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(LifeSiteNews) — In her essential book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, scholar Mary Eberstadt observes that at the root of our chaotic age, the desire for belonging – the need for an answer to the question “Who am I?” dominates everything. A few generations ago, this was a relatively simple question to answer. The vast majority of us came from families, churches, and communities. We were part of tribes – parents, uncles and aunts, siblings, cousins. The sexual revolution has destroyed much of that now, and we are seeing the consequences play out on the streets. 

Those primal screams Eberstadt wrote about are increasingly becoming a literal event, as politicians and activists alike have taken to abandoning argument altogether and are instead shrieking their anger at their ideological opponents. These emotional reactions, Eberstadt observed, are both pre-political and pre-rational. They come from a deep longing and fear over identity, and frame these longings and these fears in political terms in order to attempt a coherent expression of the source of their anger. Not incidentally, mental illness and narcissism are both sharply on the rise amongst the young, with one expert theorizing that the ubiquity of social media and the collective trauma of school shootings being two potential factors.

Several weeks ago, for example, LGBT activist Lia McGeever unleashed a prolonged scream at a San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting in protest of the DA’s decision not to pursue charges in the death of Banko Brown, which McGeever called additional evidence of an ongoing “trans genocide” in America.I don’t have any words prepared today,” McGeever stated. I just want you to feel our pain. I don’t know if you can at this point, based off your policy choices, but I have to pretend you have some form of empathy left. So, I am going to spend the next minute screaming ’cause that is what is going on in here,” McGeever said. ‘That is what the trans genocide in this country, in this city, has brought me to. 

A similar scene played out when Democrat Machaela Cavanaugh, a state senator from Nebraska, launched a filibuster of a pro-life and pro-family law that bans sex changes for minors. Cavanaugh took the podium and stated: “Trans people belong here. We need trans people. We love trans people.” She repeated it. And then she began chanting, and finally, screaming. She kept it up for a full two minutes on the floor of the Nebraska legislature, her voice increasingly betraying her loss of reason as she thumped the podium and worked herself into an emotional frenzy: 

Consider the fact that this is an adult, who identifies as a Catholic, screaming at a podium in a legislature over a law that bans giving sex changes to children. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that something has gone very wrong here – and that Cavanaugh’s meltdown is part of a larger trend that we saw most starkly during the George Floyd riots but have been present in much of progressive social activism over the past decade. We are seeing the results of the sexual revolution in real time, in which generations of young people have no longer received the socialization of intact families and have been catechized by the culture, the Internet, and the ideological gangs that they have joined to give them an identity and to give their lives meaning. 

That is a key reason that it is so difficult to reason with people like Machaela Cavanaugh and Lia McGeever. Not because they won’t listen – but increasingly, because they can’t. To engage in a discussion would be to negotiate their identities, political or otherwise, and to do that would be, in their view, tantamount to violence.

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Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.

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