Maranatha!

I hope that Rachel Lu is right about the currently fashionable idiocy about gender identity and sexual orientation fading away. But I have my doubts.

We live in a society that has lost its mind. As statistics show the tragic consequences of treating a fundamental biological reality like gender as a social construct, politically motivated "scientists" will simply falsify the data. Judges will believe the falsified data. The media will present it as established truth. Our culture having lost its rootedness not only in religion but in logic and common sense, will not hear the call of nature summoning them back to reality. I can't see the crazy fading from our society. We've forgotten the way back.

It's worth remembering how homosexuality became "normal." The gay majority on the American Psychiatric Association board (one member being still in the closet at the time) voted themselves "normal." The vote was strictly, as it turned out, along the lines of personal sexual orientation.

There was an outcry from the rank-and-file.  Despite strong attempts at intimidation at the APA convention, the convention voted to submit the matter to a referendum. A gay advocacy group spent a large amount of money circulating a letter which appeared to be- but was not- from the APA board urging those who opposed the decision to abstain so as not to embarrass; the board.  The result wasn't exactly overwhelming, but enough members did abstain that the board's decision to declare homosexuality normal was sustained.

For years, surveys of the APA membership continued to show that large majorities still believed homosexuality to be pathological. But the official position of the APA said otherwise, and ultimately coercion did its work.

Flawed studies on the effects on children of being raised by same-sex couples were taken as gospel, while studies reaching the contrary conclusion were nit-picked into oblivion. At each stage, politics trumped science, and peer pressure was more powerful than sound methodology.  Peer review ceased to be a safeguard of the integrity of research as the analysis of researcher's peers became more and more influenced by political bias and groupthink. As in so much of the rest of the scientific community, the scientific method was subordinated to the requirements of politically correct dogma.

As time has gone on, the courts- themselves dominated by social activists and accepting the political positions of "the experts" as scientific fact- have driven the law farther and farther from nature and common sense. The media have effectively stigmatized and largely silenced voices raised in opposition,  labeling dissenters as bigots and using the weapons of mass culture to paint abnormal behaviors sympathetically and those with reservations about them as benighted monsters.

I don't see the process being reversed. We as a society are increasingly driven by emotions rather than reason. We have become more and more ignorant and less and less capable of critical thought. Perhaps Ms. Lu is right. Perhaps there is a limit beyond which nature and common sense will assert themselves so strongly that the walls of political orthodoxy and de facto censorship will collapse. But I don't see it happening. I think we are too far gone. I think that we have gone deaf to the voices of nature and reason.

Yes, truth is powerful. Yes, God is still in control. But perhaps, after generations of believing that the evils of the age betokened the end times, we're finally right in thinking that such might be the case today.

There is no promise that the Western culture won't come unraveled. We have no promise that reason and common sense will prevail in the end by any means short of Christ's return in judgment. But perhaps Ms. Lu is  right.

Or perhaps the ultimate solution is praying the ancient Syriac word with which St John concludes his Revelation: Maranatha.

"Come, O Lord!"

(Stefan Lochner's The Last Judgment is in the pubic domain in the United States and other countries in which the copyright term is the life of the artist plus 100 years or less.)

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