Children are Not Fashion Accessories for Narcissists

A reader sends along this story from the tormented world of the Transgender subculture:

Heard an interview on CBC a few weeks ago, and when I read the part in today’s blog about incest being kinda-almost-acceptable, I have to share this with you.

This is about a female-born person who takes testosterone to become a man (and has a breast reduction) and deems herself a homosexual man and now (as a man) is in a homosexual relationship with a man, and they decide to have a baby. And the female-male guy lactated his/her biological baby and now wants to be a La Leche Leader, as a man. The only thing “normal” about this is that underneath all the sexual inclinations and lifestyle, it’s a man and a woman having a baby. Poor kid.

Carry on, warrior!

A “Canuck” who keeps it simple: wife, mom, Catholic–there’s no life like it!

The problem with a culture in which consent is the sole criterion of the good is simply this: our individualist, libertarian, atomized, isolated me, myself, and I choices that are nobody else’s business are as rare as hen’s teeth. Everything you do sends out ripples to the whole world and has effects on everybody else whether you or they like it or not. This is nowhere more true than in matters touching on the family, where the choice of parents to be self-absorbed narcissists directly impacts the poor wretched children who are, like everything else in the universe, turned into tools of self-expression for parents who cannot extract their heads from their own navels for one second in order to consider the needs of their children.

Part of the reason American conservative culture is so terrible at answering the arguments for gay “marriage” is that it is deeply complicit in the libertarian mindset of atomized individualism that undergirds it. The only part of Catholic social teaching we ever hear about from Paul Ryan flavored Catholic conservatives is subsidiarity. Subsidiarity basically says that, all things being equal, the people closest to the problem should handle it and only kick the problem upstairs to higher authorities when local action can’t handle it. Many libertarian and Randian devotees like Ryan regard this as a useful figleaf for a radical individualism that is recklessly heedless of the common good. What is seldom considered by such a politicized and ideological (that is, heretical) reading of the Catholic tradition is the equally important doctrine of solidarity: namely, that we are all in this together, that the human race is radically interconnected with one another and with the rest of creation, and that you can’t just recklessly ignore nature (including the nature of human sexuality and the family) without doing massive damage that sends out ripples far beyond the narcissist’s little bubble of selfishness. It’s true for people like this. It’s true for polluting corporations. It’s true for pols who smash conscience in order to enforce the abortion regime. It’s true for pols who simplistically consign half the country to the status of Takers. It’s true for a whole slew of ideologues on left and right who ignore their duty to the common good in pursuit of some tiny sliver of Catholic teaching they have expanded into an all explaining theory of everything. Catholic teaching must be received as a whole weave, not as a cafeteria.

Happily, there are sane people like my reader who get that and live out sane relationships such as “Catholic, wife, mother” which respect the solidarity of the human race and do not tear it to shreds in pursuit of selfish ideology. Way to go, Canadian Woman of the Northlands! Keep up the good work!