Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

With Stirrups Raised to Molech

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

The modern world has seen many revolutions, from the French revolution to the Russian, but the bloodiest of all of them has been the sexual revolution. And that provides the backdrop to our current uproar over the definition of marriage.

We are now much occupied with the issues swirling around same sex mirage, but we need to take great care not to get distracted. Why have the homosexual activists gone all in on this issue? Why is their prosecutorial zeal so adamant? We went, in just a matter of months, from “let’s let individual states” decide on this, to federal judges striking down state statutes, followed up hard by official harassment of florists, bakers, and photographers. Why the anger, and why the savage over-reach? And do they really think we wouldn’t remember all the things they were assuring us of this time last year?

I was talking last night with my daughter Rachel, and she mentioned something that she had observed, and which I believe is very much on point. The battle over same sex mirage is not just a distraction, but is intended to be a distraction. We do have to deal with these challenges to marriage, but without forgetting what they might be trying to drag us away from. And I am talking about the relationship between the abortion issue and the homosexual battle.

The pro-life cause is one where conservatives have fought a successful incremental battle. The carnage has certainly been terrible, and there is still a long way to go, but one full generation after Roe v. Wade, we still have a robust pro-life movement, and it is a movement that has been making significant headway in state after state. In other words, for the secularists, the momentum — however inadequate it may seem to us — is all the wrong way.There are many reasons for this. They range from improvements in ultrasound technology to shrewd incremental legislation to tireless work on the part of pro-life activists to young people growing up into the cause.

At the beginning of this month, I tweeted this:

“If a nation has slaughtered 50 million infants, they are not going to suddenly get a sense of decency over you and your cupcakes.”

Now this explains their lack of proportion, and their refusal to acknowledge the rights of florists. Someone who doesn’t flinch at the dismemberment of babies is not going to flinch at the dismemberment of some evangelical baker’s conscience. This reveals their distorted priorities, of course, but it also might be revealing a strategy. Is the homosexual lobby doing this because they are freaking out over their losses on the pro-life front? And are they doing so in a way intended to distract us away from an issue where we are slowly, gradually, inexorably, winning?

Our state legislatures are clearly having second thoughts about abortion. That is all to the good, and we must continue to push them in that direction. But at the same time we have to say that “second thoughts” is not a synonym for repentance. When repentance comes, the whole apparatus of death is coming down.

In the meantime, we must continue to defend marriage, of course, and the religious liberty of those who don’t want to be dragooned into abominable celebrations. But we should never forget that the underlying war is against our fruitfulness. If one of the central tactics of gay abortionists — now there’s a phrase for you — has been to destroy the fruit of heterosexuality, and to celebrate the fruitless deeds of darkness, then we must take special care to continue to fight them on their insistence on a “constitutional right” to slaughter the unborn.

Fruitlessness is a religion, and abortion is their bloody sacrament. And just as Boniface chopped down the tree sacred to Thor, so also we must remove those stainless steel altars with their stirrups raised high to Molech. Like Josiah, we must pitch them all over the lip of the cliff and down into the Valley of Ben Hinnom.
And this is why one of our central responses to the battle over the definition of marriage should be to double down on our commitment to the pro-life cause. Before we got into this fight over what constitutes a marriage, we were previously winning a fight over what constitutes a human being.