman", "mother" and "father", and the pronouns that have now become a thing of play. Instead of simplifying life, as a coherent culture does, the efforts pushed by trans activists are leading to semantic confusion. 

Look at this headline: Transgender man who gave birth slams nurses who called him ‘Mom’. Instead of reading and understanding, we have to sit and think what is being said, and we are compelled to assess the implications of the word play. Language is meant to aid social discourse, not stymie it.

In the case that the headline relates to, the complainant, who identifies as a man  — beard and all — had this to say:

“The only thing that made me dysphoric about my pregnancy was the misgendering that happened to me when I was getting medical care for my pregnancy,” he said. “The business of pregnancy — and yes, I say business, because the entire institution of pregnancy care in America is centered around selling this concept of ‘motherhood’ — is so intertwined with gender that it was hard to escape being misgendered.”

The confusion occurred this way: 

In 2020, Los Angeles resident Bennett Kaspar-Williams, 37, gave birth via caesarean to a healthy baby boy with his husband, Malik. But in the process of having little Hudson, Kaspar-Williams was troubled by the constant misgendering of him by hospital staff who insisted on calling him a “mom”.

So this mother seemingly objects to "motherhood" even being a term we can use in our discourse and is intent on having a  shift in the language of the whole society simply to accommodate a noncomformist wish to be a known as a father—one of two—in the family.

That's a bold ambition because, on behalf of a microminority, as mentioned above, the whole civilisation's experiential awareness of the necessary elements of a healthy family — that the child be raised by the combined efforts of a mother (with all her female attributes) and a father (with all his male attributes) — is pushed aside for the purpose of complying with the social fad of self-invention.

To oppose this ambition is not to discriminate against a woman who identifies as a man but to express biological and psychological reality.

We also have the case of an English biological woman who likewise gave birth but wished the child's birth certificate to identify her as the father. The Guardian reports:

His passport and National Health Service records were changed to show he was male, but he retained his female reproductive system. 

Both the high court, in September 2019, and the appeal court, in April 2020, ruled that even though he was considered a man by law and had a gender recognition certificate to prove it, he could not appear on his child’s birth certificate as “father” or parent.

The chief justice, Lord Burnett, came down in favour of the right of a child born to a transgender parent to know the biological reality of its birth, rather than the parent’s right to be recognised on the birth certificate in their legal gender.

Burnett said that laws passed by parliament had not “decoupled the concept of mother from gender”. He said any interference with McConnell’s rights to family life, caused by birth registration documents describing him as a mother when he lives as his child’s father, could be justified.

To put it another way, words matter, with society taking on the role of protector of a child's right to know where they came from. Society knows that this knowledge of origin is also important in safeguarding lines of heredity. 

Then there is the tragic case of a loss of a baby because medical records showed the transgender patient as a male whereas in reality the patient was a woman about to give birth.

Read Abigail Shrier's powerful examination of the transgender phenomenon Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. While some transgender cases are genuine, it is clear that much of the explosion in cases in recent years is an outgrowth of troubled youngsters being infected by a contagion spread by gender ideology activists through social media.

But, to continue my theme, Shrier cautions that gender ideology "also frames the unintended consequences of medical professionals' fudging science, rewriting medical definitions, and tolerating shoddy research to placate activists".

"At each stage, doctors may have thought: Where was the harm? And so, as a consequence, judges now decide the fate of children and their families based on phony, medically unsubstantiated metaphysics, as if it were factual that all adolescents have an immutable, ineffable 'gender identity', knowable only to the adolescents themselves," she continued.

"This is gender ideology—the belief, not backed by any meaningful empirical evidence, that we all have an ineffable gender identity, knowable only to us. This identity has no observable markers, and it is immutable (until the moment we change our minds and reveal ourselves as 'gender-fluid,' of course). It is promoted by virtually every practitioner of 'gender-affirming care', it is unfalsifiable, and its hold on our legal system is gaining ground," Shrier warned.  

New research is also raising questions about transgender medicine. 

Dr. Lisa Littman has a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, showing that the majority of those who have de-transitioned, that is, reversed their initial decision to change their gender identity, say they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a medical care provider before they initially transitioned.

Speaking on the Megyn Kelly Show she said it's heartbreaking what's happened to some of these patients. "These young people didn't get the evaluation, the support, the kind of mental health services that they needed and instead, were really rushed to medical transition and surgery," she said.

As far as pronouns are concerned, it is a courtesy to use whatever name or pronoun a person wishes, just as we use nicknames that a person has accepted. However, as with nicknames, we know there is a reality that is official or true, which takes precedence when the circumstances demand over whatever has been assumed by way of personal preference.

The point is that we must not let unreality strangle what is real, whether in matters affecting legal responsibilities or social responsibilities or social behaviour. All of us have a responsibility to protect each other, and women are more vulnerable in our present society than they have been under traditional standards of behaviour arising from Christian teaching.

Legislation in most Western jurisdictions permits a woman to declare that she is a man, or vice versa, showing how gender ideology has taken hold among the prominent institutions as activists have waved the banner of "human rights" and bullied the elite to comply to their demands, illustrating how activism can be effective..

But in everyday use, especially within the family, we can continue to hold on to reality and refer to those who have transitioned in this way: "She is a woman identifying as a man"; "He is a man identifying as a woman". Most importantly, we need to ensure we do not let the biological male in particular dominate spaces preserved for biological women as a whole. 

The reality is that no matter how a biological male may demand that they are a woman, that can never be the case. Why cannot the male say, should the matter ever come up, that they identify as a woman. Society does a disservice to transitioned males by calling them a woman as in the case of the Jeopardy winner or of the transitioned male Admiral Rachel Levine, who " is one of USA Today's Women of the Year, a recognition of women across the country who have made a significant impact".

That Levine would serve nicely as clickbait for USA Today was clear.

By being aware of all of this degradation of social discourse we will steady the ship of society as the woke elite press on in exploring the far reaches of unreality and compulsion.

💢 See also Maledom gets in the way of women's rights

                    The Dangerous Denial of Sex: Transgender ideology harms women, gays 

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Who is God? This question is at our core.

 

A "God-shaped hole" has opened in American society and "we risk leaving people at the mercy of a disorienting permanent moral flux", stoking turmoil in the nation, writes Murtaza Hussain, an American national security journalist.

The increasingly obvious absence of God in the US and much of Europe, and so the lack of a common culture, gives rise to this view: "No wonder the newly ascendant American ideologies, having to fill the vacuum where religion once was, are so divisive."  

However, although a survey just out conducted for the Deseret News found "Americans retain core religious beliefs 'even as they are less attached to religious practices and institutions, such as daily prayer and attending services'," the trend lines, especially for the young, press home the poor example the older generations have given in cultivating a life built on prayer, worship, and moral integrity.

The immense distraction of social media also has an impact on the ability of young people to open their hearts and minds to building a relationship with God.

God.

Who is God? 

An exquisite lesson on the nature of God has just been delivered by Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles. He tells us:

Friends, we have the privilege of reading one of the most important texts in the Bible, period. We're in the third chapter of the book of Exodus. It's the text in which God gives himself a name—if you want, defines himself, but as we'll see, in a way that's really no definition at all. But it’s God's manifestation of his own identity.

And so we're on very holy ground with this story.

Here's this famous and beautifully told account. “An angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in fire flaming out of a bush. As he looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush, though on fire, was not consumed.”

We have to pause there. Such an important moment. The fire of God's presence, yes indeed. But it doesn't consume the bush. In fact, it simply makes the bush more luminous and more radiant and more beautiful.

So it goes with the God of the Bible. Unlike the gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans who, when they broke into human affairs, destroyed things, incinerated people, because they were in a competitive relationship with this world. For the gods to assert themselves, something in this world had to give.

That's not the God of the Bible. Why? It’s very clear. Because God is the creator of all things. There's nothing in this world that can compete with God. God gave whatever the world has. God is not one more item in the world.

So I can look around this room and see various items in it. What don't I see? The one who designed this room. He's not here, he's not in the room.

And so God, the Designer and Creator of the whole universe, is not competing with us but rather —listen to me, now, — as God gets closer to you, you become more luminous and more beautiful and more radiant.

That's the God now who manifests himself to Moses. But now, watch this very interesting dynamic, which encapsulates in many ways a dynamic you can see throughout the biblical narratives.

“When the LORD saw him coming over to look more closely . . .”

Moses said, "Look, what's going on? Let me find out." Well, there's the aristocratic [though humbled] Moses used to having things his way. “Here's this weird sight. Let me go and investigate.”

“When the LORD saw him coming over, he called out from the bush, ‘Moses, Moses.’"

Well, here's the Lord who knows this shepherd, this nobody who's tending sheep in this mountain range in the Sinai peninsula.

Boy, this God must be a very local, very intimate deity. Very close.

Moses answers, "Here I am." And God says, "Come no nearer! Take off your sandals, for you are on holy ground."

Now here's the rhythm I want you to see. Is God close to us? Yes.

See, we don't believe in a deist God, which is to say a distant cause of the universe that way back then or way up there somewhere did his causal thing and then went into retirement, who doesn't really know the world.

Look at a lot of mysticisms where the divine is sort of a principle or a force but doesn't really know us. Look at the Star Wars mythology, which sums up a lot of the spiritual traditions of the world. Sure, there's the force out there which can be used for good or evil, but the force doesn't know me. The force doesn't know my name.

The distant deist prime mover doesn't know my name, but God knows the name of this little nobody tending sheep in the Sinai Peninsula, because the true God, Augustine put it this way, is "intimior intimo meo", closer to me than I am to myself.

Why? Because God is here and now bringing all things into being. The Creator didn't do something long ago then retire. No. God continually creates the universe. All things, moment to moment, depend upon the causal influence of God.

So, of course, God knows me better than I know myself. Of course, God knows my name and knows your name. What does Jesus say? Every hair on your head is numbered. That's how intimately God knows us.

Beautiful. Beautiful. But now wait.

Lest this draws me into a kind of too chummy intimacy with God - “Back off, Moses. Take off your sandals because you are on holy ground.”

Why would you take off your shoes when you're on holy ground?

Well, what do shoes enable you to do? Well, they enable you to go anywhere. If I’ve got shoes on, I can walk confidently over all kinds of terrain. I am in command.

Now take your shoes off, well you're much more vulnerable, right? Rocky terrain. You're not going to be climbing that in bare feet. Take off your shoes, Moses. You are not in control here. You're on holy ground.

Now that word, holy, is kadosh in the Hebrew. The angels in Isaiah chapter 6 chant “kadosh, kadosh, kadosh”, holy, holy, holy.

You know what it means? It means “other”. Other. Other. Different. Transcendent.

Well, you just told me he's intimate to us. He knows us better than we know ourselves. True. And at the same time, as Augustine put it, he is “superior summo meo”. He's higher than anything I can possibly imagine.

The Creator of the universe is not an item within the universe. That which gives rise to the whole being of the finite world is not himself a being among beings. The true God who appears in the burning bush in such a way that he enhances and makes beautiful that to which he comes close, that God is both "intimior intimo meo et superior summo meo".

Closer to me than I am to myself and greater than anything I can possibly imagine. Now we're talking. That's the true God.

This play of imminence and transcendence continues. Listen to what the Lord says: "I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob."

Well, I know your name. I know the name of your ancestors. I know the name of the patriarchs of your people. More to it, "I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt. I have heard their cry of complaint. I know well their suffering."

Now think about this for a minute. Who's the most forgettable people in the ancient Near East? It would've been this poor enslaved tribe of the Hebrews in Egypt. They're not some great empire. They're not some great cultural force. They were enslaved nobodies. And yet God knows them and has heard their cry.

And furthermore, “I have come to rescue them from the hands of the Egyptians, to lead them into a land good and spacious and flowing with milk and honey."

Wow. How intimate, involved, how aware of the people of Israel this God is.

So Moses might be thinking, "All right. He told me to take off my shoes and I'm on holy ground and all that, but now he seems, again, pretty intimate."

And so what does Moses do? And here we come to the climax of the story. He says, "All right, if you send me to Egypt to lead these people out and they ask, ‘Well, what's the name of this God who spoke to you?’ What will I tell them?"

Now, it's a reasonable question. What name? That means, who are you? What kind of being are you?

So Moses is asking a reasonable question. All right, Lord, what's your name?

Then comes the line now, which is the most famous line. It's the hinge, in many ways, upon which the biblical revelation turns.

What does God say? "I am who I am."

Now, you might say it's a bit like saying: "Hey Moses, stop asking me such a stupid question. I am who I am."

But press it even further. What's your name? Who are you? How can I specify you? Which being are you among the many beings of the world? Which god are you? There's a god of the river, god of the mountain, god of this people, god of that people.

You're a god clearly. Well, which one are you? What's your name?

No, no, no. The God that Moses is dealing with is not one of those little petty deities, not one little divine potentate among many. The Creator of the universe, as I've said, is not an item within the universe.

“I am who I am.”

[Being a mere item among many is] what God won't do. That's what God can't do. “I am who I am.” To be God is to be “to be”.

That's [13^th Century philosopher-priest] Thomas Aquinas. In God, Aquinas says, essence

Photo by Jeffrey Czum

and existence coincide. Now what does that highly abstract language mean?

Think of this camera in front of me I'm speaking into. That's a type of being. It exists. It exists in a particular way. It's got the form of camera.

There’re all these items around me I can see. There’re people around me I can see who are typical, they're types of being.

I can look up at the planet Mars, the planet Jupiter, I can look at the Milky Way and I can say, all these are types of being. I can name them. I can define them. Their existence is received and delimited according to certain essential principles.

Excuse the philosophy, but that's the way that our tradition has translated this language. They're all beings of some type.

And then there's God. “I am who I am.” To be God is not to be this or that, up or down, here or there, big, small. To be God is to be “to be.”

Now, where is this being itself? Well, everywhere in this room because nothing in this room would exist apart from God.

Where is God? He's in you in the most intimate way possible.

Where is this God who's being itself? Nowhere. Nowhere, because nothing in this room is God. Nothing in this whole cosmos is God. He's intimior intimo meo et superior summo meo, closer than we are to ourselves, greater than anything we can imagine.

It's that God whom we can neither control nor hide from that addresses Moses in the burning bush.

The two paths of sinners, by the way, and we walk them all the time, is we try to control God for our purposes, or we try to avoid him.

Give up. They're both hopeless paths. Rather, surrender to the God closer to you than you are to yourself, greater than anything you can possibly imagine.

And you know what he wants to do? He wants to set you on fire with his own presence to make you as radiant and beautiful as possible.

That's the God who addressed Moses.

That's the God who Jews and Christians have come to know over thousands of years, right up to the present generation. This understanding of God is conveyed in a brief study of the riches of the term kadosh. Knowing our place before God enables us to know who we are - in a deeper way than this catchphrase: "God is God, and I'm not!" Follow that link for a deeper knowledge of the God who knows us intimately.

💢 Read also Putin and the holiness of God

                       God's sense of humour shows through

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West's cultural war's grim toll grows

Protesters try to block statement on gender in Boston

British-American writer Andrew Sullivan's Weekly Dish column at the weekend has particularly sharp insights on why transgender activists are pushing society in the wrong direction. He shows the same anxiety as I do over the cultural changes promoted under the broad woke agenda where personal rights and minority stances must be accepted by all under pain of social cancellation.

The case that drew Sullivan's astute commentary is Lia Thomas's rise in the US to be the women's national title holder in college swimming. Lia Thomas is biologically a male but identifies as a woman. Needless to say, Thomas's competitors cried foul given the physical advantage, as shown in the photo below.

 Sullivan, who is a homosexual, writes in his column:

Lia Thomas’ triumphs at the NCAA swimming finals are never going to be treated as completely fair by most people. Inclusion is important and trans athletes need to be treated with dignity. But the core biological differences between men and women simply cannot be wished away, and when we’re talking about high-level competition, the unfairness is simply unmissable. Yelling TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN! will not persuade anyone [...]

[...] activists need to understand that demanding people not believe what is in front of their ears and eyes is a mark not of a civil rights movement, but a form of authoritarianism.

It bears repeating, as Sullivan puts it: Inclusion is important and trans athletes need to be treated with dignity.  That is certainly my view, and fact that both Sullivan and myself are Christians gives weight to our avowal of respect to all those who identify differently from their biological status. The issue is that the rest of society is being forced to accept a position on sexuality and gender that has been generally accepted only by the elites in society, namely in academia, the mainstream news media, and in leftist politics.

The elites may accept the trans agenda as intellectually accurate, or do so in response of the cultural tide that silences dissent with the slogans of "hate speech", and "harm" or "aggression", but ordinary people know reality too well, and have their children to defend from the advocates of self-invention.

Sullivan produces the following statistics:

There’s also been some new polling on the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law just passed in Florida, and for those in the woke bubble, it is sobering news. Most people [...] don’t think kindergartners or second- or third-graders should be introduced to the concepts of critical gender and queer theory. They believe that the issues of homosexuality and transgender experience should be taught in a way that is “age-appropriate.”

Here’s the Morning Consult poll, which finds 51 - 35 percent majority for not teaching K-3 about trans or gay identity; and a 52 - 33 percent majority in favor of “age-appropriate” teaching thereafter. In what I take as a hopeful sign, though, a 44 - 40 percent plurality oppose the ability of parents to sue teachers — which is also part of the law.

A Daily Wire poll provided the actual wording:

“Below is a passage from a new state education law. Please indicate whether you support or oppose it. ‘Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through third grade or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

That passage had a 64 - 21 percent majority support. 

He also cited another poll which had findings opposite the above, but it did not present its questions with the context that the polls above did so its results would not be as reliable indicators of opinion.

This is Sullivan's assessment of the poll results:

What to make of all this? I’d say simply: people don’t want to ban teachers from doing their job, but they’re leery of indoctrination of the very young. And the context for this leeriness is a revolution in the teaching of these topics to incorporate critical queer and gender theory — that relegates biology to an afterthought, describes sex as a “spectrum”, and conflates sex with gender.

There’s an obvious sane compromise on this — age-appropriate sex ed in the most neutral manner possible after elementary school — but the radicalism of the critical queer and gender theory left and the moral panic of the religious right precludes it. Yes, the bill is too vague and encourages chilling lawsuits, which is why I’m against it. But yes, too, telling 5 year olds that boys can have periods and girls can have penises is completely inappropriate. It’s bewildering and, more to the point, untrue.  

 He finds the rhetoric disturbing:

The [LGBT+] alphabet movement calls any restrictions on teaching sex ed to elementary school kids a form of “hate” and argues that the law “will kill kids”. How’s that for crude emotional blackmail? 

His conclusion:

The good news is that most Americans support equality for trans and gay people (and, in terms of civil rights, we already have it); they’re just leery of the extreme forms that queer ideology is taking, and certainly don’t want their young children caught in the crossfire. If we start from that premise, there are places we can go and compromises we can reach. If we don’t, it’s culture war all the way down.

Speaking of culture war, the urgency over the need for society to stand up against the constant demands of the "progressives" is becoming ever clearer.

British academic Eric Kaufmann identifies the nature of the ugly clash of cultures under way:

Today’s culture wars pit advocates of equal outcomes and special protection for identity groups against defenders of due process, equal treatment, scientific reason, and free speech. Our political map is taking shape around this new divide between what I will call cultural socialism and cultural liberalism. 

Cultural socialism, which values equal results and harm prevention for identity groups over individual rights, has inspired race-based pedagogies and harsh punishments for controversial speech. Rooted in the idea that historically marginalized groups are sacred, this view is no passing fad. Letters, associations, universities, and media defending free speech notwithstanding, the young adherents of cultural socialism are steadily overturning the liberal ethos of the adult world.

Kaufmann's resdarch has found that young are supportive of controlling behaviour and speech, even if it affects themselves by way of access to a job or in not being "allowed" to say what they think to be right or true.

Survey data from my new Manhattan Institute report, “The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary America,” show the scale of the challenge. While the American public leans two-to-one in favor of cultural liberalism, a majority of Americans under 30 incline toward cultural socialism. For instance, while 65 percent of Americans over 55 oppose Google’s decision to fire James Damore for having questioned the firm’s training on gender equity, those under 30 support the firing by a 59–41 margin.  

On the use of critical race theory in school, a similar divide emerges. Eight in ten people over age 55 oppose teaching schoolchildren that the United States was founded on racism and remains systemically racist, or that the country and their homes were built on stolen land. A slight majority of young people support teaching these notions. 

By a 48–27 margin, respondents under 30 agree that “My fear of losing my job or reputation due to something I said or posted online is a justified price to pay to protect historically disadvantaged groups.” Those over 50, by contrast, disagree by a 51–17 margin. Younger age brackets are both more fearful of cancel culture and more supportive of it than are older age groups.

 He concludes:

America still has two cultural liberals for every cultural socialist. Questions of cancel culture and CRT split Democrats and unite Republicans, putting pressure on both parties to resist cultural socialism. Twenty percent of Democrats, one-third of independents, and nearly half of Republican voters now rank culture-war issues as a top concern, my survey finds. The classical liberal inheritance that underpins our legal system does not live in the hearts of younger generations because it has not been brought to life in stories, film, or education. We urgently need to revive this lost tradition—but the hour is late.

Read more about Kaufmann's conclusions flowing from his research in author Rod Dreher's report of a conference in Hungary that focused on the dark clouds of culture war. 

The seriousness of the threat of wokeness was highlighted both by Kaufmann and by another speaker who impressed Dreher, James Orr, a lecturer at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Dreher writes:

[Orr] told the audience that conservatives should not make the mistake of thinking that wokeness is shallow. No, he said, it’s deep, and it’s a very serious threat to the free society. Only the State is strong enough to regulate all this and to defend liberty and sanity. Conservatives would be foolish to think that we can get by with modest responses to this threat. 

 Orr added that conservative attempts to reform existing institutions have generally come to naught. We need to create counter-institutions and networks, so our ideas can thrive.

Read Dreher's column for more ideas on how to build defences against the woke tide that, without a sustained effort, is sure to overwhelm society more assuredly than it has at present. He provides this update:

Should have mentioned the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, and its Republican legislature, for going to war against the ghouls of the transgender industry. Here’s an article about how the state Attorney General ruled that transitioning children is a form of child abuse, as it certainly is. And here’s a story from the Texas Tribune about Jeff Younger, a father who lost a famous child custody battle, and whose son is now being medically transformed into a pseudo-female; Younger’s case helped move the Texas legislature to go after clinics that transition children. The Tribune, a liberal paper, writes of Younger and his GOP supporters as a villain, but you still get the idea that it was the grassroots that compelled Texas GOP politicians to act.

This holy war is utterly modern

But this matter of the culture war that is raging in the West, and globally by means of social media and the media generally, is set in the context of the poorly recognised East-West culture war that added fuel to President Putin's push to preserve for the Russian people the "holy ground" of Ukraine.

International analyst and broadcaster Stan Grant relates how the head of Russian Orthodoxy, Patriarch Kirill, had long ago joined forces with Putin in reviving the concept of a "Russian World". Grant quotes political scientist Lena Surzhko Harned as describing as a joint mission of church and state, "of making Russia a spiritual, cultural and political centre of civilisation to counter the liberal, secular ideology of the West".

 It's true that the godless nature of much of life in the West has transformed the 'free society" ideology that blossomed after World War II from a vibrant forest tree into a desiccated desert shrub that increasingly relies on intolerance and social division to achieve its goals. Christian principles of forgiveness, charity towards those with opposing ideas, and community rather than individualistic autonomy, are absent from a large part of social discourse.

Grant quotes others with an understanding of the Russian mentality to explain why Putin made his history-shattering move:

Vladimir Putin believes the West is decadent. He believes the West has turned away from God and he is a defender of the faith. 

Is Putin truly a believer? That's not the question. This is not personal, it is political. This holy war is not medieval, it is utterly modern.

It is about identity in a world in flux. Where faith is turned inward and apart from symbolism or ritual is increasingly pushed out of public debate.

Religion and politics scholar Jocelyne Cesari has traced the evolution of secular modernity in her book, We God's People. We have now reached a point in Western Europe, she says, where "this world is all there is".

There is a division between the immanent and the transcendent — between what is Caesar's and what is God's. The immanent is the realm of politics. 

Believers, Cesari says, "are expected to keep the transcendent to themselves". She says the nation is now "the superior collective identification" overtaking "religious allegiances".

In his book, A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor says: "Modern civilisation cannot but bring about a death of God."

Taylor says we have seen the rise of an "exclusive humanism". We have swapped God for a "culture of authenticity, or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfilment, 'do their own thing'."

German philosopher Max Scheler also wrote about this — how we risk becoming alienated from one another, isolated from the world "degraded and depersonalised".

We struggle to deal with faith in our public discourse. When it arises it usually centres around scandal in the church, or abusive priests, or questions of morality and discrimination.

We miss the deeper questions of how faith can still shape our world and — when misused or exploited — can have devastating consequences. 

Cesari says religion survives in the nation state. [...] Religion can be used as the "foundation of identity". She cites political Islam as an example of how faith can emerge as "a modern technique of governmentality". The Islamic world has adopted — or had forced upon them — Western notions of the modern state but faith remains critical to public life and identity.

Radical Islam takes it even further, striking back at the West. Osama bin Laden's September 11,2001, terrorist attacks on the United States shook the West from its complacency that the world had moved on from wars of religion.

Putin in his own way is not so different to Osama bin Laden, someone for whom faith was a weapon. As bin Laden cited the 11th century Crusades and Putin seeks a return to the 10th century idea of holy Russia, both have reacted to a modern world. Both products of it, both seeking to remake it.

The West provoked Putin into making war because it refused to be sensitive to the cultural and spiritual repulsion felt by Russians - and Ukrainians, too, since they are more conservative on social and moral issues than Western Europeans, meaning they have held firm to the life-affirming Christian way of life of their ancestors.

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Why the consecration of Russia to Mary?

Mary at the birth of the Church, and with us still. Image: Source

Next Friday, Pope Francis will use a special prayer to ask Mary the mother of Jesus to pray to her son, to God, for Russia. He will consecrate Russia to "the immaculate heart" of Mary.

This action needs some unraveling, to understand both as to what is meant by Mary's "immaculate heart" and on the issue of why the Church would pray to Mary instead of the God directly. 

First, the matter of intercessory prayer. God wants us to ask Him for what we need. For that reason, Christians have a well-rooted practice of praying for each other, and the tradition is that even those who have died are part of the ongoing life of the Church. They continue to be members of the mystical body of Christ, the concept so central to Paul's teaching. Those on earth pray to God that those who have died are quickly received into heaven; then those in the presence of God add their pleas for divine help to the prayers of their brothers and sisters in need still on earth.

Second, Mary's role in the Church. Simeon's prophecy created the image of Mary participating fully in our redemption, saying that her heart would be pierced with a sword.  Luke notes twice that Mary kept all the sayings and doings of Jesus in her heart. Augustine highlighted how Mary did not have a passive role in the completion of God's plan as she had to cooperate with the Holy Spirit by applying her whole self. Mary was present at Pentecost, which marks the birth of the Church (Acts 1:14).

In the New Testament:

Elizabeth proclaims Mary blessed because she has believed the words of the angel; the Magnificat is an expression of her humility; and in answering the woman in the crowd, who in order to exalt the Son proclaimed the Mother blessed, did not Jesus himself say: “Blessed rather are they that hear the word of God and keep it”? [...] The Fathers understood His meaning, and found in these words a new reason for praising Mary. St. Leo says that through faith and love she conceived her Son spiritually, even before receiving Him into her womb, and St. Augustine tells us that she was more blessed in having borne Christ in her heart than in having conceived Him in the flesh.

By the 11th and 12th centuries Christians were acknowledging that Mary warranted special honour because of her spiritual attributes.

We honor Mary because of her office as Mother of God, and also the fact that she cooperated with God’s grace and God did something through her greater than—in fact, without Mary, there is no Jesus. There’s no Apostle Peter. There’s no Paul. There’s no nothing, there’s no New Testament, without Mary’s “Yes” to almighty God. Now, could God have chosen someone else? Absolutely! God could choose anybody wants to. But the bottom line is, He chose Mary and Mary said “Yes.”   

The Church examines the Magnificat, for example, to understand Mary's interior life, and it celebrates her joys and sorrows, her virtues, and her love for God and all those around her, which she shared with the early Church by continuing her participation in God's work.

Does not giving honour to Mary detract from our honouring God? Read on:

The Bible gives us basically two essential reasons why we honor some members of the Body of Christ more than others. Think of this: 1 Timothy 5:17 commands us to give “double honor” to the teaching elders. [...] So number one, we honor some members of the Body of Christ more than others because of their office.

But number two, we also honor them because of their holiness, or what God has done for them, in them, and through them. Well, the Blessed Mother’s a great example of that, because in Luke 1:48 she says—she prophesies under the power of the Holy Spirit—"All generations shall call me blessed, for the Almighty has done great things for me." 

Mary is worthy of honour as the Mother of God, but her manner and the Church's practice—apart from some excesses of piety from time to time or in some cultures—has been to put God first and foremost: "... for the Almighty has done great things for me".

The term "immaculate" refers to God preserving Mary from the original sin that afflicts all of humanity, making us weak in the face of evil, with a tendency to seek our own desires rather than complying with God's plan for us. The Church has seen from scripture and the regard Christians all along have held for Mary, that given this evidence, it is reasonable to believe that God would deem it unbecoming for the Creator to come into the world by means of a mother who was anything less than perfect. 

That means her heart is able to be absolutely pure in its love for God and her human sons and daughters, with the words of Jesus on the cross, "Woman, here is your son", and to John, seen as standing for all, "Here is your mother" (John 19:26) having significance.

As to the particular event next Friday (March 25, Feast of the Annunciation):

In 1942, Pope Pius XII consecrated the whole human race to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The pope said that the intercession of Mary, already known as the queen of peace, could bring an end to the war ravaging Europe, Asia, and North Africa.  

In 1952, [with the grip of Soviet communism apparent in many forms], Pius XII issued an apostolic letter entrusting the Russian people to the intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

In 1964, Pope St. Paul VI offered a public prayer entrusting the whole human race to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Pope St. John Paul II offered several consecration prayers to the Immaculate Heart of Mary; the most well-known and public was in 1984.

On March 25, 1984, he offered prayers of solemn consecration, which dedicated the world to Mary. While the pope’s text did not specifically mention Russia, some historians say that John Paul II privately added the words in his prayer. Bishops from around the world had been invited to join the consecration, and many did. 

According to some accounts, the pope was urged not to mention Russia by name in the public prayers of the 1984 consecration, because it would anger the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, who opposed the notion of Catholics consecrating their country to Mary, and because of Vatican efforts at political diplomacy with the USSR. 

Because of that omission, some Catholics have argued that Pope John Paul II did not actually consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary — and some Catholics continue to raise that objection. 

But after the consecration, Sister Lucia - the visionary who recorded the Fatima message from Mary - said several times that she believed the consecration request had been fulfilled. And in 2000, the Holy See said the consecration “has been done just as Our Lady asked”.

The new consecration is not a concession from the Holy See that the 1984 consecration was in some way insufficient, but this act will be more explicit, presumably naming Russia and Ukraine in the prayers themselves. 

[It's...] likely Pope Francis intends his prayers to be acts of renewal — pleas to God, and the Blessed Virgin Mary — in a time of great hardship, rather than making up for previous acts called into question. 

Honouring Mary as the Immaculate Heart gives us an example of how we as Christians should love. As Pope Paul VI said:

May the Immaculate Heart of Mary shine before the eyes of all Christians as the model of perfect love toward God and toward our fellow beings; may it lead them toward the Holy Sacraments by virtue of which souls are cleansed from the stains of sin and are preserved from it. May it also stimulate them to make reparation for the innumerable offenses against the Divine Majesty. Lastly, may it shine like a banner of unity and a spur to perfect the bonds of brotherhood among all Christians in the bosom of the one Church of Jesus Christ, which “taught by the Holy Spirit, honors her with filial affection and piety as a most beloved mother.” 

On 19 November 1959, Bishop Patrick O'Boyle of Washington, D.C. consecrated the United States to the Immaculate Heart of Mary:

ACT OF CONSECRATION OF THE UNITED STATES TO THE IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY

Most Holy Trinity:  Our Father in heaven, who chose Mary as the fairest of your daughters;  Holy Spirit, who chose Mary as your Spouse; God of Son, who chose Mary as your Mother; in union with Mary, we adore your majesty and acknowledge your supreme, eternal dominion and authority. Most Holy Trinity, we put the United States of America into the hands of Mary Immaculate in order that she may present the country to you.

Through her we wish to thank for you the great resources of this land and for the freedom, which as been its heritage.  Through the intercession of Mary, have mercy on the Catholic Church in America.  Grant us peace.  Have mercy on our president and all the officers of our government.  Grant us a fruitful economy born of justice and charity.  Have mercy on capital and industry and labor.  Protect the family life of the nation.  Guard the precious gift of many religious vocations.  Through the intercession of our Mother, have mercy on the sick, the poor, the tempted, sinners – on all who are in need.

Mary, Immaculate Virgin, our Mother, Patroness of our land, we praise you and honor you and give our country and ourselves to our sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.  O Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, pierced by the sword of sorrow prophesied by Simeon, save us from degeneration, disaster and war.  Protect us from all harm.  O Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, who bore the sufferings of your Son in the depths of your heart, be our advocate.  Pray for us, that acting always according to your will and the will of your divine Son, we may live and die pleasing to God. Amen. 

A concluding thought: Pray for the people of Russia and Ukraine every day. Pray, too, for peace in war zones all around the world.

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Homosexuality at war: An overview

Just about every day we get statistics that signal how a morass of depression and anxiety is entrapping our next generations because of the fallacies we have largely accepted under pressure from an elite of academia and mainstream news media, and from our own wishful thinking in which personal desire is the guiding principle.

This is the case for sure from WEIRD societies—Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic—and the latest example is from the Australian state of Victoria: 

Dr Ken Pang, an associate professor at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, says a sharp increase in the number of people seeking gender support means resources are stretched.

"In Victoria in 2011, there were just over 10 new referrals to the Royal Children's Hospital of young people aged under 18; in 2020, a decade later, that number was just under 500, and last year in 2021 it was over 800," Dr Pang says. 

"It is little wonder that gender clinics are struggling to keep up with demand."  

He adds:  "[...] unfortunately many of these young people struggle with depression and anxiety."

But society presses on down this avenue of political correctness. The headline on the Australian story is telling, as it points to the work being done to cultivate an excitement about the realm of queerness. It says: "Young Australians are exploring gender more than ever before". It's not hard to know why. The media salivate over anything to do with homosexuality and with sexuality in general. Social media pushes this for clickbait and naïve youngsters get entrapped.  

Because academia is aggressively full of it, schools roll out what the elite regards as cool but also as a matter of justice, such is the warped nature of the whole business, especially as parents are shunted aside and teachers and their ilk compete to signal their virtue. For example:

The educator says she will talk to these little kids about trans issues, about condoms, about porn, all kinds of things. As Rod Dreher puts it:

This is us. This is who we are today. The family is being dissolved. Male and female are being dissolved. The individual human personality is being dissolved.

 

The issue goes wider: 

The head of MI6, the CIA of Britain, publicly stated that the most fundamental difference between the West and Putin is over the way we regard LGBT. [...] You can mock the Russian Orthodox patriarch for saying that this war is about LGBT, but the top spy in the UK has done the same thing, in terms of framing the war as a moral crusade.

The central fact of the matter is this:

The LGBT struggle is a civilizational war. This is a war within the West; people like Joe Biden, as well as the educational profession, the media, and nearly all the institutions in Western society, are making war on families and children, and on traditional Christianity (and any religion that doesn’t affirm homosexuality and gender ideology).

In the West, those who hold to an anthropology that directly contradicts what Christianity and natural law teach about the meaning of sexuality, are winning. A recent poll found that 21 percent of Generation Z considers itself to be LGBT or Q. [...] We have an entire generation that American popular culture and institutions have convinced that their sexual identity is fluid, and should be infinitely explored. They are psychologically crippling these people — and in many cases, maiming them for life.

If you haven’t yet, you should read this incredible story by Helena, a detransitioner who writes about how she was convinced that she was trans, but later changed her mind. An excerpt:

My name is Helena, and as of this writing I’m a 23-year-old woman who, as a teenager, believed I was transgender. In the years since detransitioning (stopping testosterone treatment and no longer seeing myself as transgender), I’ve become interested in exploring why, in the last decade, nearly every English-speaking country has seen a meteoric rise in adolescents believing they are transgender and pursuing cosmetic medical and surgical interventions. Here, I’d like to go over how and why I came to see myself as transgender, the process of transitioning, and the events leading up to and following my detransition.

Helena continues:

So-called “gender dysphoria” [...] is now most commonly diagnosed in teenage girls. Activists will argue that these explosive numbers are a result of increased societal acceptance, and that at long last trans people are coming out of hiding and living as their authentic selves. If this were true, one might expect to see comparable rates of transgender identity across all age groups and between both sexes, but its disproportionately adolescent females feeling that warm and fuzzy inclusive acceptance.   

Dreher captures precisely where Western society is at:

[S]o central has LGBT liberation become in the hearts and minds of Westerners that any resistance to it is seen as HATE; we are conditioned to regard any objection at all as an expression of raw bigotry that under no circumstances can be seen as reasonable.

Last year I lived in Budapest for three or four months, and made occasional trips to western Europe — France, Spain, Austria — on book tour business. Each time, it was a shock to me to see how ubiquitous rainbow flags and the like were. Walking down a boulevard in Valencia, one of the biggest cities of Spain, I saw banners hung by the city government proclaiming that “in Valencia, women can have penises, and men can have vaginas.”

That is morally insane — but this kind of thing is everywhere. Even a conservative like me had become numb to it … until I spent time in Hungary, where things are different. Where homosexuality is seen as a fact of life, but not something ideological, and not as a weapon of culture war, as it is regarded in Western societies. 

I have quoted extensively from journalist and author Rod Dreher because I respect him for the clarity of thought he has on this matter, enabled by the width of the views he taps to interpret what is happening—in the US, in the West generally, and around the world. With the valuable resources he has available and the high quality of his sources, he can argue convincingly that it's not a nebulous aggregation of individuals that is being hurt by this culture war, but the families, and young people, and communities he knows. 

There is a metaphysical conflict raging, it is a civilizational war, promoted by an elite that has accepted the philosophical distortions arising from those who have discarded the life source of the Christian religion and of a personal relationship with God. Even with the West's "social fabric increasingly shadowed by drugs and depression and suicide", to quote New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, it presses on with a depressingly Marxist style of intolerance. 

It's not a happy place to be in. Each person has to find the strength to safeguard themselves and their family from the ravages of this war around us that is just as real as that in Ukraine. 

💢 Read this: The West, still declining  Rod Dreher goes to the heart of society's weakness

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Maledom gets in the way of women's rights and respect

Adele wants recognition as maledom takes control of award system

Adele's remarks last month about loving being a woman were attacked—inevitably—by those who do not accept the reality of life.

In accepting an award for Album of the Year at the Brit Awards 2022 in London, and regretting the decision to remove male and female categories, she said: 

“I understand why the name of this award has changed, but I really love being a woman and being a female artist. I do! I’m really, really proud of us. I really, really am.”

For that simple statement she was roundly condemned by transgender activists as a TERF, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which is the term of abuse used against women who, in this era of speech control by the woke elite, are brave enough to claim the right to respect for those who acknowledge the binary nature of the sexes.

American newspaper columnist Maureen Callahan makes a good point:

There’s been a push of late to make arts awards gender-neutral. The Brit Awards may have been the only high-profile event to make the leap, but there are calls to erase “Best Actress” at the Oscars and “Best Female Vocal” at the Grammys — part of an overall movement to make gender irrelevant.

For a Gen X-er like me, the pride taken by women in rock — from the 1990s riot grrrl movement to Courtney Love, Fiona Apple, Lauryn Hill, Liz Phair and a generation of women pushing sexual, political and economic boundaries — is not that long ago.

And it’s not like feminism has won. Women still make less money than men. [...] Still we are underrepresented in tech, politics, finance, film, and, according to a 2021 McKinsey report, all sectors of management.

Women have fought for a lot. We’re still fighting. We get to be proud of how far we’ve come.

As should Adele, a vanishingly small kind of global music superstar.

Consider what Courtney Love told Dazed & Confused magazine in 2016:

“There’s maybe 30 [female stars] if you count pop stars,” she said. “Think about that — on the planet. Rock stars, I don’t know — I’ve never really sat down and counted female rock stars. There’s a few, there’s 10, 15 . . . but throw a TV out on the balcony, the same stuff that Keith Richards did, the same stuff that Jim Morrison did, the same things that Bono did — that we all forgot about — yeah, I think I get judged by a double standard a lot, but that’s just the way it is.”

Adele is a grown woman singing about her experiences as a woman. Why should she be expected to defuse or deny what, essentially, is her superpower?

For all the crap she caught on Twitter, others came to her defense — a sign that we are possibly, maybe, beginning to emerge from an understandable state of overcorrection.

“Thank you @Adele,” tweeted author and refugee advocate Onjali Rauf. “For speaking the 2 words being vilified. Woman. Female.”

The way women speaking out about their own situation is policed by a faction in society that has managed to extend the critical race theory agenda into a new world of "transgender rights" was made clear by the experience of a British regional police commissioner. 

The Daily Mail reports the affair with these details:

A male-dominated panel of councillors found Lisa Townsend had not been ‘dignified or respectful’ to trans people when she supported best-selling author [JK Rowling]’s view that biologically male rapists were not female.

Mrs Townsend, who has received anonymous death threats, said last night: ‘These three men who complained, and a panel full of men who investigated it, have decided they must police a woman’s language about an issue of great concern to many women. 

‘That is the issue of the safety and rights of women to go to female-only spaces such as domestic abuse shelters. I will not stop speaking out about these issues.’

Rowling’s original tweet last December highlighted a policy introduced by Scottish police allowing male rapists to self-identify as women. 

Quoting from George Orwell’s 1984, the author wrote: ‘War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.’

Townsend retweeted this, writing: ‘It’s not a “niche” issue, it’s not hysterical for women to be taking to the streets about it. We will not accept this gaslighting from men who keep telling us they are women, or from those who enable them. #IStandWithJKRowling.' 

Townsend said later: ‘The panel is saying "you should not speak about this, but if you do, we’ll police the language".’

The panel’s ruling came last Tuesday – International Women’s Day. 

To pick up on a word that Townsend uses, and one that we see used a lot these days is "gaslighting". One description of its meaning is this:

Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that often occurs in abusive relationships. It is a covert type of emotional abuse where the bully or abuser misleads the target, creating a false narrative and making them question their judgments and reality.

The aggressive but befuddled narrative used by those trying to polish their woke credentials has been highlighted by the tangle British Labour Party leaders get into as they try to keep trans activists on side by evading questions on their definition of "woman". In the latest case:

Yvette Cooper yesterday became the second Labour frontbencher to decline to define what a woman is.

The Shadow Home Secretary refused three times to offer a definition, saying she was not going to go down a 'rabbit hole'. 

It came a day after her colleague Anneliese Dodds, Labour's equalities spokesman, said the meaning of the word depended on 'context'.

Dodds's failure to provide a definition earned the ridicule of JK Rowling, who said she needed a dictionary and a backbone. 

BBC host Emma Barnett asked what Labour's definition of a woman was and she replied: 'There are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is.'

When asked again, Dodds replied: 'It does depend what the context is surely.

'There are people who have decided that they have to make that transition. It's been a very difficult process for many of those people. Understandably, because they live as a woman, they want to be defined as a woman.' 

Labour has often been called out for running scared of activists who know how to turn their self-interested campaign into a matter of personal rights, into the recognition of a minority, or being on the "right side of history". That there is a "culture war" in these dying days of the liberal society, where intolerance screams from the ranks of those who have "weaponized" homosexuality, splitting that community by an unwillingness to consider anything less than capitulation who want sexuality defined on their terms alone, those terms being the extreme forms of self-invention and unreality.

A typical case is that of a Los Angeles woman who transitioned to identify as a man, objecting to nurses calling her a "mom" or using "ma'am" when she gave birth to a son. She wanted the nurses to call her the "dad". See that story here. 

And there is the case of Freddy McConnell in the UK who identifies as a man and who went to the highest court in the land arguing against being stated as mother on her child's birth certificate. The Supreme Court would not accept a challenge to the Appeals Court ruling, which said that motherhood is defined as being pregnant and giving birth regardless of whether the person who does so was considered a man or a woman in law.

This ruling upheld the High Court judge's decision that the status of "mother" was afforded to a person who carries and gives birth to a baby. While McConnell's gender was recognised by law as male, his parental status of "mother" derives from the biological role of giving birth.

In the appeal court, Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett came down in favour of the right of a child born to a transgender parent to know the biological reality of its birth, rather than the parent’s right to be recognised on the birth certificate in their legal gender.

Burnett said that laws passed by parliament had not “decoupled the concept of mother from gender”. He said any interference with McConnell’s rights to family life, caused by birth registration documents describing him as a mother when he lives as his child’s father, could be justified.

The judge said the Children Act 1989 provided that a mother has automatic parental responsibility for a child from the moment of birth, adding: "No-one else has that automatic parental responsibility, including the father."

He said: "From the moment of birth someone must have parental responsibility for a newly-born child, for example, to authorise medical treatment and more generally to become responsible for its care."

McConnell said the ruling upheld the “traditional system that does not account for modern families”.

However, it is essential for society to pay the utmost attention to biological reality, to the protection of the family as the foundation of a healthy society, and to critical scrutiny of fashionable "social justice" issues, These are essential if we are to come through this era of moral breakdown that has flowed from the "sexual revolution", through gay marriage, to the general abandonment of both God-given and natural behavioural norms, and the focus on personal desire rather than service to the community.

The behaviour of those who are unthinkingly sympathetic to the LGBT movement has been characterised this way:

To a left-wing observer, discussing social justice issues incessantly from a progressive perspective signifies moral commitment to justice.

However, talking about these issues from a dissenting point of view is evidence of insane obsession with the topic. For example:

Progressive: "Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay." Conservative: "Gay?" Progressive: "Why are you so obsessed with homosexuality, you bigoted lunatic?!"

💢 See also Trans and Reality Refresher Course 

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Unborn baby's brave parents celebrate

Baby Violet can enjoy life because of the bravery of her mother Mikayla

A couple who had difficulty conceiving took a brave step when their second baby in 10 years was found to have spina bifida, a condition affecting the spinal cord that can lead to a range of disabilities with paralysis a possibility. 

Abortion was one option put to the Australian couple, Mikayla and Peter. 

“Realistically, not a lot of people will keep a baby who has spina bifida — it’s just the reality of it,” Peter says.

“We had two pregnancies in 10 years, and were like … if there is something out there that we can do, we will do that,” he says.

Their appreciation of the gift of new life that they have received comes through in those few words. They  accepted the doctors' offer to use their skill, and they themselves prepared to do whatever was necessary to give their daughter a chance to flourish.

Their story is given in a splendid pictorial account of two cases of in-utero surgery on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website, which can be found here. The account has photos of the surgical effort to deal with the spina bifida.

At 25 weeks’ pregnant, after undergoing a series of health checks, Mikayla and her baby are scheduled for open maternal foetal surgery at Brisbane's Mater Mothers’ Hospital.

On hand to manage the delicate procedure is a specially trained team of 15 staff, which includes a neurosurgeon, plastic surgeon, anaesthetist, sonographer, midwife, theatre nurses, and two maternal foetal medicine surgeons.

Because the spinal repair is performed on the baby while it’s still in the womb, the first part of the operation involves opening Mikayla’s abdomen to access her uterus.

“You are operating on two people virtually at the same time … through the mother, through the uterus and through the membranes,” obstetrician Glenn Gardener says. 

Once inside the womb, neurosurgeon Martin Wood repairs the hole in the baby’s spine.

“Meeting parents taking on this intervention with all of the risks to the mother and the foetus … I don’t know as a parent what I would have done in this situation,” Dr Woods says.

“Every single one of the mothers- and fathers-to-be that we have met and dealt with as part of this team — the decisions they’ve made on behalf of their children are just so brave.”

Their bravery is for the sake of the child, the tiny human they have brought into existence, the person who deserves only the best response from them.

The account ends in an upbeat fashion about the prospects of Mikayla and Peter's daughter:

Twelve weeks after having open maternal foetal surgery, Mikayla gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Violet, via caesarean section.

“They could tell everything was fine and she came straight to me for a breastfeed and didn’t leave me the whole time,” Mikayla says.

Now seven months old, Violet doesn’t need a shunt [procedure], and there are promising signs she will walk. 

What a loss to the world if Violet had been aborted! 

Personal bravery in accepting the consequences of one's actions and in concern for another living being is seen, too, in the case of  women who have an unplanned pregnancy and who shun the easy option of abortion.

Such instances have been highlighted in the account of a British doctor who helps women who start a medical abortion - using drugs only - but decide they have made the wrong decision about destroying their baby and then seek to reverse the treatment.

The doctor, cardiologist Dermot Kearney, suffered himself because of the treatment he offered women who changed their minds during a medical abortion. The Medical Council banned him from offering the treatment and he had to take the Medical Council to court over the matter. But the result was that the council withdrew its ban and cleared the procedure that he offered.

Dr Kearney has helped 32 women to give birth to healthy babies after reversing the effects of the abortion drugs. He said:

“My hope is that woman across the UK will now be told by medical regulators and abortion providers that abortion reversal treatment is safe, that it is available, and that success is possible if they regret their decision to have an abortion and choose to seek help.” 

Mothers, fathers: be brave!

💢 See also why we must protect people with Down Syndrome - A career path for people with a disability   

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