Whether the drag queens on display in Paris were intentionally mocking the Last Supper or celebrating the pagan god of indulgence, one thing is certain: The spectacle was French.
The same ceremony depicted Marie Antoinette holding her severed head while singing a revolutionary anthem.
The revolution in France in 1789 was as much a rejection of the church as it was of the monarchy. As the French writer and forerunner of the revolution Denis Diderot declared: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
The political revolution in France ended in bloody failure and a return to tyranny under Napoleon. Yet the cultural revolution survived and was on full display in Paris just a few nights ago.
Although symbolic gestures like the opening ceremony of the Olympics often garner the most attention, real-world policy initiatives springing from the same ideological roots can go overlooked by comparison.
Currently, in Switzerland, parents of a teenage girl who expressed “gender confusion” find themselves in court for declining puberty blockers and explicitly rejecting the local school’s attempt to “socially transition” their daughter.
For seeking to protect the health and well-being of their daughter, 16, these parents now face a legal standoff over their fundamental right to care for their child who, after being removed from her parents’ home, resides in a government shelter. She is being encouraged to pursue dangerous, life-altering, and irreversible medical procedures to “transition.” Alliance Defending Freedom International is supporting her parents’ legal defense.
By contrast, in the United Kingdom, the High Court has declared the government’s ban on so-called puberty blockers to be lawful. The National Health Service in Great Britain, once on the forefront of Orwellian “gender-affirming care,” wisely has reversed course and returned to evidence-based medicine.
This turn reflects the wisdom of English author and theologian C.S. Lewis, who declared: “If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
Here in the U.S., there are more examples of the politicization of health care and the prioritization of ideology over science, medical ethics, and common sense.
Unsurprisingly, California provides one of the most recent. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law AB 1955, a bill banning schools from ensuring that parents are notified if a child “identifies” as the opposite sex.
The message is clear: The state of California will usurp parental authority under the guise of “compassion” if parents don’t agree with the state’s preferred viewpoint.
Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration continues its attack on the privacy, safety, and equality of educational opportunity for women and girls by attempting to eviscerate Title IX.
Thankfully, all five federal district courts where Alliance Defending Freedom challenged the attempt to convert the word “sex” to “gender identity” have ruled against the government.
The Biden-Harris administration has appealed two of these injunctions to higher courts, where they await emergency rulings at the U.S. Supreme Court.
As the legal battles play out in courts around the U.S. and the world, the court of public opinion will be in session again daily in the media and the broader culture. That court is never in recess.
So, all eyes will be on the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics to see whether any lessons have been learned. Those responsible for the opening ceremony of the Games did eventually apologize, once it became clear that efforts to gaslight the world into believing it was merely a misunderstanding by oversensitive, uneducated Christians had fallen flat.
The controversy surrounding the opening ceremony is a microcosm of the global divide over trans ideology. Too many cultural elites have chosen the side of revolution against objective truth and the created order. But every revolution against reality is doomed to fail.
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