The Degradation and Tyranny of Volitional Rights

Saving Our Children From Ideological Predators

We are living amidst a rapid integration into the void--to use the words of Cornelius Van Til.  The waters swirl faster as they approach the plug hole.  So with cultures going "down the tubes".

Consider the speed at which sexual degradation has morphed into an inviolable human right.  The degradation used to consist of homosexualists coming "out of the closet" to argue that what they practised and promoted was a human right because they were "born that way".  No-one has ever discovered a homosexual gene, but they were certain there was one.  The issue was akin to ethnicity they argued: no-one should be stigmatised for the way they were born, for their genetic code.

Then, the issue "morphed" into an argument over whether people had a human right to choose to be homosexual.  The proposition now became that homosexuals were not genetically made that way, but they were choosing homosexual practice and lifestyle as a preference.   Homosexuality morphed from a genetic-based right into a freedom, or volitional, right.  It was a rapid transformation.  The next iteration was even more rapid: homosexualists had a volitional right to marry and have their "marriage" codified in law; but they also had a freedom right to divorce and reverse their homosexualism to heterosexuality or bi-sexuality, or whatever they wanted.  What was required, demanded, was that everyone else cheer and celebrate their choices.

Fast following came genderism.  This next iteration released human gender from one's genetic structure, and made it also a matter of preference and volition.
 At last count Facebook offered 65 different gender-states one could choose.  One's choice defines and constitutes reality.  Moreover, one's choice is fluid.  Just as one day a homeowner might choose to live in a South-western Detroit burb, and a month later may choose to move to another location, so one may choose gender.  It rapidly became a volitional human right to choose one's gender orientation--a right which must be respected by all and sundry and throughout all the institutions of society.  This represents Descartes's nominalism, "I think, therefore I am" taken to its logical, radical extremity.

How should we Christians respond?  One response is calmly to acknowledge that many are the perversities of the human soul, that all perversities cannot be contended, and one has a volitional right to descend into Hades according to one's choices.  In Hades there is public triumph over ever greater manifestations of rebellion against God, of self-mutilation and degradation.  But just as there is no honour amongst thieves, so amongst the damned.  There is both cheering the "hero" whose rebellion against God is greater, but also loathing and hatred for the one upstaging the rest.

A second response is also required.  We will protect our children from such.  Not just the ideology and associated propaganda swirling around volitional rights and sexual degradation, but also from those who advocate, represent, and promote such degradations.

Imagine you lived in a nation practising Moloch worship.  Imagine taking your children out to observe and attend the nearest place of Moloch worship.  Imagine getting your children to watch as other children were cast onto the altar and the flames as an act of dedication and devotion to the cursed god.  Never.  Such spectators would be themselves so depraved we would need to protect our children from them, lest we become like them.

Anthony Esolen makes this very point with respect to the homosexualists and the genderists of our day.  These demand the right to teach their perversions to our children, and insist that all other teachers champion their volitional rights and freedoms so to teach and so to live and so to encourage children to follow in their steps.   They demand further that the government endorse and support and fund their perversity.   As Esolen says, "It is everywhere, a pervasive pollution, like fecal bacteria in your water supply."  [Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017),  p. 53]

Fifteen years ago such perversity would have been considered the stuff of dystopian nightmares.  The integration into the void has indeed become faster, more desperate, more depraved.  By such means God chastens and purifies the Church.  Those at the end of the process of devolution into the void represent and champion extreme forms of depravity; as they enter Sheol they are both cheered and hated, celebrated and mocked by those they descend to join [Isaiah 14:9-11].

There are those who do not sufficiently hate idolatry  until they see the child burnt to death on Moloch's altar.  When they do see, when they are confronted with such unimaginable evil, they, by God's grace, are moved to swear their allegiance in the following terms: "choose you this day whom you will serve; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."  [Joshua 24: 15]  No longer will we allow the Sheol-bound to teach and instruct our children to celebrate their wickedness.