In yesterday's House vote on a bill that would prevent biological males from competing in female sports not a single Democrat vote Yes; all 203 voted No. Feminists are befuddled: What happened to the Democrats as champions of women and their rights?
They should not be! The Cultural Left has for half a century poorly camouflaged its contempt for femininity. It doesn't articulate this; it does something worse...it denies "woman" is a reality. They cannot defend women because they cannot define woman: they deny there is a reality, a form, an interior essence that is "woman."
Imagine two families in which the father fights with the son. In both cases the son storms out of the house swearing to never return. In the first, the father stamps around the house, punching walls, screaming like a maniac: "I will kill him if he returns!" "I hate his guts!" "I will beat him to a pulp!" The second father quietly says "I disown him. He is dead to me. He is not a reality. His name is NEVER to be spoken in my presence." Which is the worst hatred? Clearly the cold denial of one's reality.
Militant, mainstream feminism from its inception in the 1960s has insisted on the sameness of man and women. It dismisses the worth and reality...moral, social, religious, intellectual...of the bi-morphic structure of the human person as male-related-to-female and female-related-to-male...as oriented to spousal union and the fruition of new, eternal human life. In deconstructing gender as a created, by divine hands, reality, it reconfigures both woman and man into interchangeable units of production and consumption. Women have become, if anything, more contributory to the economy except in a few areas like construction. Women become photocopies of the male as diminished and toxic: productive/careerist, contraceptive but not fruitful; consumerist but not contemplative; sexually "liberated" but not spousal in loyalty; empowered in the "war of all against all" and against their own blood.
In his brilliant, pivotal Flight from Woman, (1965), neurologist-psychologist, Jewish-convert-to-Catholicism Karl Stern found in the personal histories of the architects of modernity, especially Descartes, an aversion to their own mothers and thus a "flight from woman." This leads to a preference for knowledge as controlling, mathematical, logical, deductive, and technocratic and a denigration of intuition, creativity, contemplation. Autism has been identified as an exaggeration of the male intellect with a diminishment of the more feminine intuition and emotional intelligence. We can see then that our entire society became "autistic" in its engineering, mathematical expertise but diminished in empathy and intuition. It is noteworthy that Flight from Woman was published in 1965, the precise moment when the Cultural Revolution, including the deconstruction of femininity, was about to explode across the West. Stern was prescient.
In the liberal refusal to protect girls from male intrusion in sports we finally see, after 50 years, the contempt of progressivism for the feminine. To be sure there are genuine forms of feminism which champion the womanly as womanly: Edith Stein (St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross), John Paul II, psychologist Carol Gilligan, activists against pornography, and prolife feminists But Cultural Liberalism champions the woman only as a quasi-toxic-male: ambitious, abortive, promiscuous, sexually active but intentionally sterile.
Progressivism has no concern for the person of the woman, the homosexual, or the tortured trans-person. The core value for this ideology is the unrestrained power of the Imperial Self: the unlimited empowerment of the Ego to determine sexuality, gender, identity, meaning, purpose and destiny. Detached from God and the moral order, the secular progressive claims unconditional dominion over what is true and good; consistently, he must protect the autonomous Self who self-defines as abortion-seeking, gay, or trans. Femininity and masculinity can be discarded as outdated. As can the powerless unborn. As can the rights of teenage girl athletes. The only absolute is the imperial Self.
I suspect this issue may give an advantage to the conservative position in the Culture War. The abortion war is at a stalemate, even with the Dobbs reversal of Roe. The blues and reds control and consolidate their own territories with neither capable of a decisive strategic victory: much like the stalemate in the Ukraine at this time. The gay agenda has achieved a rapid and complete victory in the Supreme Court, in popular opinion and especially among the young. This is a for-now-lost-cause hardly worth tons of energy. Conservatives are in retreat on this front; defensive of their own religious freedom and resistant to a woke tyranny that would compel participation and moral approval. It will be several decades before the broader society recognizes the sad, sterile, futile nature of gay life and moves into a wise and truthful empathy.
But the vulnerability of adolescent girl athletes to the intrusion into competition and locker rooms by biological males who are conflicted in their gender identity is as obvious to common sense as the Emperor's lack of clothing.
This insanity may well occasion a retrieval of an authentic understanding of and reverence for the actual reality of the Feminine, in all its splendor, dignity, generosity, vulnerability and resiliency....the Eternal Feminine as embodied quintessentially in our Blessed Mother Mary in glory.
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