Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Have you not read from the beginning that the Creator made them male and female, we heard our Lord say in today's Gospel, Matthew 19, verse 4, so we are continuing what we started last week, looking at gender theory, we'll begin today by looking at its roots, where does gender theory actually come from, we want to note that gender theory is an ideology, ideology basically means the study of ideas but it's come to mean a theory without scientific foundation that's adopted and embraced mainly for political purposes, so ideologies are not rooted in reality and truth, they're rooted in a false understanding of life, they're propagated by lies and by people with influence and they're sustained by propaganda, power and control, communism and Nazism are probably the most infamous recent ideologies that we're aware of, we can add to that list gender theory as well too, in addition an ideology can also take a part of reality, so take the truth about reality and make that truth the whole truth, so you begin to see everything, all of reality through that one lens and you also become blinded to seeing and understanding the whole picture or the larger picture of things.
Sometimes in the confessional, I remind people that we need to confess not only what we've done wrong or what we've not done that we should have done, but we also need to repent of wrong beliefs too, for example, if someone's pro-abortion, they haven't changed their mind about that, they cannot validly be absolved of their sins, why?
Because being pro-choice, even if you've never had an abortion, being pro-choice is a sin against the first commandment, it's a sin against the faith, it's also obviously a sin against the fifth commandment too, you shall not kill, or better you shall not murder, so belief and behavior have to go together, sins aren't just actions or omissions, sins are also false beliefs too, beliefs which are contrary to God's revelation and contrary to his created order.
With gender theory or gender ideology, there are problems of both belief and behavior, so what's the behavior that got us here culturally?
Well, it's a behavior that's tied to a particular set of beliefs and attitudes, yes, but I think it's primarily this behavior or this activity that is the driving practical force behind today's gender theory and sexual confusion, what's the behavior?
The behavior is contraception, divorcing sexual activity from procreation and from responsibility and natural consequences, and this is a specific behavior that, even today, if you're practicing it as a form of birth control and you aren't repentant of it, you cannot be validly absolved of your sins.
Three things that God doesn't intend us to separate are marriage, sexual activity, and procreation, the proper place for children is in a stable family, the proper place for sexual activity is within the marriage covenant, not before it, not outside of it, and sexual activity in marriage is always meant to be at least open to offspring, otherwise, believe it or not, it just turns into selfish mutual masturbation.
To separate or divorce those three realities, marriage, sexual activity, and procreation, to do so is to live outside of the will of God, it's to live outside of his plan and his purpose for our life, and doing so, in fact, feeds and leads a selfish life, even a purposeless life, even a meaningless life, really a godless life in the end.
Margaret Sanger is the one who opened up Pandora's box for this one, she founded the birth control movement in America, I don't know how familiar you are with her, she was born in 1879, died in 1966. Sadly, Margaret Sanger was an anarchist, she was an adulteress, an occultist, a racist, a white supremacist, a eugenicist, an avid hater of the poor and the working class, and a hater of the Catholic Church too, and none of that is really a slur, in the sense that it's actually very clear from her biographies, from her own writings, from her own mission too, that she was all of those things.
Control is the cornerstone of Sanger's ideology. Faith teaches us that we need to regulate our desires, to live in accord, to live in harmony with nature, so to live in harmony with the world, with others, with ourselves, desires have to be controlled. All wisdom literature throughout all the centuries teaches that, even non-Christian literature. Margaret Sanger, in line with Enlightenment progressivism, said, no, it's nature that has to be controlled, not me. I don't have to control myself.
The idea of our passions and our selfish desires needing to be controlled, she called that an absurdity. She wanted control over biology, over bodies, and over persons, she wasn't interested in exercising self-control. So instead of curbing our will to live in harmony with nature, according to Sanger's philosophy, it's nature that needs to be suppressed in order to unleash our wills.
Margaret Sanger championed the liberation of sexual desire, becoming herself an unfortunate slave to sexual pleasure, a sex addict, essentially, with innumerable partners.
She passionately believed in weeding out of society those whom she deemed were not fit to live, in particular, the poor and the working class people and non-whites. She said she wanted to eliminate, quote, the dead weight of human waste, unquote, and contraception would help her to do that.
Regarding her being a eugenicist and racist, for example, Sanger described her plan to stop the growth of the black population in the United States in a private letter to a certain Clarence Gamble, dated October 19th, 1939, so this is when she was already 60 years old, pretty mature in her thought by then. In the letter, she spoke of a project that would, quote, hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with a social service background with engaging personalities, unquote, to travel through the South and propagandize birth control.
She said the most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal.
We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members, unquote.
Control slash birth control, contraception slash birth control serve a triple purpose for Sanger. One, relieving women overburdened with children. That sounds benign, right?
Sounds like a good thing. Two, liberating sexual desire and expression, which lines up with her spirit of being an anarchist. And three, eliminating the race of what she called the weak, the degenerate, the feeble-minded persons who, according to her, have been unfortunately, unfortunately, kept alive by compassion and pity, and who are dragging humanity back down the evolutionary slope.
Again, the idea of practicing abstinence, self-control, self-denial in regard to sexual activity were, to Margaret Sanger, bizarre and unnatural ideas, as they are to many people in our culture nowadays, believe it or not, who embrace her thinking. Sanger sought voluntary and involuntary birth control, sterilization, and abortion as the panacea, as the cure-all for all social problems and human misery. So it's not virtue and grace that will solve our problems. It's control, and being controlled, for Sanger.
She wrote, birth control is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of eugenics would immediately give a concrete, realistic power to that science.
For this reason, eugenic birth control, quote, has been accepted by the most clear-thinking and far-sighted of the eugenicists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health, wrote the founder of Planned Parenthood. And at a certain point, of course, it seems that she had to take a step back from talking about eugenics because the Nazis had made that idea, shall we say, distasteful. But it was just a matter of changing how she wrote and spoke about things. It wasn't a matter of changing her vision or her plan for society. In 1917, she founded the publication, The Birth Control Review. One of the favorite slogans on the masthead of the journal or review was, birth control to create a race of thoroughbreds. That was like the headline. Her earlier newspaper publication, The Woman Rebel, which is what it was called, was decorated with the slogan, no gods, exclamation point, no masters, exclamation point. And Sanger offered the following creed. She wrote this, rebel women claim the following rights, the right to be lazy, the right to be an unmarried mother, the right to destroy, the right to create, the right to live, and the right to love.
Notice nothing about responsibility there, right? It's all rights, no responsibilities.
Another one of the hallmarks of our culture today. For Sanger, because bodily fertility threatened a woman's autonomy or freedom, then the natural connection between sex and procreation had to be severed for her. And the god of pleasure demanded that procreation and the fruits of procreation be sacrificed on its altar. 
Sadly, maybe Margaret didn't know herself very well. She didn't realize that birth control and sexual pleasure had indeed become her gods and her masters. She was unfaithful in her marriages, endless strings of lovers, was never a mother to the children that she did have. In rebelling against the true lord and master, she just found herself enslaved by another, enslaved by the demon or the demons of lust. 
Sanger founded the National Birth Control League, which was named, was changed in 1922, and established as a corporation that in 1942 became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Rebel women have the right to destroy, she said. And Planned Parenthood is, of course, today is the world's largest provider of abortion, the largest destroyer of unborn human life. 
And what is abortion? It's Plan B. Plan B for what? When contraception fails. 
Sanger's writings made explicit her view that feminine fecundity is not a natural and a good thing. Rather, for her, pregnancy is pathological. Female fecundity is a dangerous disease that needs to be treated and controlled. Nowadays, access to birth control and abortion are all but synonymous with reproductive health. We hear that a lot, right? Reproductive health is a clever term. It sounds, again, pro-woman, but as one writer points out, it actually pathologizes natural biological realities that are unique to women. What's that? Fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood. Margaret Sanger helped a great deal to make people think that those unique feminine realities of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood are abnormal and unwanted and a hindrance to true freedom. For example, if you tell a young woman today that she'd make a great mother, you'd better be careful about that.
If she's a spiritual child of Margaret Sanger and her strand of feminism, she'll give you a piece of her mind if you tell that to her. And she probably won't talk to you again, too, which might be a good thing, actually. Sanger has been called, among other things, he's been called the father of the modern society, ironically. She bears a great deal of responsibility for the gender confusion of our day. 
One of her lovers, of course, the more accurate term would be one of her haters, because they didn't really love her, and vice versa, right? But one of her lovers, the English writer H.G. Wells, said, when the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history, and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine, he said. 
If you think that's bizarre, when she died in 1966, she was eulogized at the Episcopal Church in Tucson, Arizona. It was said during her eulogy that she was, quote, a good, fighting saint who experienced martyrdom, unquote. And the rector of St. Philip's in the Hills c6hurch, Reverend George Ferguson, added, quote, all the elements of sainthood were personified many times in her life, unquote. It's quite a compliment for an anarchist, an adulteress, an occultist, a racist, a white supremacist, a eugenicist, an avid hater of the poor and the working class, and a hater of the Catholic Church.
We're not trying to be nasty about saying these things, it's just that we're pointing out how whitewashed and distorted our understanding of these cultural revolutionaries really is.
It's no wonder why we're in the mess we are today. 
So in our next reflection, we'll continue to look at how contraception has contributed to gender confusion and gender theory. Let's ask Our Lady for the grace to steer clear of these errors and these sins. Otherwise, instead of our thoughts lining up with God's thoughts as they're supposed to, our thoughts will much more be in line with Margaret Sanger and those who came after her, which is not a healthy thing. 
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.