Today we see linguistic and moral
confusion in almost everything said about the subjects that have us most
perplexed: man and woman, marriage and children.
“He is a liar and the father of lies,” said
Jesus of Satan (John 8:44). They who are committed to holiness must be
committed to clarity of intention and speech: “Let your speech be yea, yea: no,
no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil” (Matthew 5:37).
The lie is the distinguishing feature of evil,
because of its self-devouring commitment to what is not: it is an inner
vacuity. Shakespeare’s villain Parolles identifies himself as a “corrupter of
words,” and the sardonic Porter in Macbeth remarks
wryly upon the liar who equivocates his way down the primrose path to
perdition. Orwell’s dystopian regime in 1984 rests upon
a ground floor of terror and violence, but its bedrock foundation is the lie:
witness the hero Winston Smith’s work at the “Ministry of Truth,” sending
precious archival materials down the “memory hole,” where they will be lost
forever. It is why Dante situates fraud below violence in the Inferno’s decrepit descent into non-being and idiocy; so we
find the giant Nimrod, builder of the heaven-aspiring Tower of Babel,
sputtering gibberish, and the consummate liar Satan uttering not a single word,
but telling the same old lie again and again with every flap of his bat-like
wings, “I rise by my own power.”
The result is, literally, confusion—pouring
together, a disorderly mélange, a chaos. I believe, in our day, that we see
this linguistic and moral confusion in almost everything that is uttered about
the subjects that have us most perplexed: man and woman; marriage and children.
Examples abound. A recent paper in a journal of medical ethics
has recommended “after-birth abortion” as a morally sound measure for those
parents to take who, once they see their child, determine that they would have
killed it in the womb if they had known about its specifics beforehand. I note
here that “abortion” itself was already a linguistic dodge, as its early
meaning, the morally neutral “miscarriage,” was applied to soften the
perception of an intentional killing. Nobody could sensibly say, “I am going to
the doctor’s to miscarry,” because the absurdity of the infinitive would be
immediately apparent; that is what made the more technical noun handy.
But now our moral pathfinders wish to extend
the utility of the initial lie. Of course they must, for the sake of feeling,
limit themselves to the vicinity of birth. No one can sensibly say of her
two-year-old son, “Johnny is proving altogether too much for me to handle. I’m
going to take him down to the doctor’s to have him aborted, poor guy.” So it
will have to be near enough to the birth for the pretense to take hold. It is as if one were to fly to Paris, land on
the tarmac, have a look about, and say, “I think after all that we shall abort
our flight to Paris,” as if one had not already arrived there. What would then
imply a completed trip to Paris? Wine and cheese on the Champs-Elysees? What
would imply a fils accompli? A highchair and
jars of stewed apricots?
We may find the same embrace of confusion in
the odd alliance between feminism and the homosexual movement. Each of those
terms in itself embodies a confusion or a contradiction. Feminism should mean
the promotion of what is peculiar to women as women: what is feminine. But that
is precisely what it does not mean, or at
least what it does not mean on odd-numbered days. On odd-numbered days, the
feminist argues vociferously that there are no important differences between a
male homo sapiens and a female homo sapiens. There are all kinds of important differences
between a male equus equus and a female equus equus, or between a bull and a cow, or a stag and a
doe, or a silverback orangutan and his consort, but when we come to the most
complex of all the mammals, whose marks of sexual differentiation are more pronounced than those of horses, cows, deer, apes,
dogs, cats, and what have you—well then, presto, they suddenly disappear. On
the odd-numbered days, that is; for on the even-numbered days, we learn that
women are superior to men. If there are no important differences, then, as far
as the common good is concerned, it should not matter much if all of a nation’s
congressmen are in fact men, or women, or half and half, or whatever. Then,
since the feminist does cheer the
advance of (some) female leaders, she must acknowledge the fact of difference;
but if men and women are indeed different, we should expect to find talents and
dispositions for various things unequally divided among them. Thus does the
feminist saw off the limb upon which she is sitting.
A similar contradiction bedevils us when we
use the rather recently coined term “homosexual.” Sex implies
difference-in-relationship. The sexes are, literally, distinguished and
separated one from another. That is what the Latin sexus means:
it is related to a host of Indo-European words having to do with separation,
division, or distinction: cf. Latin scindere, Greek
schism, German verschieden,
English shed. But the separation-from, in this
unique case, implies a being-for. To be male is to be oriented toward the female;
that is what it means to belong to a sex. If we could imagine a group of human
beings endowed with an organ not present in others, say a sixth finger, that
would not constitute a sex, because there would be nothing intrinsically male
or female about it. There is nothing that six-fingered people and five-fingered
people need to complete in one another.
Now then, the “homosexual” at once claims to
belong to a sex, and not to belong to a sex. He says, “I am a man,” but he
denies the implications of the manhood. If he makes common cause with the
feminists and insists that there are no crucial differences between men and
women, we may reasonably ask him, “What then attracts you so?” Unless he
confesses a puerile fetish for the male organ, he must admit an attraction to
the whole constitution of a man—not simply the
form of the body, but the masculine nature itself. But that masculine nature
is, by obvious biological design, oriented toward the female.
The result is confusion. We can observe the
confusion, indeed, in the gallimaufry of invented terms for every sexual
proclivity under the rocks and bushes of human desire. Take the term
“transgendered.” What does it mean? Again, if there are no important
differences between a man and a woman, why not simply and charitably make
everyone’s life easier and bow to custom? After all, one does not build a
bridge from one end of a flatland to another. If “gender” is arbitrary or
nugatory, why the “trans”? What’s to cross? But to bless the confusion we must
nod when people say, “I am a woman in the body of a man who is attracted to men
who are attracted to women,” or, “I am a man with a surgically altered female
body from the waist up, in love with a male who is really a woman attracted to
masculine women.” There are not sufficient letters in the alphabet to identify
the endlessly dividing categories of self-deception.
Or consider the matter of marriage and
divorce. To this day, almost all marriage ceremonies include vows of perpetual
fidelity, “as long as we both shall live.” The ring itself is a symbol of
endlessness and of an indissoluble bond. It signifies, in Spenser’s words, “the
knot that ever shall remain.” Now, people either intend that vow, or they do
not. If they do intend the vow, why do they commit Ehebruch, to
use the telling German word for adultery, vow-break? Why
do they break the vow even more radically by divorce? If they do not intend the
vow, or if they place unspoken conditions upon it, they are lying, and at what
may be the most solemn occasion of their lives. Most of us will never be
soldiers on a battlefield, or captains of a ship; or priests called to defend
the faith with their very lives. The one time we will be called upon to give
ourselves without reserve is when we utter the marriage vow. To tell a lie at
that time would be as if a president of the United States, his hand on the
Bible, were to swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, while
harboring a secret intention to become one of those enemies if the right
occasion presented itself; or as if a witness in court were to swear to tell
the whole truth and nothing but the truth, while harboring a reservation,
“Depending upon what the lawyer asks me.” This vow-that-is-not thus strikes at
the heart of every human enterprise. It uses the law to undermine the law, or
uses the state to undermine the state; or employs the trappings of marriage to
undermine the very possibility of marriage.
Lies, lies. Planned Parenthood does not plan
parenthood. Its business is to take women who are already
mothers and make away with their unborn children. Birth control is not birth
control. It is either conception-prevention, or, in the case of incipient human
offspring already conceived, birth-prevention. Sex education is not education
in the meaning of sex. It masquerades as how-to instruction in hygiene, as if
the only concern of a boy or a girl were to keep the works clean while
enjoying, when the “right time” comes, sexual expression. Even at that, the
rising sewer of diseases is hardly mentioned, and least of all those odd and
dangerous diseases, other than AIDS, that result from the unnatural things that
some men do with other men. “You really shouldn’t live in the sewer,” says the
teacher, “but everybody does, so make sure you wear a pair of galoshes, and
watch out for the rats.”
But
the sexual lie whence all these others spring is common now and unregarded. It
is the lie that says, with the body, “All that I am is yours,” while insisting,
by virtue of not yet having made the solemn vow of marriage, “I am for now
still my own.” It is “unrealistic,” we are told, to tell young people that they
should embrace the virtue of chastity. One might as well say that it is
unrealistic to tell them that they should embrace the virtue of truth. No one
is without sin, nor will we ever find heaven upon earth. But it is one thing to
fall, and another thing to insist upon calling the fall an ascent. It is one
thing to deceive oneself and to believe in a “marriage” without the vow of
marriage. It is another thing to enshrine the deceit. It is one thing to tell a
lie; it is another thing to adore the lie. That is the constant and dire
temptation that all human societies must face. Some face it on account of their
desire for glory; others on account of their avarice; we face it on account of
our hedonism. We are not fighting in a different war from that wherein other
societies have fought. We are only fighting in a rather more contemptible
field.
