The First Church of Secularism and Its Sexual Sacraments

[Valin]

National Review:

This new orthodoxy regards sexual acts as inviolable.

Mary Eberstadt

June 15, 2016

 

Surveying some of the sweeping social changes out there — from the legalization of same-sex marriage last year, to the Obama administration’s campaign this year over bathrooms and transgenderism — many people of otherwise differing opinions have paused to wonder the same thing. How did the social revolution over sex happen so quickly?

 

One contrarian thought is that it didn’t. Eyed from further back in time than just the past couple of years, the legalization of same-sex marriage and the mainstreaming of transgenderism — like related transformations before them, and others still to come — aren’t, in fact, precipitous at all. They’re instead just the latest newly surveyed landscapes atop a seismic shift that’s been underway for decades now.

 

For more than half a century, at least since the invention of the birth-control pill, secularists and progressives collectively, if not always consciously, have been assembling a new, quasi-religious orthodoxy. In place of the Judeo-Christianity of yesterday, and mimicking its outlines to an uncanny degree, this new body of belief has by now a well-developed secular catechism. Its fundamental faith is that the sexual revolution — that is, the gradual de-stigmatization of all forms of consenting non-marital sex — has been a boon to all humanity.

 

In the new dispensation, traditional restrictions and attitudes are viewed as judgmental, moralistic forms of socially sanctioned aggression, especially against women and sexual minorities. These victims of sexuality have become the new secular saints. Their virtue becomes their rejection and flouting of traditional sexual morality, and their acts are effectively transvalued as positive expressions of freedom.

 

The first commandment of this new secularist writ is that no sexual act between consenting * adults is wrong. Two corollary imperatives are that whatever contributes to consenting sexual acts is an absolute good, and that anything interfering, or threatening to interfere, with consenting sexual acts is ipso facto wrong.

 

(Snip)

 

The so-called culture war, in other words, has not been conducted by people of religious faith on one side, and people of no faith on the other. It is instead a contest of competing faiths: one in the Good Book, and the other in the more newly written figurative book of secularist orthodoxy about the sexual revolution. In sum, secularist progressivism today is less a political movement than a church.

 

______________________________________________________________________________________

 

* I suspect the next step is getting rid of the word adult....or a redefinition of the word.

 

 

Addendum: One of the things I've seen is the rise of not just individualism but hype-individualism. I...I...I I Have My Rights. Is it destructive to society as a whole? No matter I Have My Rights!