From a recent opinion piece by John J. Miller in the Wall Street Journal titled “Why the Left Won’t Leave Nuns Alone”:
“At Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, N.Y., the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne (founded by Rose, sister of Nathaniel) provide free medical care to poor people with terminal cancer. They don’t take a penny from any government or insurance company to fund their 42-bed complex. Sustained by private donations, their work is pure charity.
‘We cannot cure our patients, but we can assure the dignity and value of their final days and keep them comfortable and free of pain,’ said Mother Alphonsa, in what amounts to a credo for these heroes of compassion.
That’s not good enough for New York’s Department of Health. Two years ago, it began sending letters to the Hawthorne Sisters. Rather than thanking the sisters for their kindness to the dying poor, the letters demanded that the sisters respect the ‘gender identity or expression’ of their patients.
The sisters were directed to use 'preferred' pronouns, permit cross-dressing, and allow males into the ladies’ room. They were to allow sex outside marriage, and to enroll in 'cultural competency' training. Refusal to comply would mean risking fines, loss of operating license, and even imprisonment."
That same day, The New York Times ran a piece called “Should Letting Children Play Alone Outside Be a Crime?” “Two forces — fear and control — have systematically reduced childhood independence over the past four decades,” the article noted, quoting a prominent professor of developmental psychology.
And the day before that, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) signed legislation removing prior restrictions on abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy. Licensed physicians may now perform late-term abortions based entirely on their professional medical judgment, making Massachusetts one of the few states with no gestational age limits.
Somehow these three, more or less randomly selected news items, seem connected.
They all stem from gruesome lies: lies about the human person, lies about the nature of reality, lies about the meaning of such notions as fairness, justice, and compassion.
We swim in such lies: victim mentalities, grievance studies, oppression modalities, the very nature of which is so obnoxious that the genuine victim, genuine grievance, and genuinely oppressed get swept aside.
We insist upon including and giving preferential treatment to the minority while excluding and demonizing the majority.
We claim to promote social justice and deny the most basic, essential, and beautiful fact about the human person — that we were created man and woman. Then we ignore the profoundly deleterious effects of such a lie on women, the poor, children, immigrants, and the elderly: the very minorities we purport to champion.
We slavishly follow “influencers,” obediently, mindlessly mimicking their dress, manner of speech, and consumer habits. The irony lost on us, we then need sensitivity triggers before contemplating the depredations of “empire” or the oppression of the “patriarchy.”
We brag about our “polyamory,” promoting indiscriminate sex with both genders and multiple partners, then — never stopping to contemplate the effect of our behavior on the most vulnerable among us — require trigger warnings before hearing of incest, human trafficking, or rape.
Why don’t we have trigger warnings before being asked by a health care professional what gender we’ve been “assigned?”
Why don’t we have grief counseling for the person contemplating that the richest and most powerful country in the world passes laws allowing for the murder of a baby on the cusp of birth?
Why don’t we have free mental health care for the person stupefied by the insanity and sheer meanness of a group of “activists” who would shut down a charitable organization that takes in the indigent sick and dying?
“Can anyone imagine St. Francis of Assisi speaking of rights?” asked French intellectual Simone Weil. The follower of Christ thinks not in terms of rights, but of responsibility. We don’t demand from others; we offer ourselves.
Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork, “The Gulag Archipelago,” contains a passage that’s come to be known as “Live Not by Lies.” The smallest lie, he observed in the camps — signing a false confession, parroting ideological slogans — leads to other, bigger lies, and eventually, inevitably, to acts of brutality. The public’s active participation in such lies leads to totalitarianism. Our personal and spiritual integrity, he insisted, depended on our refusal to participate in such a system, no matter the cost. A lie may come into the world (for we can’t force others to tell the truth), “but not through me,” was his credo.
Today’s most egregious cultural lies are aimed at the dissolution of the human person, the human family, and the divine order.
Ever more, the elderly are expendable, men and women are interchangeable, and children are commodities, to be created, genetically engineered and destroyed at will.
It’s fine to yank the child out of the womb and kill it, admirable to start indoctrinating it at two or three to believe it’s been born into the wrong body, and a kindness to educate it to demand that the world accede to its every whim.
In the Soviet Union, the ideological effort to eliminate the family, wipe out religion, and “include” everyone in one undifferentiated, Utopian-dream blob ended in somewhere between 9 and 20 million deaths.
Meanwhile, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the most progressive among us are coming to agree there is one unforgivable sin, for which the parents should be arrested and perhaps jailed.
God forbid they should ever allow a child, full of wonder, to freely explore the world, in all its glory. God forbid they should ever allow a child to play outside, alone.
