Path to destruction

Enough about my wedding: The big news is Marvel Comics X-Men superhero Northstar got married this June to his longtime boyfriend Kyle, prompting DC Comics to push its own Green Lantern character out of the closet.

Things are moving faster now. In the early days homosexuals came hat in hand, kissing up to the media, testifying gravely on NPR that they were gay by an accident of birth. Their gayness was as fixed and ineluctable as gravity.

Fast-forward 30 years and the "fixed" part is so passé: Now we swing both ways and it's all good. The cheat is never pointed out, of course, nor even brought to mind. We were had, but like Jeremiah said: "They were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush" (6:15).

I know of a woman who left her family for another woman, having evidently discovered some latent gene for lesbianism that had slept quietly through four pregnancies and decades of a normal marriage. I'm nostalgic for the simpler genetics of the '70s.

No, all that is over now. All the charade of apologia, pseudo-science, nature-nurture discussions, ginned-up experts, and pandering to social sensibilities-none of it is necessary anymore. At some point philosophy was tossed in the dumpster on the way to the bathhouse. Everybody suddenly looked at each other and said, "Hey, let's just all be bad, OK?"

I had an uncle by marriage who lived in the poor side of town and insinuated his way into the family. I was a child and remember him standing in the doorway of my grandparents' grand old house, not daring even to step over the threshold without permission. In the end, when he had married my plain-featured aunt and my grandparents had died, he was running the family business (into insolvency), and his wife braved cold mornings to warm his Cadillac so he could get into a heated car, as he bedded half the town.

"If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (Psalm 11:3).

How are the foundations destroyed? I pondered. Think termites. First come legions of them, and their best work goes on behind the scenes. By the time you notice your house is honeycombed with holes, it is as brittle as a sugar confection.

Think avalanches. The stresses of weight and shear and gravity are building a long time before some natural trigger finally overloads the snowpack; then it all comes tumbling down. God only knows when the tensile strength of a corrupted nation is reached.

Once they would have been indignant at the suggestion of a connection to the dungeons and fantasy rooms of mid-town Manhattan; now they celebrate it on mainstream programming. See how easily, Wormwood, without the slightest resistance, LGBT became acceptable, the "B" and the "T" riding the coattails of "L" and "G" on nothing more than an acronym.

Homosexuals had to win the winsome word "community" by a thousand numbing repetitions on a thousand talk shows, yet the BDSM crowd co-opted it overnight. Once a shock barrier is broken, the subsequent ones fall like dominoes and shame parades brazenly in the land.

Karl Marx was high-minded and philosophical. The end of his vision was the crass spectacle of looting Russian manor houses and raiding the larder.

"The land that you are entering, to take possession of it, is a land impure with the impurity of the peoples of the lands, with their abominations that have filled it from end to end with their uncleanness" (Ezra 9:11).

When One Million Moms complained about homosexual appropriation of comic book superheroes that their children might read, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) replied: "From Christian churches to sports fields, to now even fictional comic book worlds, our culture overwhelmingly supports gay and lesbian Americans and that's what anti-gay groups like this are working against."

GLAAD got that impression about churches from somewhere. Let us not imagine ourselves impervious to the forces that have brought the collapse of the supporting beams around us. Things are moving at breakneck speed now. "Wham! Bam! Slam!" The only escape from the avalanche is Christ. But "if you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all" (Isaiah 7:9).

Email aseupeterson@worldmag.com