(LifeSiteNews) — How did the LGBT movement conquer America? Well, to paraphrase Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, slowly – and then all at once. Which is to say that the country we see now – where once-radical ideologies are the fiercely defended dogmas of half the American political spectrum and are part of the formal public education curriculum in many states – endured many small changes before it became apparent that a once-mocked movement was now running the show.
Carl Trueman, author of the surprise academic bestseller “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution,” broke this down in a fascinating essay earlier this year titled “America’s LGBTQ establishment.” An excerpt:
How do you take over an empire? That is a question that I used as a title for a lecture I gave each year in my Ancient Christianity class. The answer is simple to state but somewhat more difficult to achieve in practice: You simply need to control time and space.
Christianity achieved this in the Roman empire during the fourth century, a century that opened with the last great imperial persecution of the church and ended with Christians firmly established as the dominant religion officially sanctioned by the state and privileged above all pagan rivals. By no coincidence, it was also the century that saw struggles where the deployment of martyr relics was used as a means of claiming ownership of land for sacred purposes and the development of liturgical calendars for marking the rhythm of the year in distinctly Christian terms.
In our modern days, the same principles are deployed by those who seek to control our world. And Pride Month is surely the most ostentatious, annoying, and egregious of them all. June has been taken over by the avant-garde of the sexual revolution. It is the high feast of the progressive liturgical calendar and almost as long as Lent – though committed of course to self-indulgence, not self-denial. Pride parades pass through the streets, flaunting ever more exotic forms of explicit sexuality, often cheered on by parents with small children.
In that context, throwaway headlines take on a new significance. Such as this one, for example: “California becomes first state to recognize Transgender History Month.” “Transgender History Month” is already a thing in places like San Francisco, but now, as of September 6, House Resolution 57 makes California the first state to formally set aside an entire month to celebrate “transgender history” because California has been “the epicenter of the trans liberation movement” and this would further “create a culture led by research, education, and scholarly recognition of the contributions of transgender Californians to our great state’s history, and will educate future generations of Californians on the importance of this history.”
Honey Mahogany, the chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party and sponsor of the resolution, informed a press conference that this is just a beginning. “Even here in California, where we have a sanctuary state, where we have overwhelmingly Democrats representing us in the capitol, we are still seeing acts of violence. We are still seeing attempts at legislating against our community,” she said. “And so it’s really important to us that we stop spreading misinformation about the trans community and take this opportunity to actually tell the truth and educate people about who we are and what we need.” Mahogany, incidentally, is also a drag queen and identifies as “gender non-conforming trans.”
June in California is “Pride Month,” which frequently spills over into July; now all of August is “Transgender History Month.” It is tempting to scoff this off as yet another LGBT vanity project, but as Trueman points out, it is actually part of a campaign to colonize the calendar – to control time and space. With “Transgender History Month” will come state-sponsored revisionist history; publicly-funded and public events; formal declarations of fealty to the transgender movement and promises from politicians to “do more” and commitments to the transgender political agenda, which continues to grow as society transitions.
