View from Editor: Pride before the fall
So it’s now time for the increasingly inappropriately-named “Pride Month” where corporations shamelessly pander to homosexuals for money and heterosexuals who want to feel virtuous give them money as a reward for this behavior, and somewhere in the middle lie the rest of us, watching all this unfold with a growing amount of confusion and disgust.
I don’t like the term “pride” in reference to homosexual acceptance. For the record, I supported gay marriage rights and society allowing for homosexual couples well before it was trendy. I maintain that there’s little reason for a secular society to not allow two consenting adults to form a romantic bond as they please. I think it’s far more dangerous when the authority of the state steps in to promote such bonds to increasingly younger and younger children -- and that’s to say nothing of insisting their physical development be stunted in order to provide an extreme panacea to their mental health.
But I don’t see much for any of us, gay or straight, to take pride in regarding sexuality today. In fact, I think the state of our nation’s sexual dynamics is appalling. We have no longer any standard of quality, any standard of behavior, when it comes to sexual selection. Men are taught to avoid at all costs upsetting women, and women are taught that they do not need men.
Presently some 15 million children live in single-mother households. Presently the rate of marriages is decreased exponentially, to the point where every 5 out of 1,000 people are getting married, which is a huge drop even from the 1990s.
Indeed, we live in a time where it is acceptable to have sex with someone shortly after meeting them, but not to tell them you love them afterwards.
Maybe we don’t need to go back to the age of courtly romance, where poems and ballads and grand gestures were expected before a couple could even kiss one another. But maybe we should take stock in what we have had happen to us -- because it seems to me that we are breaking apart at the seams. The divorce rate isn’t as high as some people say, but it is awfully high. And as more people remain unmarried, they nevertheless continue to produce children, and those children grow up wanting for stability and support that their homes don’t provide.
And what of our health? There isn’t a state in our union now where we don’t have less than ¼ of the population reporting they are obese. Outside of states where men are more numerous than women (like North Dakota) obesity is seen more among women then men. Despite -- or perhaps even because -- they are told endlessly how empowered they are to be and act however they like, women are more likely to be diagnosed with depression. Women, who now are told it is to their benefit to act like men, grow to suffer the same health consequences as men do, from alcoholism to heart failure.
Among the gays and lesbians, domestic violence is highest among lesbian couples than either homosexual males or hetereosexual couples. And this is to say nothing of those who identify in this manner who were themselves subject to childhood abuse, a statistic difficult to quantify as now such numbers are obscured by claims of bigotry -- it is to say, it’s unclear whether the (predominantly male) victims of abuse were victimized because they thought they were gay at an early age, or they began to think they were gay as a consequence of victimization.
Either way, when men suffer and want for emotional support, they are consistently told to suck it up, toughen up and go about their day. Men are disposable. Women are without flaw, without fault. And yet we have not sparked joy in the hearts of women by this endless empowerment. Indeed, fat and depressed, women are now closing yet another gender gap -- that of suicide. Once and still dominated by men, an increasing number of women over the age of 45 committed suicide between 2000 and 2016.
Do you feel proud yet? Because I don’t. I don’t feel shame either. I feel annoyance. I feel that this runaway train effect on our society is a consequence clearly predicted. We threw aside love for lust, and we have spiraled eversince. You wonder why the kids today are not alright? I don’t. I can see why they aren’t alright. I can see it from the way I was raised, from the lessons I was taught.
Our society is producing a slew of broken people, broken homes and broken illusions. We are more connected and more isolated than ever before. We are bereft of love and drowned in sex and perversion. In our heart of hearts, I think we understand this too. I think we know how wounded we have become, and yet like anyone with a bad habit, we can’t seem to stop ourselves, for our friends up above enable us so effortlessly.
“The fruit for which your soul longed has gone from you, and all your delicacies and your splendors are lost to you, never to be found again!” (Revelation 18:14)