Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today's gospel, we hear of our Lord, who spoke with authority and acted with great authority in his public ministry, preaching the truth and casting out demons.
As much as we would like to speak about Mother Teresa today on her feast day, we're still working on casting out the demon of gender ideology, so we're going to continue our reflections on that today, our catechesis on sexuality and gender theory, which is the latest worldview to attack God and humanity and the church all at once.
In our last couple of reflections, we've looked at some of the philosophical underpinnings of gender theory, which is essentially rooted in feminism and feminist thought.
The other day we spoke about what's called existential feminism and its leading philosophical proponent, who was Simone de Beauvoir.
Today we're going to talk about what's called postmodernism and postmodern feminism.
Keep in mind that both existentialism and postmodernism are atheistic at their core.
So postmodern thought takes existentialism, which said that you exist first, and then you have to figure out who or what you are or construct who you are.
Existentialism adds to that the belief that nothing is natural.
Nothing.
Why?
Because, as the philosophy of existentialism had already said, there's no such thing as human nature.
As Catholics and as Christians, we believe that there is such a thing as human nature, which is what we share in common with other people.
Existentialists and postmodernists deny this.
Postmodern thought says that the terms male, female, man, woman, they're just social constructs.
They're just constructed by society.
They don't correspond to reality.
So for them, there are no differences between male and female at the level of being.
Any perceived differences are just products of society and of culture.
If that sounds bizarre to you, that's a good thing.
It's actually a good thing if it sounds bizarre.
Our Lord in the Gospels talks about the people who look, but they don't see.
Matthew 13 verse 14, postmodern thinkers and postmodern feminists look at men and women and don't really see any differences.
As a side note, underpinning postmodernist and existentialist thought is a great spirit of Nihilism, which is Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy that life is meaningless and absurd.
Just knowing that, it's no surprise that Nietzsche actually died as a madman in an insane asylum.
Right, his death actually perfectly fit his philosophy.
And there's another little side note, perhaps humorous, perhaps not.
One young person recently said to me, she said, you know, they said homeschooling children are weird.
You might hear that, right?
But then they say in public school, James thinks he's really a girl, so you have to call him Janice and refer to him as a girl.
And they say that Andrea is really a boy trapped in a woman's, girl's body, so you have to call her Andrew now and mutilate her body and pump her full of hormones.
And they say that Ryan thinks he's a cat, so you have to be very careful with how you treat him.
He might scratch you if you say the wrong things.
But homeschoolers are weird, what they say.
They hear, but they don't understand.
They look, but they never see, says our Lord.
Likewise, with postmodernist thought, all assertions of truth or knowledge are just said to be power plays, that's all they are.
Nietzsche's book, The Will to Power, which his sister published a year after his death, says it all in the title.
The Will to Power, since there's no truth, no meaning, it's all about power.
Truth is unknowable or non-existent, says the postmodernist.
In fact, logic, reason, and truth are ultimately seen as, again, social constructs or assertions of groups of power.
A feminist postmodern philosopher, Judith Butler, said that, quote, what we perceive to be gender is actually an unconscious, socially compelled performance that creates the illusion of essence.
She says that sex identity is only performance, that there are no real man or woman underneath the various cultural expressions, and any meaning that you try to ascribe to biological sex differences is just your assertion of power, she says.
There's no truth to what you really say.
Of course, she's just doing the same thing when you think about it, right?
There's no truth to the assertions that she's making.
Her theories are just her asserting her will to power over everyone else, because it does cut both ways when they begin to talk in these ways.
Butler writes, quote, the body is not sexed in any significant sense prior to its determination within a discourse, through which it becomes invested with an idea of natural or essential sex.
The body gains meaning within discourse only in the context of power relations.
Sexuality, she says, is an historically specific organization of power, of discourse, of bodies, and of affectivity, unquote.
So she's saying that your body doesn't say anything about your sex or your gender prior to people talking about it.
I hope that does sound a bit bizarre, right?
My body doesn't say anything about who I am prior to people talking about what it is.
Again, for Judith Butler, there's no givenness to the body or gender or sex.
It's just when you begin to talk about it in a certain cultural context that the body gains some type of meaning.
In case you're not sure, this is actually pretty evil and dark stuff that we're dealing with, really.
To go back to our Lord's words, they look, but they don't see.
Why?
Because they are very spiritually blinded, essentially.
Biological sex itself, says the postmodern feminist, is just, again, a social construct, a category arbitrarily assigned at birth, which is what they say nowadays, which, of course, is about as anti-empirical and anti-scientific a statement that you can actually make.
A lot of pro-gender theory people would unhesitatingly triumph science over religious belief, and yet some of their assertions couldn't be any more anti-scientific.
You're assigned your sex at birth.
It's actually the doctor, and you look at the baby and say, the baby's a boy.
The baby's a girl.
You're assigned a sex.
This is why we call it gender ideology.
Abigail Favale, in her book, The Genesis of Gender, writes this.
She says, by the mid-20th century, biological sex was dethroned, both linguistically and conceptually.
The word sex no longer served merely as a shorthand for one's biological sexual identity, but expanded to indicate any kind of erotic genital activity.
Sexuality no longer referred to one's maleness or femaleness, but to the flavor and expression of one's erotic desires.
This dethroning of sex created a conceptual vacuum, one quickly filled by the term gender.
If you want to understand how that distinction between sex and gender, between sex as a mere biological fact and gender as merely socially constructed norms that may or may not have some affiliation with your biological sex, if you want to understand how that distinction between sex and gender entered into our language and our thinking, you can look up the psychologist John Money and the inhuman and immoral experiment he did on two twin brothers that actually led to their eventual suicides, too.
You can look up that experiment and see how he promoted that failed experiment as a success and used it to champion this concept of gender as a mere product of culture rather than nature.
And of course, the term gender nowadays can mean whatever you want it to mean, because it has no real meaning other than what you or I give that word.
Because life itself really has no meaning, no purpose for these people.
That's postmodern, existentialist, nihilistic, atheistic thought, and it's everywhere.
Even in Indiana, sadly.
Expected to be back in Massachusetts where I'm from, but out here, very sad.
Some of these people might say, I do have a gendered essence, but I'm in the wrong sexed body, right?
So the body needs to be altered or mutilated to conform to who I really am.
So gender can now mean the sex of the soul, whatever the soul means for these people, which may or may not align with the sex of the body.
Or gender is what, again, in my mind, I experience and define as gender.
But again, at the heart of it, my body only means what I want it to mean, which is part of postmodern feminist understanding.
The goal with this type of existentialist and postmodern feminist thought is what we noted in our past reflections.
The goal is to totally wipe out the norms of gender and sex and totally erase the normality of heterosexuality and heterosexual reproduction.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848 Communist Manifesto, they called for the abolition, the abolishing of the family.
Existentialist and postmodern feminist thought is very much in harmony with that mentality.
Marxist ideals literally saturated the literature of the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s.
In the feminist Shulamith Firestone's 1970 book, The Dialect of Sex, she writes, among other things, quote, the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, Susan B. Anthony types, not just the elimination of male privilege, but of the sex distinction itself.
Genital difference between human beings would no longer matter culturally, wrote Shulamith Firestone in 1970.
And because they say that the use of language is just a power play, the gender theorists live by that creed.
They constantly manipulate language and change the definition of terms or don't define terms at all.
Why?
Because again, they think the terms are meaningless for one.
So they're nominalists philosophically, plus, more importantly, they want to exercise control and power over others.
Abigail Favala again writes, this postmodern understanding of truth as power leads to a postmodern political praxis in which language is intentionally manipulated to institute these new modes of reality.
This is why there's so much emphasis on policing speech, creating new pronouns and mandating their use, constantly changing the definitions of terms like gender, continually proliferating new categories and subcategories of identity and desire.
This is a concerted effort to enforce a new social truth script through an exercise of power, writes Favala.
Hence, for example, the mandated use of personal pronouns, right?
My name is X, and I go by the pronouns he, him, and his.
At the heart of it, mandated personal pronouns has actually little to do with offending others.
It has something to do with that, granted, but little.
It has everything to do about steering the culture in an androgynous direction.
It's about controlling others, getting others to embrace a false worldview, and affirm lies about reality and human nature.
Not a happy homily today, I apologize for that, but we're almost finished.
Lastly, what's called intersectional feminism doesn't care so much about universals or even individuals.
Intersectionalism looks at people through the lens of their identity groups to discern whether what they believe or say has any value.
Human beings are defined or constituted by their position on the grid of interlocking forces of oppression.
This is where the idea of identity politics comes from.
If you belong to a group or claim to belong to a group that's been socially marginalized or oppressed, then you're awarded more of a voice, more political, social power.
Claiming an oppressed identity itself becomes a mode of power, too.
Favale again writes, she says, the villain of patriarchy morphs into the arch nemesis of cis-white male heteropatriarchy.
Please don't ask me what that means, I don't know.
The constant spawning of neologisms like cisgender is another mark of intersectionalism, which relies on the manipulation of language as a way to reshape what is considered real again.
Typically with intersectionalism, I guess the economic status doesn't so much matter as far as qualifying for an oppressed minority, whether you're poor or not, it doesn't matter so much in this case.
They said it's probably because this philosophy developed and flourishes in well-educated spheres, the academic world, the corporate world, places where people have a lot of money and they aren't worried about those who don't have that.
So if you're poor, don't claim that you're poor and oppressed, they don't really care so much about that nowadays.
In short, in this feminist thread of existentialism, post-modernism, and intersectionality, reality, sex, gender, truth, everything's just socially constructed.
So what we've constructed, or what our ancestors constructed, can be deconstructed, it can be torn apart, torn down, built up differently.
That's what's going on, that's what they're doing right now.
They're destroying Adam and Eve and creating Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein, or the Groom of Frankenstein, or the whatever of Frankenstein nowadays in their place.
To think that the devil has nothing to do with any of this is about as crazy as thinking that there are 70-plus genders too.
In our next Reflections, we'll look more specifically at the philosophical and theological errors of gender theory.
Let's just ask Our Lady for the grace to stand up to the truth that not just life and marriage and family are sacred, now we have to need Her help to stand up to the truth that the human person and sexuality itself is sacred.
May She guide and protect us in these very dark hours.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.