Simone Biles, the gymnastics legend, picked a fight with women’s sports campaigner Riley Gaines, only to back down and apologize after a fierce backlash.
This is what winning looks like.
As Matt Walsh tweeted, “Famous public figure issues a groveling public apology and backtracks after tweeting pro-trans propaganda. This scenario would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.” Biles (insincerely) apologized to clean up the PR mess she created, Walsh explained.
“Her outburst in favor of ‘trans rights’ has become a major PR disaster that she has to navigate,” he added.
The Glamor of the Sexual Revolution Is Fading
People are sick of men in women’s sports and spaces. The federal government and numerous states are cracking down on the medical malpractice of transitioning children, as is evident in President Donald Trump’s executive order against transgender surgeries for minors.
Relatedly, Pride seems subdued this year. The month-long celebration of all things gay, queer, trans, and the rest of the endless acronym is still happening, of course. But, the festivities seem muted, and corporations, perhaps chastened by the debacles of Budweiser and Target, seem less inclined to wallow in Pride for a month. The radical rainbow revolution has stalled, and even its prior victories, such as same-sex marriage, may be losing support.
But though gender ideology and rainbow wokeness are unpopular, they may make a comeback due to the lack of a popular alternative. Consider the options. The Christian sexual morality provides a clear and coherent account of human nature and sexuality. But the Christian view is now the province of a minority. It is not only that most people violate its teachings, but that they consider them to be ridiculous and bigoted. They certainly don’t want to return to a culture in which fornication and sodomy were considered shameful.
The Middle Ground Doesn’t Work
Rather, most Americans favor a mushy middle ground that rolls sexual wokeness back a bit. They like the idea of LGBT rights but reject transitioning kids and letting dudes into the girls’ locker room. They support same-sex marriage but dislike the censorious wokeness that persecutes dissenters. They are fine with cohabitation but disgusted at the push for polyamory. To put their attitude toward the Sexual Revolution into the historical terms of the French Revolution, they want a Thermidor, not a Bourbon, restoration.
The problem is that this “compromise” is ungrounded and unstable. This sort of half-hearted sexual revolution lacks a normative anthropology — that is, an account of human nature, who we are, and what is good for us. Although cultures are not entirely logical and can and do exist with all sorts of internal contradictions and inconsistencies, these tensions are destabilizing because they arise from wildly divergent accounts of what it means to be human and what duties we owe each other — especially when it comes to the primal matter of sex and the civilizational foundation of the family.
Christianity provides a consistent account and answer to these questions. So do the rainbow radicals, albeit a very different one. The majority of Americans, however, prefer a mushy middle ground, but a partial sexual revolution doesn’t have a normative anthropology. A lot of people who are sick of sexual wokeness are nonetheless opposed to accepting Christian sexual teaching. They either need to choose or get busy building a coherent philosophy of the human person.
This may seem abstract, but it has very practical consequences for our capacity to explain why laws should set limits here instead of there, and why the culture should praise and promote this rather than that. Longing for the sexual culture of 2015, 2005, or even 1995 won’t cut it.
This is why the Sexual Revolution has constantly blown past successive limits, and why slippery slope predictions have been prophetic. Even as the Sexual Revolution has inflicted more harms and delivered less pleasure than promised, it has continued its march through American culture and institutions because, without Christian sexual morality, nothing solid could stop it. Each step set the stage for the next, even as its advocates insisted it would never happen.
The gay rights movement set up the rapid advance of gender ideology by denying that our embodiment as male and female has any normative meaning and instead only matters as the object of subjective sexual desire. But if male and female don’t matter in marriage, then they don’t matter anywhere. If an “extra daddy” can replace mommy without a problem, then why can’t a daddy try to become a mommy if he wants? The acceptance of phrases (and the conceptual framework behind them) such as “her wife” paved the way for accepting the notion of “her penis.”
In turn, the gay rights movement emerged from a culture of heterosexuals who had abandoned sexual restraint and family responsibility for themselves. They, then, had no grounds on which to say no when the gay rights movement demanded the same.
It is impossible to build a culture of human flourishing atop an ethic of self-indulgence because that self-indulgence slides to new lows. To defeat the evils of sexual wokeness, we cannot only oppose its most obvious excesses. Rather, we must point toward a coherent and grounded sexual ethic that both diagnoses our problems and offers a better way to live. This more difficult task offers real healing and fulfillment in a broken culture.