Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Remanded to Sensitivity Camps

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

When two armies happen to meet, the battle is not necessarily over the terrain they are fighting on. Sometimes it is that, of course, but there are also occasions when the place where they are fighting and the place for which they are fighting are two entirely different places.

The current battle is at the place of same sex mirage. It is where we are fighting right now, and may God grant success to us here, holed up in our little gender-normal Alamo. Our God is able to deliver us, but even if He does not, be it known, o king, that we will not consent to applaud the use of a man as though he were a woman.

Homosexual vice is a bad business, one that the apostle Paul describes as the end of the ethical road. But that is simply where the battle is right now, not what the battle is over. And so, since I have raised the point, what is the battle over? The battle is over the right to define the world.

Man wants to be God, and he wants to be able to declare the way things shall be, and then have them be that way. He hates God and wants to replace Him, and wants to replace how the way things stand fast whenever God declares them. Man wants to speak the ultimate and authoritative word.

Some people have asked from time to time, usually with some petulance, why I write about same sex mirage so much. The answer is found in the disputed nouns — the marriage/mirage issue.
The issue is not an instance here or there of same sex coupling; the central issue is what we as a culture are going to call it when it happens. We have always had those who were in the grip of this lust; why should Christians raise an uproar about it now?

Well, I would say mildly, we are not the ones raising an uproar. You can tell what the real issue is by where the enforcement is. When do the cops show up? When do evangelical bakers get remanded to sensitivity camps? Whenever we refuse to use their vocabulary, the goons come out. That alone, that by itself, should tell you what the real issue is. Under their regime, you do not have to commit homosexual acts. But under their regime, you must agree to pretend that what they have decided to call it has in fact come to pass. But it hasn’t come to pass.

At the end of the day, you have two dudes in bed, with no decent place to put things, or two women there, with nothing real available for either of them. The emptiness, the vanity, the loneliness, the folly, is manifest. And comes now the state, demanding that whatever else we do about this, we must agree to call this state of high loneliness and desperation a state of holy matrimony. I might not be as courageous as I think I am, or as faithful to Jesus as I think I am, and so you might be able to get me to say something like that after pulling out my fifth fingernail. But if you think you can get me to do it by coolshaming me into an approval of round squares, then I guess I had better type a little bit more, in order to make my sentiments clear.

So in a city of one million, I would much rather have a thousand illicit homosexual acts, unrecognized by the public, than to have just one illicit sexual act, covered over with the thin film of all our solons calling it an official marriage. Why? In the former instance, we have a thousand instances of sin. In the latter we have a million. There is a difference between a city with sin in it, and a sin city. In the former, the sin is instances of homosexual sin; in the latter the sin is with our shared language, the currency of all. Both strike at the image of God in man, but the latter is far more serious.

Because the Word was with God, and the Word was God, the latter sin is heinous. You could drop the sexual element out of this altogether, and still have the same problem. I would want to be fighting in the same way if federal judges were declaring that two and two make five, and were applying stiff fines to all born-again mathematicians. We happen to be fighting in the sexual arena because when a people are addled by their lusts, or are grossed out by people so addled, it is far easier to distract them all from the real issue.
The real issue is that man bears the image of God. He is not a god in his own right. He cannot declare, and have it be necessarily so. He must be content to repeat what God has said. Man’s only possible glory and dignity is as God’s vicegerent. And that is dignity enough.

When he sets up shop on his own, everything spirals down into autonomous folly. Revolts against God’s holy order cannot achieve a higher dignity for us. We cannot achieve linguistic independence. God’s gravity is infinite, and there is no escape velocity. We cannot speak the word, and create a new sex — we can only blur the meaning of words, and go out in drag. We can also fine people who refuse to go along with our big pretend.