Introduction
I believe that it is past time for us to add the P to our conga line of kink. The reason we must add the P, standing in for pedophile, is that we have already in principle added the P. This already happened, with virtually no one noticing when it happened exactly. There is a difference between crossing the Mississippi in Minneapolis compared to Memphis, but you are crossing the same river in both instances.
Pedophilia has already been accepted by our culture. The only thing that remains for us to discover that this is so, and for lots of clueless evangelical cultural observers to smack their foreheads five years after the fact. Who knew? Why weren’t we told? Why weren’t we warned?
Why So?
My argument is an a fortiori one, a “how much more” argument. If it is now legal for a minor to begin the process of transitioning, with that process including the use of hormone blockers to prevent the onset of puberty, and to go under the knife, which is a monumental and irreversible decision, shouldn’t they be allowed to experience sexual activity, of whatever kind they want? If a child is competent to decide to allow a 35-year-old surgeon to cut off her breasts, then why is she not competent to allow a 35-year-old surgeon to fondle them? Which is the bigger decision? Which has the greater long-term consequences?
We can rest assured that there are in fact 35-year-olds who do want to fondle them, because there always are, and we can be equally assured that there are 35-year-old surgeons—because money talks—who will want to cut them off.
Not only is this kind of iniquity legal and approved, but it also “hate” to be critical of it. The reason disagreement is deemed hatred is because this kind of hatred of God loves to project. “And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake” (Luke 21:17).
Progressivism is progressing all right—in tighter and tighter clockwise circles, approaching the sucking nadir of our drain to the sewers, which our demented solons and poohbahs want to call the apex of our enlightenment. Now admittedly our laws are in a state of flux, and it might be a few years before everything is sorted out. Right now, in many states, if you “fondle them,” it is off to the Big House for you, while if you simply cut them off, your chances of a TED talk gig and a book deal are pretty good. So there are angularities. We should allow ourselves some leeway for such inconsistencies to get ironed out. But given the current state of our culture, which way that inconsistency is going to be reconciled is kind of obvious.
The structure of my argument is a simple one. If we have decided that 10-year-olds can walk for an hour across town, busy thoroughfares and all, then we have already settled in principle that they can walk around the block.
What kind of sense would it make if our laws did not require parental permission for permanent tattoos, but in order to get a temporary henna tattoo you needed a signed statement from both parents, and a court order from a judge?
Put yet another way, if you managed to swallow the camel, you will probably be able to get down the gnat.
I mentioned the angularities, which are a tangle of contradictions. But the lust imperative is in the process of sorting them all out. Right now, if a young high school sophomore wants to get it on with a boy in the school, the one with the acne problem, the school nurse has to give her a supply of pills, and may not inform her parents, but if she wants to do the same thing with the older man parked behind the stadium, the one with a steady job, the school nurse has to call the cops. This is because, we say, older men are capable of “grooming,” which is an insult to individuality and so on. This is not to say that grooming isn’t evil; it really is wicked. I am simply saying that our entire society is busily grooming all our teenagers, and we have not yet worked out the legal angularities. She can decide to have sex with her boyfriend, for she is her own person and quite mature. She can decide that she is actually a boy now, for she is her own person and quite mature. But if she exercises that maturity in the direction of an older man, then suddenly she is a widdle gwrl.
This is a lunatic inconsistency, and I have ten dollars here that says it will be resolved in favor of the imperialism of lust.
A Brief Interlude
So you tell me. Suppose a second grader in some public school near you decided to transition to a girl. His parents were totally supportive, and wanted to throw a classroom party in order to celebrate the transition—confetti for the cutters, you might call it. Notification of the parents of the other kids in the classroom would be a total infringement of something ACLUish, and any children who were not totally supportive after the fact would be—naturally—registered as “bullies,” a category that is much harder to transition out of. You can’t just announce that you don’t identify as a bully any more.
I would like to interrupt this rant in order to say a few choice words about Christian parents who still have their children in the government schools that are promoting this savagery. And yes, I acknowledge there are still exceptions. I am not talking about you parents in rural Alabama where the school board is made up of all Baptist deacons, the principal is also a Sunday School superintendent, and the music teacher opens assemblies by leading them all in singing Jesus, What a Friend for Sinners. That particular school district is not my concern. My concern has to do with the Christian parents who are subjecting their children to these cheerleaders for mutilators in California, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts, and who are doing so for the same reason that drives the mutilators to mutilate—money. Homeschooling would mean that mom has to give up her job. Private school would mean tuition. Mammon. The same thing that drives the cutters.
The fact that government schools are not facing the economic consequences of a mass exodus of Christians from their schools is a testament to the fatal compromises that have infected a large part of the church. We are complicit. If we were not complicit, none of this would be working.
And by the way, after a couple more years of this, I am even going to start attacking those red state school districts that have their football teams working through the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
That Woke Thing—Another Brief Interlude
Being woke is no piecemeal thing. And so I would like to issue a cautionary word to all those Christians who are finally getting woke on racial reconciliation issues, or getting woke to the siren summons of socialism. If you are getting woke on anything, then you are just one or two wet kisses away from being woke in the wrong bed.
If you think you are just “being biblical,” then it will come as quite a shock to you to discover that all of your hermeneutical subtleties were about as sophisticated as simple Simon going to the fair. The revolution is all of a piece. The whole project stands or falls together. You can’t make the inroads of cultural Marxism disappear simply by scrunching up your eyes, and rubbing your fists in them.
So a word to the woke in any arena assigned to you by the worldlings. You should prefer being awake to being woke. “Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light” (Eph. 5:14). That is Christ who gives the light, not the dim bulbs of the secular establishment.
If you are woke at all, you are part of the parade. If you care what the world thinks of your wokeness, then you have assembled and entered a float in this cavalcade of concupiscence.
Smuggling all the Extras In
So back to the argument. In our lineup of alphabet rights, there was more than a little bit of contraband in those letters that we just started to stack up together. I still remember the old puritanical days when it was just LGB. Our local university even had a gay/straight alliance, as though a simple binary categorization could possibly satisfy a demented culture with a head full of bees. What a repressive bunch we were back then. Gay/straight. Almost as bad as male/female. Then somebody, somewhere, probably the devil, added the T. Ah, the T, of course. It was just a string of letters—right?—and we want the government out of our bedrooms—right?—and so whatever T means, it must be okay. I mean, HR at Hewlett-Packard is being supportive of the T, whatever that is.
And because the sexual revolution is fissiparous and splintery, the Qs were not long in coming, and then genders started to multiply like they were straight bunny rabbits, and Facebook gave you a choice of some 71 gender options, then some genius came up with the + sign, so that we could be preemptively inclusive of whatever the hell was next, and we could do it without winding up with a string of letters that made the whole thing into a clown car revue of letters that nobody could even remember, and nobody could see the end of. Who wants to do hard time because he forgot a letter? And then be busted for a parole violation because he used the wrong pronoun?
So what is entailed in the + sign? That is the genius of it. Whatever your horny little lusts demand of it. I mean, can you imagine that + sign saying no to anybody? The little tramp.
And remember, lust is really bad at impulse control. God is the one who invented the concept of the straight and narrow. “You shall be careful therefore to do as the Lord your God has commanded you. You shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left” (Deut. 5:32, ESV). But the plus sign careth not if you turn aside to the right or to the left.
There is no principle of internal restraint inside that + sign. There are no brakes in that car. There are restraints, but they are all external. As long as it is possible to shock the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie will provide some friction, some resistance. But as soon as the bourgeoisie is worn down, or worn out, or off in reeducation camps for the ideologically unfit, the absence of an internal braking system will become at that time fully apparent.
The necessity of more than two sexual partners was smuggled in under the B, and the ink was hardly dry on the T before there was some poor trans-kid gracing the cover of National Geographic, and so the age of consent barrier was shattered in principle. Throw the Q and the + in there, and I have some additional candidates lined up for you.
So you have signed up for the whole stinking menagerie. LGBTQP+. Deal with it.
From widespread use of child porn, from the mainstreaming efforts of Call Me by My Name, from Roman Polanski, from the use of sexually provocative underage models for major clothing retailers, from Oklahoma state senator Ralph Shortey (a family values conservative) getting busted for child porn and sex trafficking, from the marketing of child sex dolls, from Clinton friend Epstein’s Lolita Express, to the a priori discrediting of those voices who consistently protested at every stage of this apostasy into sexual ruin, we can see that, apart from a spirit of repentance granted by Heaven, we are in no position to, quote, “deal with it.”
But What About . . .?
Now somebody is going to come along and try the tu quoque on me—“what about you?” On more than one occasion somebody has wanted to find out more about this Douglas Wilson character and they have made the mistake of typing my name into that little Google bar. They thereupon discover that I am the purported Friend of Pedophiles, and what about Sitler and Wight, huh, huh, huh??!!
I am actually glad you brought this up because it gives me the opportunity to write about the only thing that matters in all of this inchoate mess, and that is the fact that Jesus is Lord.
But before getting to that good news, one preliminary point should be made. If I were really a friend of pedophilia, if I were genuinely an enabler of that kind of appalling behavior, then this is what you should look for in the coming years. When the P is finally openly attached to that chain of letters in an irrevocable bond, and we all come to realize that the exclusion of P from its rightful place in the alphabetic daisy chain was a grotesque violation of human dignity, and an intolerable and grievous lack of wokeness, what should happen at that point, if the slanders were correct, is that I would be hailed as a pioneer—a conservative voice who was a friend of pedophiles before it was cool.
The reason I would urge you all not to hold your breath is because that will never happen. The reason it will never happen is because the only place anybody can be a friend to any sexual sinner—pedophiles, sodomites, lesbians, fornicators, cross-dressers—is under the blood of Jesus Christ. It is true that I offer the gospel of Christ to repentant pedophiles, just as I offer the gospel of Christ to those who slander me. Christ died for sinners, and that leads to the last point.
And this is why I (and others with me) will not be hailed as heroes when we get to the next stage of our debauched wokery. In this world of ours, this world of unraveling lusts, the smell of repentance, the smell of faith, is the stench of death to those who are perishing. It is only the aroma of life to those who have been turned.
The Restoration of the Image of God:
Mankind was created in the image of God, male and female (Gen. 1:27). In that image, we testify to the one who created us. When our first parents disobeyed, and fell into sin, the result was that this image was marred. It was not eradicated, but it was terribly damaged. We know that the image is still there in a fallen world because God assigns the death penalty to murderers on the basis of it (Gen. 9:6). The image of God is still borne by all the sons of men, and because of our rebellion, we hate the fact that we bear that image.
One of the central ways for expressing that hatred is found in the attempts of our sexual engineers to erase that image, and they think an effective way to do it is by erasing the binary image of male and female. And so they set to work with their knives, and they pass laws making it illegal to point out that their knives are not erasing the image, but rather just leaving scars all over it. Stop saying that, they demand, and bow down to the androgynous ambiguity.
In the meantime, Christ came to work in the opposite direction. He came to restore the image of God in man. He is the bridegroom, and the Christian church is the bride. He lived a perfect, sinless life, so that His obedience could be reckoned to us. He died on the cross so that we could be permitted to die in Him. He was buried in a tomb, so that we could descend down to death in Him. He rose from the dead so that all who believe in Him might be given the gift of rising in Him. In Him, we have salvation, and in Him we realized that salvation and the restoration of the image of God are the same thing. And this is why the Revoice conference, along with all of its defenders, fellow-travelers, and excuse-makers, are standing in the way of the cross of Christ.
The culmination of human history is found in the New Jerusalem, descending like a bride out of Heaven. And the bridegroom is standing there, hands extended, palms up. Our final eschatological and blessed hope is a binary hope. If it is not binary, it is not blessed. It is a heterosexual wedding. Can you not see?
And so we see that the only scars to be found in the renewed image of God are the scars in His hands, His feet, and His side. Every other blemish—among which we must reckon every lust—will be removed, taken away, cleansed, washed, forgiven. The bride will have no scars because her bridegroom has them all.
“And the Spirit and the bride say, Come” (Rev. 22:17).