Pansexualism and the Pope

Zenit reports that the Belgian Parliament has passed a resolution condemning Pope Benedict XVI's statement that condoms are not the solution to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa and actually make the problem worse. http://www.zenit.org/rssenglish-25567

What is it about sex that makes people stupid? Why do otherwise rational people attack the Pope for saying exactly what leading scientests researching the pandemic are saying? Has the Belgian Parliament attacked Dr. Edward Green of Harvard, who has said that the pope is right? No, but they have laid into the Pope. (See my previous posts "Harvard Researcher Backs Pope's Statements on Condoms" and "Ignorance Regarding AIDS Prevention is Staggering!")

The liberal media and politicans, aided and abetted by Catholic dissidents in Europe have literally "freaked out" over the pope's remarks. Why? There are several reasons.

For one thing, this is a concerted attack on Benedict XVI, who is seen as the major obstacle to the European liberal dissidents whose goal is to take the Catholic Church in the direction of the The Episcopal Church and thereby cut all ties with the Christian Tradition. Their idea of "reform" is to conform totally to the worst excesses of the Western culture of death. But another reason is that the Pope is tampering with the real religion of secular Europe - pansexualism - and they can't let him go unchallenged. In other words, the real religion of Europe today is pansexualism and secular Europeans are fundamentalist fanatics when it comes to defending it. They would rather die than give up sexual gratification - literally.

Pansexualism is the real ideology driving the sexual revolution. It is the doctrine that sexual liberation means that all should have sex with all at will. It holds up promiscuity and the unisex ideal as its goods. True sexual liberation can only occur when sexual pleasure has been totally detached from the bonds of family life and procreation. Pansexualism seeks to sever the connection between parents and children because that tie stands in the way of complete sexual liberation for the autonomous individual. Parenting prevents individuals from satisfying their hormonally driven desires with whomever they feel like doing it with at any given moment. So the family must die. It is an obstacle to individual fulfillment; it is inherently "oppressive."

Margaret Sanger turned the birth control movement into a powerful social force and the whole basis of her philosophy was the idea that sexual pleasure is a right and the highest good. Contraception and abortion, she taught, are necessary tools in order for individuals to find sexual fulfillment. The whole population explosion scare of the 70's and even the eugenic message of the 20's and 30's were secondary in many ways. They served as convenient rationales at the time, just as the environmental hysteria of the contemporary world does. The strategy is to figure out what people are worried about (the white race being over-run by the dark races, population increase, global warming, etc. ) and then promote contraception and abortion as the answer. This is more effective politically that just coming out with one's pansexualist agenda.

Second wave feminism was a particularly virulant form of liberal individualism that saw male promiscuity as the sexual ideal for the human race and tried to convince all women to embrace it as their lifestyle. Of course, contraception and abortion are necessary for this project. But nothing advanced this agenda, and was more destructive of the family, than no-fault divorce. The epidemic of living together without being married, easy divorce and social approval of adultery has gone a long way toward destroying marriage as the foundation of Western society. In some places (eg. Quebec, Scandanavia) marriage is now a minority lifestyle.

Today's push for same-sex "marriage" is the latest wave of this same ideology of pansexualism. Here we see the unisex ideal come into the open. Since sexual pleasure has been detatched from reproduction, the next logical step is to relativize sexual difference as trivial. If the sole purpose of sex is pleasure (and maybe friendship or some sort of pragmatic partnership based on a contract) how can heterosexuality be better than homosexuality? This argument is being made persistently and powerfully today. But the premise is the separation of reproduction from sexuality and the destruction of the family structure as the humanizing mechanism of society. Increasingly, the State is expected to raise children. Taboos against incest are now being openly questioned and the normalization of sex with children is definitely on the horizon. Pansexualism has few, if any, boundaries.

The debate over same-sex marriage is completely futile at the moment because it is not about the real issues. To speak as if it were a matter of letting homosexuals into an institution that would otherwise remain unchanged is just plain foolish. In fact, it is deceit. The real issue is whether marriage is compatible with the ideals of the sexual revolution and if not, which needs to give way. How should human sexuality be ordered? By pansexualism or by marriage? It is not merely same-sex marriage that needs to be rolled back, but also easy divorce, cohabitation and sexual promiscuity in general.

Is there any hope? We must remember that at other times in Western culture sexual morality has been as bad as it is today and God has graciously sent revival and the Church has led the way back to sanity and concern for the young, the old and the weak, who always are the ones who suffer when marriage is attacked. Maybe this is the early stage of Spring, the time of muck and mud that heralds the thaw of Winter. Who knows? But we need to understand that if reform and renewal are to come, the direction of our culture must change.

If you want to see what pansexualism looks like, read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. There people are all single and promiscuous and the family has been abolished. Children are conceived in laboratories and raised in state institutions called "hatcheries." Depression is so common that everyone is on a soft drug called "soma." Mankind has been divided into rigid, eugenically engineered classes overseen by the "Controllers." This is a form of Nietzsche's vision of the Overman and the Lastmen. The adults in the novel live in a state of perpetual adolescence with little initiative, few long range goals and no sense whatsoever of the heroic.

We are not only moving toward this nightmare scenario, as Huxley himself saw, but we are moving toward it with increasing speed. Ultimately, what is at stake is not just a moral system, but a moral system that supports human nature against those who would de-humanize us. One need not be a Christian to find this horrifying, but Christians have the advantage of knowing where this evil comes from and how it can be defeated. No wonder the Pope has become a lightening rod for the fanatical hatred of the pansexualists.