Things I don't understand (rant, rant, rant)

There's a lot that is simply unintelligible out there right now.  Like how Trump ever made it to where he is.  But also I don't understand the whole bathroom/gender thing.

First of all, if there are so many people walking around dressed up like the opposite gender, where have they been going whenever they needed a public bathroom up til now?  I have been using bathrooms for a really long time now and never in my life do I recall an obviously transgender person using one.  Maybe I just didn't notice?  How is this suddenly something that has big corporate bullies and celebrities who haven't had to use a public john in decades, boycotting a state whose legislature voted to try to clarify things for everybody.

Why is it that the liberal 1% are the biggest bullies around anyway?

But what really gets me is, I don't understand this position as a parent.  My youngest is 14 yo now but I remember when they all were younger, I would get nervous when my kids for some reason or another had to go use a public bathroom by themselves.  I was always nervous about a predator lurking in the bathroom.  As a parent you hear all kinds of stories.  Don't these people realize that predators look for opportunities to molest?  They are opportunists through and through.  This whole thing is like people decided they wanted to create an optimum situation so that children and women especially can be vulnerable to some sicko.

The Catholic Church has been dealing with the horror of sex abuse scandals where the whole organization was taken to task (and rightly so!) because it allowed ongoing abuse of children.  And yet. . . . here we are priming the pump!  The Obama Administration is in on it now.

How is it, that in our society where a mother can get arrested if she lets her kid play alone in their own yard, it is ok to let them use restrooms with grown men?  In fact you must or you are a bigot!

We have campuses with 'rape culture' and 'safe spaces' for people so they can avoid 'triggers' and yet it is ok for women who have been assaulted to be forced to share bathrooms with men.  Don't we realize perverts will take advantage of the fact that anybody can say they identify with the opposite sex if that is what it takes to further their own lascivious lusts?

There is just so much mass hysteria and a stampeding rush to condemn anything that doesn't smack of the current agenda.  It really reminds me of the French Revolution, only thankfully, not as bloody (yet).  But really we are going down the path of no freedom in the name of freedom.

Now some girls really want to use the boys room.  I wonder how that makes boys feel when a girl walks in while they are peeing?  Boys might have a sense of privacy and modesty too, maybe.  In my state, there is a case where a transgender teen sued the school system because they would not let her use the boys room.  In not one report that I read from the Washington Post or New York Times did they mention the very important fact that the school had given this teen their own bathroom to use!!! (the blatant dishonesty and yellow journalism of today's media is whole another house of horrors). That wasn't good enough though.  This person must be able to use the bathroom of her/his choice regardless of everybody else in the school.  This is insanity!  How selfish can you get?  I remember 10 years ago Mark Shea saying something about how it wasn't about tolerance but about how everybody must consent and obey.  Tolerance is working out a deal.  Tolerance is both sides trying to figure out a middle ground.  It is not forcing everyone to comply to your demands.  And then declaring that anything less than this is bigotry of the highest order!  I am glad the school system is fighting the court on this.  They know the chaos that is going to happen in the wake of genderless bathrooms in high schools.  And shouldn't everybody?  Isn't it obvious?  What's wrong with saying, if you are transgender, use this particular bathroom?  I would have loved to have my own bathroom in high school!

Why do we have rape culture on campuses?  Could it be that we have embraced perverted post-Kinseyian sexuality, that we have mixed dorms and lots of alcohol on campus, even though as adults we know kids are given to too much partying and poor self-control?  How about the rampant porn?  We have created and continue to create a toxic sexual environment for our children.  Now we want 5 year olds to be able to decide what gender they are.  When my kids were 5 they very often thought they were superman or some other flight of fancy.  To demand schools let a 5 year old experiment with gender is just crazy!  This is child abuse!  Not only to that child but to all the children that must go along with it.

It's at a crazy level now too.  My daughter who teaches middle school said she once divided up the class, boys on one side and girls on the other (uh oh! You can't do this anymore!) and one of the girls said she identified as a boy.  My daughter thought this was actually funny because the girl obviously didn't and was the type of kid who would do outrageous things for attention, so she said, ok, whatever.  It turned out to be no big deal because the girl was just using it for attention leverage and then forgot about it later.  But, geez!  This thing makes every little interaction a minefield.  That is how deep it goes to an understanding of our humanity.  It is a true deconstruction of reality.

One of my sons said that when he was little and he went next door to play with the little girl, she would often make him play as if he were another little girl, to the point of putting on one of her princess outfits.  He said he was so glad he never realized this was 'cross-dressing' and something that should make him question which gender he was.  He just was playing, you know?   He was 4 at the time.  Honestly, we have lost our minds.

My 17 yo said something too.  How when he was little he was into ballet and gymnastics and he was mad that it was all girls.  He said what if he had had parents who pushed the idea that this meant he was transgender.  But if you think about it, ballet and gymnastics are the things that are actually genderless, not the people who participate in these things.  Our culture is so warped that we attribute identity to arbitrary things.  To be a boy right now in our supposedly tolerant society and to be into ballet, or Irish dance or gymnastics or ice skating or horseback riding (check out the summer camps - all girls!) you get labeled as gay.  That's where the injustice comes in!  And he said anyway, how can you really know that you are supposed to be the other gender, unless there is some physical thing wrong with you.  If it is just you feeling out of place, well everybody feels that in some capacity or another.  It's the loneliness of the human condition!  That doesn't make you transgender!  You can't really know what it is like to be the other sex, so it is just your imagination that tells you it's true.  He said he could easily see someone, especially if you are little autistic, getting fixated on the idea.

Rick brought up something that I had forgotten.  A long, long time ago we had a children's audio tape of music.  It was a very groovy folk music type album about peace and love and such.  And most of the songs were great.  But there was one song that made us laugh.  Oh we were so naive.  We thought it was absurd!  The song was a lull-a-bye but in the intro the singer said that she knew a couple who didn't want to know the sex of their child for the first few minutes after the baby had been born (obviously this was before sonograms became available) because they wanted that child to just be who they were before being limited by their gender.  We laughed at this because of course the child already was either a boy or girl and it was just in the parents' mind that he or she was somehow free from this if THEY didn't know it (talk about self-centered point of view!) but also we just thought the idea that your sex limited who you are as absurd.  Who you are is who you are and it is biologically based.  You don't exist without your body.  You aren't some spirit floating around until you find a body to pop into.  At conception a new human is created.  Catholics believe that at death the soul and body are separated but will be eventually reunited as a resurrected body.  You are your body, your DNA, your hormones, what your body takes in in terms of nutrients, etc.  Of course you also develop according to your environment too, so that if you are well loved and protected you'll grow better than if you are deprived of these things.  And of course, Catholics believe we are made in the image and likeness of God so we have souls and free will.

In this age that is supposedly more rational and scientific, there is a lot of anti-science I've noticed.  It isn't just the creationists who believe in the Biblical creation account as somehow scientific evidence.  It isn't just the crazy flat-earthers.  A lot of it is on the left.  They use really hokey science to push an agenda that makes no scientific sense.  It is as if they read The Abolition of Man and decided that it was a How To guide rather than a dire warning.

Honestly, I think a lot of transgenderism is disguised misogyny.  I really do. (I think a lot of feminism is too frankly.  Your fertility is a disease!).  If you are a woman who decided you want to be a man, well, obviously you are rejecting womanhood.  And if you are man wanting to be a woman, it seems as if the thing you really want are all the shallow bits of womanhood.  The looking like Marilyn Monroe, the sleazy stuff that is just there to serve other men's lustful appetites, the make up, the sexy clothes, the jewelry.  Dressing is a cultural thing.  We could have a society where men and women dress exactly the same.  It is like cross dressers thought women's fashion magazines were some sort of pathetic spiritual enlightenment.  It really is a twisted materialism.  

A couple months ago, when I was taking my daughter to her voice lesson, I saw a guy, obviously a guy dressed up like a woman, high heels (I don't wear them), a really short skirt (don't wear those either), big bouncy boobs in a clingy shirt, a big wig, big gaudy jewelry.  He was walking up and down the street in this exaggerated, flouncy way.  I kept having to drive up and down the street myself just because I dropped her off then went to run an errand and then came back.  I saw him the first time and I thought, what the heck? But then I kept seeing him, walking back and forth.  I had two conflicting emotions:  1) that poor guy - how messed up you must be to do that sort of thing.  How craving for attention!  2) feeling insulted because he was a really stupid caricature of womanhood and yet this is the sort of behavior that is being enabled and even lauded in our culture now.

We are toxic, especially to those who are emotionally and mentally disturbed.

When I was talking about all this with my kids, it dawned on me how blessed we are to be believers in God.  We don't have to search for an identity.  We are children of God.  We don't need attention, we have a Savior who loves us so much he died for us.  That's a lot of attention!  We are endowed with dignity and gifts by our Creator.  Our dignity doesn't come from inventing ourselves or being absolute conformists with the current trends.  God calls us to be who he created.  If we follow his will, which is love, we can be who we are called to be.  True freedom is following God's will.  It is freedom from sin and vice and selfishness and insanity.  It is the freedom to be with eternal Love.  All this angst and made up contortionist thinking goes out the window when you know this.  I pity the secular world.  It is such a lonely, confused place to be.