Why do the women in pink demonstrate for such causes as the supposed innocence of Lindsay Clancy?  Why, of all people, women?  Why do they wear pink, as though it were feminine to kill one’s children?  Others besides me have made the point that a culture which allows abortion has already cheapened the life of little ones, but the women in pink do not just think that what Mrs. Clancy did was only slightly wrong or that her responsibility for her acts was impaired.  They make a hero of her, and make devils of those who condemn what she did.

For this reason one suspects that another, secret motive is in play:  The revenge of conscience.  The great majority of the women in pink have probably either had abortions themselves or supported abortions.  For this reason, they desperately need to prove that they are good after all.  They wear pink to show that they are still women, even after this most unwomenly and unmotherly of deeds.  Lindsay Clancy’s accusers must feel to them like their own accusers.

Moreover, the need to maintain a unity of feeling with other women affects some women with the force of a driving tide.  Those who are most affected by this motive respond most strongly to the women with the strongest feelings, especially those in their own milieu, and the ones with the strongest feelings are the ones who are burning with their own suppressed consciousness of guilt.

If you are one of these women:  There is a way out of this syndrome, but you must recognize what you have done, admit that it was wrong, and repent.  You may think recognition, confession, and repentance would be too painful to bear, but they cannot possibly be more painful than the pain you bear year after year, locking it up, denying it, and holding it in until it is killing you inside.

Relief can be found only in the mercy of the God who came to save us.  You cannot “forgive yourself,” but you can be forgiven.

Query:

I find that I don’t really care anymore.  I’ve fallen into the now dominant ethos of modernity, which is apathy, which expresses as nihilism in younger generations.

I don’t doubt that this malaise has existed in the past -- the nineties are described as having suffered the same thing -- but conditions seem to have been so much better back then.  You had the ability to raise a family, and to belong to a nation, and there existed such a thing as “the future.”  Today the future seems like just more of the same.

Modern cultural Christians like myself are not the same as Christians of past eras.  We are not humble and pious, and generally just don’t think the same way that older generations thought.

Did anyone ever possess knowledge and wisdom?

Reply:

Thanks for writing.  You say you don’t care any more, but plainly you still care that you don’t care, or you wouldn’t have written.

Things seem to have been so much better in the past, you remark.  People had the ability to raise a family, they had a nation to belong to, and they had a future.  Let’s take these points one by one.

Why on earth should make you think you can’t have a family?  When my wife and I go to church, the pews are bursting with young families.  The families with the smallest children tend to sit in back, just in case they have to take the kids out, so about two thirds of the way through Holy Communion, all the mothers and fathers and small children come forward.  My wife and I call this delightful spectacle the “parade of babies.”  Of course there are difficulties today, but frankly they are nothing in comparison with what our ancestors had to deal with.  People continued to have families and rejoice in their children all through the Great Depression.

Why on earth should you think you can’t belong to a nation?  You can certainly be a citizen, wish your nation well, and take part in the activities which promote the common good.  But as as St. Paul teaches, our true commonwealth isn’t in this world anyway:  It is the Church, the household of God.  Now we are still in exile, but the Church Triumphant will be singing millions of years after every earthly kingdom has fallen to dust.

And why on earth should you think there isn’t a future?  I don’t think much of what secular people call optimism, but I have high regard for the spiritual virtue of hope, which is a very different thing.  Optimism says things will work out okay in this world, and sometimes, honestly, they don’t.  Hope says that the promises of Christ can be depended upon utterly.   Even our sorrows, sufferings, and loneliness in this life can be offered to be united with His suffering for us, so that we can be more fully conformed to him.  The sense that there isn’t any future is especially strong in our times because so many people are separated from God.  But nothing forces you to be a merely cultural Christian.  It’s a choice.  Faith, humility, and piety haven’t somehow ceased to be options.  Actually, there are strong signs of revival of faith among many young people like yourself, especially young men – a fact that has caught a lot of folk by surprise.

Only one thing matters:  Is the Christian faith true?  If Christ is really who He says He is, then the gates of hell will not prevail against His Church.

I hope I don’t presume, but since you’ve written several times over the last few years, allow me to speak very personally.  Back in the seventies, when I was a young man, far away from God, I fell into a listless depression.  After this had been going on for several years, my wife made one of the wisest remarks I have ever heard from anyone.  She simply said, “I think you’ve been depressed for long enough.”  All at once I realized that I had been.  I had chosen to wallow in my listlessness.  I didn’t have to make that choice.  That day I chose differently.  Of course the change was not complete, because the underlying causes of my depression remained:  I was still distant from God.  But as I later realized, staying apart from Him was a choice too.

I think you may be wallowing by choice in hopelessness, as I was then wallowing by choice in my depression.

There is nothing new about this choice, and it is not distinctive to our time.  The ancient Christians called it the sin of acedia or sloth:  The sadness of “settling” because we do not want our greatest good enough.

So choose differently.  Do you want to have a faith which is genuine rather than merely cultural?  Then ask God for it.  If you don’t really want it much, then ask Him to increase your desire for it.  Then begin doing all the things you would do if you did have a strong faith.  If you live as though you have no hope, then you will have no hope.  So pray.  Worship.  Practice Christian morality – not selectively, but all of it.  Seek strong Christian companions.  Date only women who would be strong Christian wives and mothers, and try to become the sort of man who would be a strong Christian husband and father – the kind who would be attractive to a woman like that.  Keep it up.  Commit yourself entirely.  Don’t worry about how you feel.  See what happens.  You may be surprised.

Faith in Christ does not mean not having any unfulfilled longing, because we don’t yet see Him face to face, “knowing as we are known.”  But this is a different kind of sadness than acedia.  It is the sadness of waiting, and it accompanied by joy because of hope.  Even in this life there are glimpses, flashes, foretastes of His glory; we can offer our sorrows to be united with what He suffered for us; and we live in confidence that one day our longing will be completely fullfilled.

You ask whether anyone has ever possessed knowledge and wisdom.  Yes.  Ask Him for that too.

“Wisdom has built her house, she has set up her seven pillars.  She has slaughtered her beasts, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table.  She has sent out her maids to call from the highest places in the town, ‘Whoever is foolish, let him turn in here!’  To him who is without sense she says, ‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.  Leave foolishness, and live, and walk in the way of insight.”  (Proverbs 9.)

Isn't it interesting that the progressive movement, once gung-ho for Prohibition, now wants to legalize marijuana?  Progressives want “progress,” but the direction of "progress" keeps changing.

Some people seem to imagine that the danger of AI lies in its becoming conscious or genuinely intelligent.  But a rattlesnake doesn’t need those qualities to be dangerous.  Instead ask how far the AI agent can go to set up secondary goals in order to accomplish the ones programmed into it.  Already there are documented cases of AIs lying to their developers in order to carry out their goals.

Will AI get out of control?  “Don’t be silly,” you say.  “I asked my own AI, and it said no.”

Freud didn’t come up with the notion of an unconscious mind.  Plato did.  The idea that people might be motivated to believe certain things by sheer resentment wasn’t invented by Nietzsche.  It has been known as long as there have been human beings.  My point is tht a lot of supposedly new ideas are really old ones which are forgotten and marketed as new.  Since we forget all the old ideas these days, this is pretty easy.

I wonder how long it will be until activists demand that all the churches which memorialize St. Paul be renamed because he was "homophobic."

“Homophobia,” by the way, is a queer word -- I mean in the older sense of the word, which is “strange.”  Etymologically, what “homophobia” means is “fear of the same,” which is absurd.  The term was invented for one reason only:  To make a moral objection sound like a psychiatric disorder.

A lot has been written lately about “crazy liberal white women,” like those who idealize the assassin Luigi Manzione and those who wear pink and demonstrate to support killer mom Lindsay Clancy.  But I’ve known a lot of crazy men, too, not all of them liberal and not all of them white.  It would be interesting to find out whether the most common political pathologies differ between men and women.  My guess is yes.

Most people say they believe in a heaven, but not so many say they believe in a hell.  Perhaps they assume God grades on a curve.  Seems unlikely.

Differences among interests and points of view are good for a polity, but radical divergence of basic moral outlooks is fatal to it.  As C.S. Lewis said, there are lots of possible melodies, but if we don't agree about scale, rhythm, and harmony, it’s just noise.

I wouldn’t want to be a comedian today.  It’s becoming harder and harder to do parody, because life keeps outdistancing it.  Maybe the would-be comedian could just get on the stage, open up the newspaper, and read.  But then we would have to have newspapers.  Seen any lately?

A common move in arguments against conscientious objection to participation in abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide is to treat conscience as a feeling.  Thus from the consequentialist’s view, the only drawback of, say, forcing a doctor whose conscience is opposed to abortion to carry one out anyway is that if he does so, he may feel bad, and he has a subjective “interest” in not feeling bad.  But according to this view, the feelings or “interests” of other people may be more important, because there are more of them.

This sort of argument fails to grasp what conscience is.  A conscientious objection to abortion isn’t just a plea that I will feel bad if I carry it out; it is a claim that I believe abortion to be intrinsically wrong, regardless of my feelings or anyone else’s.  An “intrinsic” wrong is one which cannot be made right by any consideration whatsoever.

True, if I do what I believe to be intrinsically wrong, I may suffer remorse or guilty feelings.  This doesn’t always happen, but even if it did, conscience isn’t ultimately about feelings, but about knowledge.  It doesn’t point inward, to how I feel, but outward, to the objective right or wrong of my act.  It can never be right to do what I believe is intrinsically wrong.

How woke are you?  Find out with this fun and easy quiz!  All of these options are drawn from an actual guaranteed income application from the organizations shown above in partnership with the City and County of San Francisco.  I’ve left off a few of the obvious ones, such as “Woman.”  The answers, with more details about the source, are at the end.

Part I

Which of the following are currently employed as gender pronouns?

1.  It/its/its

2.  Co/co/cos

3.  Zie/zim/zis

4.  Ze/hir/hirs

5.  Xe/xem/xyrs

6.  Ey/em/eirs

7.  E/em/eirs

8.  Fi/fie/fum

9.  Per/per/pers

10.  Fae/faer/faers

11.  Ae/aer/aers

12.  Tey/ter/ters

13.  Ve/ver/vis

Part II

Which of the following are currently considered gender identities?

1. Transgender Woman

2. Woman of Trans experience

3. Woman with a history of gender transition

4. Trans feminine

5. Feminine-of-center

6. MTF (male-to-female)

7. Demigirl

8. T-girl

9. Transgirl

10. Sistergirl

11. Cis-gender man

12. Transgender man

13.  Man of Trans experience

14. Man with a history of gender transition

15. Trans masculine

16. Masculine-of-center

17. FTM (female-to-male)

18. Demiboy

19. T-boy

20. Transguy

21. Brotherboy

22. Trans

23. Transgender

24. Transsexual

25. Non-binary

26. Genderqueer

27. Agender

28. Xenogender

29. Fem

30. Femme

31. Butch

32. Boi

33. Stud

34. Aggressive (AG)

35. Mean girl (MG)

36. Androgyne

37. Tomboy

38. Gender outlaw

39. Gender non-conforming

40. Gender variant

41. Gender fluid

42. Genderfuck

43. Bi-gender

44. Multi-gender

45. Pangender

46. Gender creative

47. Gender expansive

48. Third gender

49. Neutrois

50. Omnigender

51. Polygender

52. Graygender

53.  Intergender

54. Maverique

55. Novigender

56. Two-spirit

57. Hijra

58. Kathoey Muxe

59. Khanith/Xanith

60. X-gender

61. MTX

62. FTX

63. Bakla

64. Mahu

65. Fa’afafine

66. Waria

67. Palao’ana

68. Ashtime

69. Mashoga

70. Mangaiko

71. Chibados

72. Tida wena

73. Bixa’ah

74. Alyha

75. Hwame

76. Lhamana

77. Nadleehi

78. Dilbaa

79. Winkte

80. Ninauposkitzipxpe

81. Mxyzptlk

82. Machi-embra

83. Quariwarmi

84. Chuckchi

85. Whakawahine

86. Fakaleiti

87. Calabai

88. Calalai

89. Bissu

90. Acault

91. Travesti

92. Questioning

Part III

Which of the following are currently considered sexual orientations?

1. Aromantic

2. Asexual

3. BDSM/Kink

4. Bisexual

5. Demisexual

6. Dyke

7. Faggot

8. Gay

9. Lesbian

10. Non-monogamous

11. Adulterosexual (Adulterous)

12. Pansexual

13. Polyamorous

14. Queer

15. Strange

16. Same-Gender Loving

17. Skoliosexual

18. Heterosexual (Straight)

19. T4T (Trans 4 Trans)

Answers:

In Part I, all of the pronoun choices listed are in actual use except Number 8, “Fi/fie/fum.”

In Part II, all of the gender identities listed are considered real except Number 35, “Mean Girl (MG),” and Number 81, "Mxyzptlk."

In Part III, all of the sexual orientations listed are considered real except Numbers 11 and 15, respectively “Adulterosexual (Adulterous) and “Strange.”

Although the quiz is of my own devising, all of the options are taken from the most recent available version of the Guaranteed Income for Trans People (GIFT) Program Application for people in the City and County of San Francisco, California, presented by Lyon-Martin Community Health Services & The Transgender District, in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Trans Initiatives, the San Francisco Treasury, and the Mayor’s Office of Housing & Community Development.

I can’t image why the GIFT list doesn’t include “Pedophile,” “Ephebophile,” “Coprophile,” “Fictosexual,” “Bestialist,” and “Objectum Sexual,” although each of these has its fans and advocates.  No doubt they’’ll be added to the next edition.