Note: The views expressed are my own and not necessarily those of the National Conservatism movement or LifeSiteNews.
(LifeSiteNews) – The most important message delivered at NatCon 3 is one that has been mostly overlooked. It was a single word earnestly spoken with authority by the conference’s chief organizer, Yoram Hazony: “Repent.”
That six-letter word has the power to change the direction of our country which has plummeted far down a slope from mid-20th century liberalism to today’s increasingly totalitarian Woke Neo-Marxism. If heeded, Hazony’s message will mark a pivot point in the history of the United States and the western world. If disregarded, there is no end to the degradation and evil that await us.
Here’s the hitch: National repentance begins with sincere personal repentance.
“If we really want to know what we should do, we’ve got to ask, ‘What did we do wrong?’” said Hazony. “We’ve got to ask: ‘What did I personally do to bring about this situation that we’re in now?’ Because if we don’t think in that way, if we don’t fix ourselves, then things are just going to keep going in the direction that they’ve been going.”
Then Hazony delivered this powerful admonition:
If we want to face the Woke with something as powerful as their Marxist Revolution, then the thing that we’re going to have to face them with is an actual life of conservation and transmission. In other words, the things that we’ve lost: God and Scripture and Nation and Family and Man and Woman, Loyalty, Honor, Sanctity — these are just words to most people today and without them you cannot have a society that conserves and transmits and restores and repents when it needs to.
If you don’t have those things, then you have at best liberalism, and now we know that liberalism collapses into Marxism and it can’t fight it. [Liberalism] doesn’t have the antibodies; it’s not capable of resisting.
Why? Because when you’re raised as a liberal and your parents and your teachers tell you, ‘Look, the important thing is to do what makes you feel good, to do what makes you happy …” When that’s all you hear, then freedom becomes everything. It’s important, but freedom becomes everything, and the main thing that you’re free from is from the past. You’re free from what previous generations thought. You’re freed from God and Scripture. You’re free from parents and Nation. You’re free from man and woman. You don’t need to care about those things anymore because you can do what feels good. You don’t need to care about man and woman, loyalty, honor, [or] sanctity. These words cease to mean anything.
Here’s the thing: You are going to have to change your lives. Because if America is going to change, it’s going to change because you decide that Christianity is going to be restored as the public culture of the United States, or at least those parts of it where it’s possible.”
Gay conservatives: An appeal to intellectual honesty
While Hazony’s exhortation will apply to different people in different ways, there is one group of conservative-identifying individuals in particular who need to open our ears to hear the clarion call to repentance: Gay conservatives.
We need to be intellectually curious and intellectually honest enough to judge our own lives and consider what role we have played or may be continuing to play in the liberal world order as it morphs into Woke Neo-Marxism.
Personal autonomy is a good thing, an important component of human dignity and happiness, but clinging to personal autonomy to justify continued behaviors and policies which ultimately erode society by unraveling the fabric of marriage and family life––and which have led to the undefining of man and woman, husband and wife, boy and girl, son and daughter––is to collaborate with objective evil.
This is a message many of us do not want to hear. But it is a message we need to hear. Hopefully it’s one each of us can begin to consider, then embrace. The future of our country and the western world depends on it.
The stakes are high, reaching from our individual lives, outward to our families and communities, and upward into heaven and eternity. A conservative cannot forget God or His Precepts. In fact, one cannot truly be a conservative without bending one’s knee to the Great “I Am.” And we cannot be at peace with the universe, free from constant striving against our own nature and that of the world around us, without acknowledging Him who created the universe. Otherwise, we risk tragically mistaking our own thoughts for God’s thoughts, living in error, missing the mark.
“A conservative approach to politics and morals cannot be made to work without the God of Scripture,” wrote Hazony in his recently published book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. “We experience his presence as that countervailing force which stops every scheme of ideas, and every principle, from expanding infinitely outward until it has subjected all things to its rule.”
“The God of Scripture circumscribes all human things, reducing them to their true proportions. Remove him from your thoughts, and your own scheme of ideas, which is local and incomplete, will begin to expand, overrunning its true boundaries. Indeed, it will continue to expand until you mistake it for something universal and complete, and the pronouncements of your own reason come to appear as if they were those of unchanging nature.”
“At this moment, you mistake your own mind for that of God.”
“Here all humility ends, and tolerance of alternative views evaporates. Then these foundations of a just politics are no longer visible—for the human mind, mistaking itself for God’s mind, is blind to them.”
This is the error perpetrated and perpetuated by gay conservatives if we do not accept the message of repentance and amend our lives.
Perhaps the biggest reason same-sex ‘marriage’ won the day in 2015 is because those who were opposed to the notion were prevented by those who set the rules of engagement for conservatives from discussing the morality of same-sex sexual relationships.
Homosexuality and same-sex marriage now enjoy shimmering auras of normality throughout much of the conservative world. That can seem like a victory for the same-sex attracted. It’s not. It’s a crippling defeat for western civilization.
Rubber meets the road: Accepting the truth
This is not an easy message. It’s a hard one. It’s a challenging one. Yet it’s a truth which beckons us all. Now. Here. Today. It tugs at my heart, and yours.
When Yoram Hazony spoke of repentance, his message resonated deeply with me.
I am a same-sex attracted. I can’t recall a time in my life when I was not.
Twenty-four years ago, married with two young sons, I divorced my wife to live as a gay man; 10 years later, while still in a gay relationship, I became politically engaged for the first time in my life. I co-founded National Capital Tea Party Patriots and trained myself to become a writer in order to better win hearts and minds in the public square.
In those days, I was a 100% pro-same-sex marriage. The first commentary I ever published was for The Washington Post in 2009, arguing in favor of same-sex marriage.
But soon afterwards, as I began to look more deeply at the issue, something truly extraordinary happened: I was drawn by undeniable truths which clearly outweighed my sexual predilections. I realized I was on the wrong side of history, of science, of nature, and of God. In the end, I had no choice: I had to reform my life. I resolved to restore my marriage and to make our family whole again. It didn’t happen overnight. It was a long process. But it happened.
In 2013 I was compelled to return to full communion with the Catholic Church after having been away since shortly before our divorce, and along the way I became a marriage, family, and children’s rights activist.
The buck stops with me and you
Gay conservatives: You may feel like you have a mighty wind at your back, propelling you forward to an even more glorious time when homosexual relationships are no longer differentiated in any way from conjugal marriages. You may think that we have already arrived at this point. This is an illusion. It’s a grand pretension of the forces of Woke Neo-Marxism to which you and I risk falling prey.
Think about it: While you may proudly and rightly judge transgenderism to be absurd, the notion of same-sex marriage was known to be just as absurd less than a decade ago.
It’s time to stop drawing a line when it comes to our own sexual and romantic lives. Much more than our own sense of personal fulfillment or “rights” is at stake.
If there is going to be a reawakening of conservatism in our nation, it is in large part going to have to be led by those of us who experience same-sex attraction rejecting homosexuality and calling for Obergefell to be overturned. We must pave the way to restore marriage and family, to reestablish timeless principles and immutable definitions, and to reopen the public square for the proclamation of truth.
Gay conservatives must reject Obergefell
“We can’t mock Justice Jackson for being unable to answer ‘What is a woman?’ if we mumble into the microphone when asked, ‘What is marriage?’” insisted Joe Rigney, president and associate professor of Theology and Literature at Bethlehem College & Seminary, at NatCon 3. “Obergefell, like Roe before it, is both unconstitutional and in high-handed rebellion against reality. It unleashed chaos and absurdity into the body politic.”
“Yes, marriage was already weakened by no-fault divorce and destigmatizing adultery and fornication. The lust, desires, and sinful passions of men have done a number on marriage,” continued Rigney. “But those passions and desires had, in some measure, been restrained by our laws and our customs.”
“Obergefell unleashed them, placed them in the driver’s seat to the heart of children, the weakening of the social order and the natural family, leading to the transgender chaos in which we live.”
“He who says, ‘LGB,’ must say, “TQ+.’ The move from one to the other is just what cancer does when left untreated,” declared Rigney. “The left is trying to use cultural acceptance of LGB to press for TQ+. We must labor to use the human recoil against TQ+ to roll back the wicked custom of LGB.”
“So part of our task is to help regular Americans see the organic connection between same-sex mirage and the transgender insanity,” said Rigney.
After 47 House Republicans voted in July to pass the Respect for Marriage Act which aims to prevent states from discontinuing the recognition of same-sex marriages, GayCon commentator Andrew Sullivan, “married” to a man since 2007, chided National Review editors for suggesting that same-sex marriage had released the contagion of transgenderism.
“‘The bullying, unfairness, and sheer illogic of the trans movement have all drawn strength from same-sex marriage.’ What a self-evidently absurd statement. What a completely reactionary editorial,” tweeted Sullivan.
“The bullying, unfairness, and sheer illogic of the trans movement have all drawn strength from same-sex marriage.” What a self-evidently absurd statement. What a completely reactionary editorial.
https://t.co/gGkNI9q5y3— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 21, 2022
Yet the National Review editors and Prof. Rigney are correct. Sullivan’s defense of genderless marriage is unhelpful and wrong. He has willingly blindfolded himself from seeing and admitting demonstrable truth.
Only we same-sex attracted conservatives––beneficiaries of Obergefell and recipients of so much largesse and goodwill in recent years––can turn this around on behalf of the nation, on behalf of our brothers and sisters, and on behalf of the future children of America.
America has been kind to us. We must be kind to America.
There are perhaps as many or more of us who have walked away from homosexuality and transgenderism than there are those who pledge allegiance to the rainbow flag, or who reject that flag but live as stereotype-breaking men who have sex with men or as androphiles nonetheless.
In 2019, an extraordinary event took place late one night in the magnificent rotunda of the United States Capitol, yet you likely have not heard about it. Former gay, lesbian, and transgender men and women repented and interceded on behalf the nation for the sins of homosexuality and transgenderism.
I was privileged to be present, and although I was there as a journalist, I counted myself as a participant. Among those present were two survivors of the 2017 Pulse Nightclub massacre. The spontaneous moment of repentance and worship was the perfect response to 2 Chronicles 7:14:
If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.
If those of us who count ourselves as gay conservatives fail to repent and change our ways, our country may not experience the healing it so desperately needs.
Complementary, man, woman
This will sound harsh, but let’s face it: Our world would be better off if the not-so-long-ago coined terms homosexual and gay were expunged from dictionaries. Those words and the practices they imply have impoverished the world.
The world turned on its axis for millennia without those terms.
Nowhere is this better sensed than in the magnificent Humanum Series of videos produced by Ecce! Films for the Vatican’s 2014 Colloquium on the Complementarity of Man and Woman.
Humanum Film Series: Episode 1 from Ecce! on Vimeo.
It’s a cosmic thing
Masculine and feminine are cosmological terms, not artificial stereotypes invented by society, explained prolific Catholic author and Boston College Professor of Philosophy Peter Kreeft. “Every society in the history of the world has seen that.”
Pointing to a seascape with waves splashing across shoreline rocks, “The sea is ‘she’ and the rocks are ‘he,’” said Kreeft. “And of course, this is not just a private or biological or subjective thing. This is a cosmic thing.”
“The shore is the most popular place on Earth. Waterfront property is the most expensive real estate anywhere in the world. Why? Because that’s where the sea and the land meet. That’s where man and woman meet,” said Kreeft. “The place where they meet, that’s where all the action is.”
The great complementarity of heaven and Earth
“Right there at the start of the whole Bible, we have this rich symbolic account of God’s good creation, which has male plus female at the heart of it, as a signpost, pointing to that great complementarity of God’s whole creation of heaven and Earth together,” explained N.T Wright, presently a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford.
“By putting male and female together as the image of God, there’s something very powerful being said about the rest of creation seeing this symbol and realizing something about who God is, and about how the male and female together have the task of bringing the love and life, stewardship, and care of God’s creation into the rest of the world,” said Wright.
“Every couple, every family on Earth is like a Cathedral,” explained Paris sculptor Fleur Nabert, describing Auguste Rodin’s “The Cathedral” in which a man and a woman’s hands lightly touch to create a sacred space between. “All of us can be creators of a masterpiece of goodness, beauty, and spirituality.”
Intellectual bankruptcy
Abandoning complementarity is a disaster to our humanity “reflecting a tendency to live alone, and aloneness is the number one source of suffering among human beings,” observed Dr. Chady Rahme, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University, Louaize, Lebanon.
Not belonging to a family “will also make us more and more selfish people because we didn’t experience love within a family. We didn’t see love between a man and a woman, and we did not experience receiving love from both a man and a woman, and so we end up thinking that we should take whatever we can,” continued Rahme. “We become selfish, we become destructive, living in an illusion of self-sufficiency, keeping us alone.”
‘Homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ are contrived terms created for political purposes, not for the enrichment of lives, explained Thérèse Hargot-Jacob, a philosopher at the Collège Stanislas in Paris, France.
“These are meaningless terms,” she asserted. “What we are is women and men, and we are, first and foremost, all human beings. We must remind ourselves of this to free ourselves from anguish.”
Agreement with Woke LGBTQ+ ideology has impoverished the entire western world by robbing it of intellectual curiosity and honesty. The fact that so many can no longer affirm that men are men and women are women, or who cannot deny that two men, two women, or a ‘throuple’ can form a marriage reflects the extent of our intellectual bankruptcy.
You are not ‘born this way’
We have been told repeatedly that gays, lesbians, and transgenders are ‘born that way,’ yet science makes no such claim. In fact, social science, biological science, and every branch of medical science and psychology contradict this claim. And above all, the testimony of nature all around us vividly proclaims the reality that humans are complementary beings. It’s written in our DNA, in every cell in our bodies. We are made for each other.
“The God who invented human sexuality also invented the universe. The two fit,” said Prof. Kreeft. “It’s a much happier philosophy. We fit the nature of things.”
By exempting ourselves from complementarity, we are strangers to the natural universe, impoverishing society and weakening the structures most important to human flourishing: faith, marriage, family, and community.
Same-sex attracted conservatives: Be the men you are created and commissioned to be. Stand up for what is right and true. We should invest our lifetimes in achieving the maximum good for humanity.
