By Judie Brown
A single headline this week sums up the road America has taken. It reads: “Nashville Transgender School Shooter Possibly Targeted Christians Over ‘Hateful’ Rhetoric, Senator Says.”
The senator, Missouri’s Josh Hawley, who reacted to the incident with a simple call for an investigation, was ripped to shreds by the secular media for all the wrong reasons.
To be clear, my comment is based on a strong documentable trail of evidence that has shown over the past nearly 60 years that the decriminalization of contraception in the 1960s has led to all manner of societal insults to the Lord’s creation of man and woman. We have, sadly, long since passed the point of reasonable discussion on what it means to be male and female, as God created us.
I agree completely with Fr. Dwight Longenecker, who wrote:
“The transgender phenomenon is complex and doubtless has many sources. But in the general view, gender confusion is simply the logical outcome of a societal break with the traditional understanding not only of sexual roles but also of the meaning of the sexual act itself—and therefore the meaning of masculinity and femininity.”
The exploitation of this latest tragedy as a mere news item will do nothing to help the families of the victims left in the wake of the madness. And it will not address the underlying causes of our cultural desire to placate every wayward concept of a human being with word salad that avoids the truth of what it means to be male and female. You see, there are no other genders, and there never will be.
For as the word of God makes clear in Genesis 1:27: “God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.”
The simple fact is that Audrey Elizabeth Hale needed help, and without knowing her, that is all we are able to say. But on the broader question of what it took to get to such a juncture as human beings, we can say that the broken brick road was paved with every sort of sexual deviation; it began with Margaret Sanger’s idea of controlling birth with contraception then moved to the widespread acceptance of abortion, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, infanticide of the imperfect child, and so forth.
Is it any wonder that today we talk about gender as if it were a treatable malady rather than a fact of nature? Such attitudes do not surprise me in this age of godless moral upheaval. This is why I am grateful to the wisdom of Fr. Longenecker, who wrote:
All revolutions are violent, and the sexual revolution has been no exception. The invention and introduction of artificial contraception brought about a revolution never before seen in the history of humanity. Along with the other dire predictions of Paul VI, gender confusion is a result of this rupture, and the role of Christians in the midst of a revolution has always been to suffer as martyrs but also to shelter the victims—and eventually to emerge into the aftermath, rebuild, and find new life and new love in the ruins.
The basic truth about the human person and his or her identity as a child of God has never changed, regardless of how mankind has striven to eradicate it. While society may devise new ways to play God, the reality that confronts us in the person of Audrey Hale, abortionist Caitlin Bernard, or the infamous Margaret Sanger, among others, is that departure from the creative power of God will always end in chaos.
Today, as we pray for all those involved in the Nashville massacre, we once again remember the profound words of St. John Paul II in the encyclical letter Redeemer of Man:
The love of God “is greater than sin, than weakness, than the ‘futility of creation,’ it is stronger than death; it is a love always ready to raise up and forgive, always ready to go to meet the prodigal son, always looking for ‘the revealing of the sons of God,’ who are called to the glory that is to be revealed.” This revelation of love is also described as mercy; and in man’s history this revelation of love and mercy has taken a form and a name: that of Jesus Christ.