You May Say to Yourself . . .

You May Say to Yourself . . .

Dec 26, 2022 | Culture

What is the first thing that came into your mind when you read the title of this post? Before I answer about mine, one of my sons is reading through the Bible and recently came to me with a quote from Deuteronomy 8:

17 You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” 18 But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.

He said it was profound, which of course gave me the opportunity to expand on the profundity as is my wont; my wife and kids have had to endure these lectures for decades.

The beauty of Christianity, and Judaism for those who take the faith of their fathers seriously, is that when life is properly understood our accomplishments, including the money we make, leads to humility not pride or arrogance. Any clear-thinking secularist would have to admit their wealth and success included depending on many people without whom their accomplishments would be impossible. Yet without knowing a personal God who in Paul’s words gives all people “life and breath and everything else,” a deep humility in gratitude to God for his blessings is not possible. Everything is better, tastier, better sounding, more beautiful, more gratifying, etc., knowing it comes from the gracious hand of our Creator God.

About the verses, the reason wealth was so important to the Hebrews and the Jews as they came to be called during the Babylonian exile was because of these verses, among others. Wealth was a sign to them of God’s covenant faithfulness, a blessing that confirmed God’s love for them. Jesus changed that equation a bit, but there is nothing glorious or virtuous about poverty. God wants us to create wealth, and as we strive and struggle to earn a living (by painful toil and the sweat of our brow always fighting thorns and thistles), we must always understand through the process of learning and growing that it is the Lord our God who gives us the ability to produce wealth. Knowing that we can be grateful and generous, blessing others with what God has so richly provided.

On to the words. As soon as they came out of my son’s mouth I thought of the song by the Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime.” Now I can’t get it out of my head! As we listened to it, I decided to look at the lyrics and discovered it is Nihilistic in a quirky Talking Heads kind of way. David Byrne is an odd fellow and their songs are like that, quirky if not all quite as Nihilistic. This song just happened to be a perfect contrast to the truth of the Deuteronomy verses and why they lead to mutually exclusive places.

The Talking heads version of reality is quintessential secularism where God, if he’s even there, isn’t relevant to everyday life. Our lives are basically a mystery, so he starts with, “And you may find yourself . . .” As you look at the strangeness that is your life you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?” Who knows!

It seems life in Byrne world has something to do with the vagaries and mystery of water, while things are and always will be, “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.” We must remember “Time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us,” and we just let the days go by, same stuff, but “Here a twister comes, here comes the twister.” And we all know twisters just happen for no rhyme or reason.

The song captures so well the hopelessness of secular life without the living God in Christ. It shouldn’t surprise us that in a culture awash in secularism even though it’s the most prosperous civilization in the history of the world, over 40,000 (45,979 in 2020 to be exact) people a year in America kill themselves, and many more try. Life in secular Byrne world will do that to people who try to live without any ultimate hope. I’m reading through the Psalms now, and as I’m writing this I just came across these words of David in Psalm 63. The contrast to secular Byrne world could not be any greater:

You, God, are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.

2 I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
3 Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
4 I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
5 I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.

Our secular neighbors need this God desperately, and I pray God gives us all opportunities to share him with those who know they have needs nothing in this world can ultimately fulfill.

 

 

DJ Stephen ‘tWitch’ Suicide and the Bankruptcy of Secularism

DJ Stephen ‘tWitch’ Suicide and the Bankruptcy of Secularism

Dec 18, 2022 | Culture

The entertainment world was hit with a suicide last week that appeared inconceivable to the secular minds that inhabit “Hollywood” and most of America. I wasn’t planning on writing anything about it because I have written about suicide here before and asked the question, “In What Kind of Culture Do 45,000 People a Year Commit Suicide?” A bankrupt secular culture—that’s what kind!

I recently finished a chapter on secularism in the book I’m currently working on, and I’ll quote myself: “Secularism is dead. It has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” That’s why I’m writing this post, and because of the quote below. I came across it in a book I’d read and it makes a stunning comparison showing us just how bankrupt secularism really is. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the answer for a bankrupt culture, and what every secular person is looking for whether they know it or not. It’s for you and me to share the good news, the great, glorious, wonderful news with them!

This suicide, like every one of them, is of course tragic on so many levels. Not just for his wife, but imagine what this does to his two biological children and stepdaughter. Ugh! It makes me so angry. This guy who had absolutely “everything” the American dream could offer abandoned his family and puts a bullet in his head. As I said in my previous post on this topic, I can’t “judge” the man because there but for the grace of God . . . . However, God calls us to discernment and to be wise about the ways of evil in our midst—to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, and to call spades, spades. The spade I’m calling a dark ace is the modern world’s established religion of secularism, and how it destroys everything in its wake.

I read this in Nicole Mering’s book Awake Not Woke not long after I learned about the suicide, and it’s stunning, but didn’t surprise me at all:

Viktor Frankl contrasts the lack of neurosis and suicidal thoughts among the prisoners in Auschwitz with the growing phenomenon of suicidal thoughts from teens living with ease in modern Austria. “We are living in a society, either in terms of an affluent society or in terms of a welfare state. . . . These types of societies are out to satisfy each and every human need. Except for the one need, the most basic and fundamental need. . . . the need for meaning.” Suffering is intimately tied to meaning. Serial gratification is intimately bound up with despair.

And Frankl said this in 1979. I can’t think of a better description of modern American and Western culture than the pursuit of “serial gratification.” Think of the child who gets everything they want. If your objective is to create a monster, a little Varuca Salt, there is no better way to do it. This is happening on a societal level by a secular culture that believes what it sells, that true meaning and satisfaction can be found in this life if only . . . . fill in the blank. If only I was . . . .

  • smart enough
  • good looking enough
  • thin enough
  • rich enough
  • tough enough
  • sensitive enough
  • sexy enough
  • well-dressed enough
  • well-read enough
  • loved and accepted
  • appreciated
  • Etc.

If only I . . . .

  • had a college degree
  • had a bigger how
  • owned a house
  • had a nicer car
  • had bigger muscles
  • had a smaller behind
  • had bigger breasts
  • had a smaller nose
  • had nicer hair
  • was a great athlete
  • had more money in the bank
  • had a better position in the company
  • had more respect among my peers
  • was more well known in my profession
  • travelled more
  • had a better personality
  • had a girlfriend
  • had a boyfriend
  • had a husband
  • had a wife who really loved me
  • had a husband who really love me
  • had kids who weren’t spoiled rotten brats
  • was rich and famous
  • Etc.

Here’s the deal too many Christians really don’t grasp, and non-Christians can’t: Without Christ, nothing will ultimately deliver on what it promises. No person, no thing, no circumscance, no place, nothing. People get by well enough pretending it does, but they lie to themselves and others. Our lives are defined ultimately by one thing, our relationship to our Creator, and only in Christ, only in the gospel, can we be reconciled to Him and know true meaning and satisfaction, true joy and hope and purpose, true love, true gratitude, Truth itself. Blaise Pascal said it perfectly and succinctly:

There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.

We are the life raft in the dark and turbulent sea of secularism for our neighbors, and if they are willing, we can rescue them by introducing them to Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who told us 2,000 years ago:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

 

Ubiquitous Homosexuality and The Sinner

Ubiquitous Homosexuality and The Sinner

Oct 18, 2022 | Culture

What percentage of Americans self-identify as gay or lesbian? I asked some friends and family several years ago, and the answers ranged from 25 to 40%. They were surprised when I said the actual number (according to a massive CDC study) is under 2%. Just the other day I asked a young Christian friend, and she said 30%. Whatever the actual number, it’s a small fraction of the population. Why the disconnect? The simple answer is popular culture. What we know as “Hollywood” is relentless in its determination to normalize homosexuality, and I’ll make up a word, ubiquitize it.

My latest encounter with this comes from the Netflix series I recently wrote about, The Sinner. God is pretty much persona non grata, especially in any way it would help the hapless scarred and broken people in the stories. If anything, he lends to the scarring. It’s a secular show written by secular people for a secular audience, thus no positive portrayal of God, but you can be sure we’ll see positive portrayals of homosexuality! In the third episode of season 4, we see two men kiss at the end of the episode. I threw the clicker at the TV, metaphorically. The scene was completely gratuitous. There was nothing, no mention of the two guys whatsoever in the next episode. It was  blatant Hollywood homosexual normalizing. Whether intended for this purpose is irrelevant; it is what they are doing nonetheless.

Does my visceral response mean I’m “homophobic” or hate homosexuals? Moral judgment doesn’t necessarily indicate fear or hatred. In fact, there but for the grace of God . . . . I’ve now had 44(!) years of God helping me (forcing, actually) to take the log out of my own eye, so the specs in others’ eyes are less offensive or threatening to me. So, it’s not homosexuality per se that ticks me off, it’s producers and writers imposing it on every story. Entirely too many shows have an agenda, and it’s exhausting.

As a Christian I believe homosexuality is a moral evil, but in the Apostle Paul’s words it is also unnatural, different from heterosexual sin (Rom. 1):

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

The word Paul uses in Greek for unnatural is exactly that, what is not according to nature. Back when the Supreme Court was redefining marriage, I had a friend who was convinced the Bible didn’t condemn homosexuality, and no amount of quoting verses would convince him otherwise, so I used a different tack. I asked him if he’d ever heard of the word telos, a word Aristotle uses for the purpose or end of a thing. He said no. After I explained it, I asked him, isn’t it apparent that the particular body part male homosexuals use was designed for the specific purpose of disposing waste from the human body, and not sexual pleasure? He gave me a puzzled look and said, “I never thought of that.” Of course you haven’t.

The Bible couldn’t convince him, but Aristotle did!

God through Scripture doesn’t identify sin whimsically, or arbitrarily, as if the only reason something is wrong is because God says it is. That is true, but it’s also the way he created the structure of reality to work, the way it’s supposed to work, as is the moral order a reflection of his being. Thus homosexuality is a perversion against God’s creation. But from 21st century entertainment we would think it’s not a perversion at all, but every bit as natural and normal as sex between a man and a woman. It is obvious it’s not, and everyone knows it.

We have to be programmed to think perversion is normal, vice a virtue, and that’s been Hollywood’s plan for a long time, at least since the TV show Friends, which started airing in 1994. A culture’s entertainment is a powerful tool to shape a people’s worldview.

When I was writing my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I used homosexuality (along with smoking) to show how the secular culture transforms our plausibility structures about things, or what we see as real and normal and just the way things are. The plausibility structures we get through the culture determine for us what seems normal to us, just the way things are, and more importantly, how they’re supposed to be. When we watch The Sinner, the message we’re supposed to absorb is that homosexuality is normal, good, and common, and Hollywood has been hugely successful in that endeavor. Just ask your friends the question that began this post.

Illustrative of how effective the propaganda is can be seen in Barack Obama. When he ran for president in 2008, he had to lie, claiming he was against same-sex marriage. His left-wing base knew he didn’t believe that, but he had to say it because the American people weren’t ready for the homosexual is normal, good, and common message. Another indication they weren’t ready happened the same year. Voters in the reliably Democrat state of California passed Proposition 8 which defined marriage in the California constitution as between a man and a woman. Yet, by 2015 the American people had been so successfully indoctrinated by Hollywood, among other cultural messaging, that a Supreme Court case giving same-sex couples the “right” to marry was made the law of the land.

Many conservatives and Christians Chicken Littles at the time wailed that the sky was falling, but marriage had been eviscerated decades before with the passing of no-fault divorce laws and the “sexual revolution.” And because homosexuals are in fact a tiny percentage of the population, and very few want to be married, especially men, it’s completely irrelevant to almost all Americans. Unless, of course, you watch TV. Then it’s everywhere.

 NOTE: Picture is from The Sinner

The Sinner

The Sinner

Oct 13, 2022 | Culture

Despite what you think, this post isn’t about me, although the title might imply that. It’s about a Netflix series called The Sinner which my wife and I have recently been watching. We just finished season 3, and I learned season 4 is coming to Netflix this week. The show stars Bull Pullman as Detective Harry Ambrose, an emotionally scarred detective, thus the title, and he has the perfect vibe for the character. He does what typical detectives do, but his emotional baggage allows him to connect in a unique way with the also emotionally scarred people he’s investigating. He kind of reminds me of another detective those of my generation would be familiar with, Columbo, but with a lot of problems. His issues, coming from his dysfunctional upbringing, help him to relate in some way to those he’s investigating, which in turn helps him deal with his own demons.

Dealing with terribly broken people, the show has themes of redemption and forgiveness, and the ongoing effects of sin. It reminds me of what Moses wrote in Numbers 14:18:

‘The LORD is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.’

At first reading we might consider this is unfair. Why should children suffer for their parents’ sins? When we think about it for a minute, though, how could it be any other way. He isn’t saying the Lord visits punishment arbitrarily down through the generations, but that the sins of parents have implications in the lives of their children, and their children’s children and so on. It’s an obvious fact of life, and one portrayed skillfully in The Sinner. Sin always has consequences, even generational consequences.

What is not in the show, however, is God, not even a hint, except in the third season which is an interesting exploration into the nihilistic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. So God, in effect, becomes a character by his absence. I couldn’t help thinking of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and his character Raskolnikov who took his God-less view of the universe to what he thought was its logical conclusion. I appreciate that a TV series in 2022 would tackle something like that. You wonder if Bill Pullman’s character in response might see God as an answer to his emotional pain and confusion, but he doesn’t, or at least he hasn’t so far.

While the title implies something religious, The Sinner is a typical secular modern drama, a broken and messed up man trying to figure things out as he interacts with other broken and messed up people. God obviously isn’t relevant to that process. That’s how secularism on a cultural level perpetuates itself. God isn’t denounced a la the angry atheist, he’s just irrelevant. That is powerful cultural messaging, even though the writers don’t intend it to be. They’re just secular people writing secular drama for other secular people who would never think to ask, a la Where’s Waldo, where’s God? As Christians, we think leaving out God is as dumb as making a Where’s Waldo picture with no Waldo! He’s gotta be in there somewhere, right? Nope.

The writers and directors of secular entertainment don’t intend to program secularism into those who watch, but it happens at a subconscious level, nonetheless. As I’ve written here before, that’s how plausibility structures are built in the modern human mind. Unless someone gets a consistent dose of counter programming, secularism is what seems real to them. Watching The Sinner, they would never think to ask, why isn’t God part of this drama. Like most people outside the church in the Western world, they are seeped in the secular stew all their lives, so God is an afterthought at best.

Almost everyone in the West “believes in God” because they know intuitively that atheistic materialism (matter is all there is) is absurd. They can’t believe everything came from nothing, but whoever or whatever God is, he’s just not relevant to their lives. This is inconceivable to we Christians because life without the constant presence of God in our thinking isn’t life. But as Christians, we need to be aware of the secular programming of the culture because it affects us, and we too are immersed in that stew; there’s no escaping it.

A rich vein of examples of such programing could be mined in our lives, but The Sinner offers one up with no digging required. The message we would take from the show is that the problems in our lives are not inside of us, not in our sinful human inclinations and rebellion against our Creator God but are outside of us, and primarily caused by others. If not by others, then by circumstances beyond our control. We are, to put it another way, victims. Thus, Detective Ambrose is consistently looking back at his upbringing, his psychologically disturbed mother and absent father, and the memories haunt him. But there being no Jesus, no mercy, no grace, no unconditional love of God in Christ, no divine rationale for forgiveness, he grapples as best he can. Season 3 ends with him weeping uncontrollably over the death of a nihilistic murderer, and we’re left to wonder why exactly he would do that.

As Christians we realize the answer Detective Ambrose is looking for is the gospel, which is the good news that can give him the only answer to all the emotional pain life has dealt him.

Last Sunday our pastor in the sermon said something that gets to the heart of that answer. He said, our problem isn’t others sinning against us, or us sinning against others, but our sinning against a holy God. Once we are reconciled to our Creator God in Christ, we’ll be able to see that it is not the effects of sin that is our problem, or the people or circumstances that cause those problems, but that we’re the problem. King David after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband killed to try to cover it up penned Psalm 51. In it he wrote these amazing words that indicate he understood the essence of our sin, that it is primarily an offense against God:

4 Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
and justified when you judge.

When we too understand this, no secular programing of an irrelevant God will tempt us to see ourselves as victims. That is good news indeed!

CRU Goes Full-On Woke

CRU Goes Full-On Woke

Jul 21, 2022 | Culture, Uncategorized

I Knew when Campus Crusade for Christ changed their name to CRU in 2011 it wasn’t a good sign. I can understand that the word crusade had some negative connotations in the Middle East, but only because Muslims and too many Christians accepted a faulty interpretation of The Crusades as Christian oppression of Muslims. The story is much more complicated and fails to consider that Islam is a religion of military conquest. Be that as it may, Campus Crusade had done just fine with that name for the previous 60 years, and it didn’t seem to hamper its mission. What this name change reflected is a bowing down to cultural shibboleths in the name of Christian sensitivity and compassion. They are not the only Christian organization or church to destroy their real counter-cultural witness in the name of good intentions, not by far.

Fast forward to 2019 and CRU’s annual conference. The reason I choose 2019 is because 2020 and ‘21 probably didn’t happen, and I just happen to come across the following video learning about CRU going full-on woke (thank you, Maya!). When you watch, you’ll see a compilation of videos that a young man, Jon Harris, put together, and you simply have to see/hear it to believe it. When you do, you’ll understand why I put the adjectival phrase full-on before woke.

Jon does some commentary after the video, and one thing he says is that there is no gospel in any of this. This is a tragedy, considering what the actual mission of Campus Crusade was for sixty years prior to 2011. I have no idea how quickly wokeness took over the leadership of the organization, but clearly, they’ve fully bought into wokeness. The reason there can be no gospel is because the entire woke ideology is born of Marxism, specifically the bastardized version now known as cultural Marxism. At the heart of Marxism is two things. One is perpetual grievance against societal and cultural “power structures,” whatever they or that might be, so the people will have what follows from that, revolutionary consciousness 24/7. There can be no forgiveness, mercy, or grace because that mitigates against the fundamental goal of Marxism, which is peretual revolution. I’m not saying any of this is well thought out, especially by well-meaning, sincere Christians, but this drives them whether they know it or not.

I recently read a book called, Awake, Not Woke by Noelle Mering. In it she calls wokeness “an ideology of rupture,” which is spot on. From her introduction, she continues, “The term woke refers to the state of being alert and attuned to the layers of pervasive oppression in society . . . . Specific acts of injustice are used to serve the larger goal of furthering the ideology that sees all of human interaction as a power contest . . . . [It] is an ideology with fundamentalist and even cult-like characteristics that is on a collusion course with Christianity.” CRU might want to consider if such a contention is true or not. Mering says the ultimate target of the woke revolt is God himself in Christ. Ouch! If it’s true. CRU staff and leadership who buy wokeness, would likely deny all or most of this, or that they are even “woke,” but you watch/listen to the video, and you come to your own conclusion.

Libertarians are Not Conservatives: Dave Ruben and Same-Sex Surrogacy

Libertarians are Not Conservatives: Dave Ruben and Same-Sex Surrogacy

Jul 10, 2022 | Culture

We live in very strange times. For all recorded history the peoples of the world, no matter what their view of the universe and religious outlook, from the most rank deranged heathens to the most pristine moralistic religious people, believed in the fundamental duality of biology. In other words, there is man and there is woman, nothing in between, two sexes. I used to wonder why certain conservative intellectuals warned us against using the term gender. I didn’t understand what they meant until the transgender insanity broke out of Western academia into wider Western culture. Since gender is a sociological construct and not tied to biological reality, it is ultimately malleable. The concept would have mystified anyone who lived before the current post-modern generation, as would a related concept unknown in all of human history until now, same-sex “marriage.” The two ideas are connected by the same moral framework, which does not, cannot, include our Creator God.

The inspiration for this post is a piece in Life Site News about popular conservative political and cultural commentator Dave Ruben, and the decision he made with his “husband” to have a baby. Thus, same-sex surrogacy, meaning a woman has agreed to have “their” baby. The title of the piece was click bait for me: Why is the Daily Wire promoting same-sex surrogacy? That is a very good question! The subtitle of the piece reflects my opinion as well: “Same-sex surrogacy is a grave distortion of the family, and intrinsically evil.” Surrogacy is morally problematic in general, but to put a child into a “marriage” without a mother and father is morally reprehensible. And in case you don’t know, The Daily Wire is a conservative website founded by Ben Shapiro and film director Jeremy Boreing, and I wanted to know why they were promoting something that is clearly not conservative. I was surprised to find out this promoting came during an interview with none other than Jordan Peterson, who I gather is a new contributor to The Daily Wire. Before I address the moral framework, I stumbled upon this short video of Doug Wilson basically eviscerating the arguments of both Ruben and Peterson:

I’ve known since I first realized I was a conservative when Reagan was elected (just between you and me, I voted for Carter, but not a word to anyone) I was not a libertarian, but I’ve struggled ever since to explain exactly why. The debate between conservativism and libertarianism has existed since the dawn of the modern conservative movement with the founding of National Review by Bill Buckley (RIP to both). Out of that came something called fusionism whcih held traditionalist conservatism and libertarianism together for decades. It’s been a marriage of convenience, but something fundamental separates the two so the marriage could never be consummated. The author of the Life Site piece in critiquing the argument Ruben and Peterson make explains why fusionism ultimately doesn’t work. The justification they are making for same-sex surrogacy comes “from the faulty libertarian emphasis on choice over morality.”

The reason libertarians believe choice is more important than morality is because, they argue, without the choice to be moral or immoral, one’s action can’t have any moral meaning. This is of course true. If someone points a gun at my head and threatens to kill me if I don’t walk the little old lady across the street, my doing so has no moral value; I was coerced. We are, however, rarely confronted with any kind of coercion to be moral or immoral, but constantly confronted with choices whether to be moral or not, do right or wrong, be good or bad, tell the truth or lie. Putting my self-interests and self-fulfillment over the interests of children is deeply immoral, and that is exactly what Ruben and his “husband” are doing. Wilson’s assessment of their arguments demonstrates their weakness, and futility, but also why there is nothing conservative about them. As the author of the Life Site piece points out, “there is no conservatism when you eschew moral tradition and natural law,” and both come primarily from one source, The Bible. Without God there is nothing to conserve. Libertarianism, to the contrary, can do just fine without God because the liberty to choose is in effect their God, their highest good.

The founders of America were most definitely not libertarians. They fought a revolution, gave their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the cause of liberty, but it had nothing to do with libertarianism. They knew without “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” there could be no liberty, and they held “these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Every person who read these words at the time had no doubt Jefferson, maybe the most Deist among the founders, meant the Creator God of the Bible. He knew without the moral compass of Christianity there could be no “nation conceived in liberty,” in the words of Lincoln. The supreme law of the land depended on Christianity as it’s moral North Star. As John Adams, the second President of the United States declared, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He too meant the religious people of the Old and New Testaments.

I’m grateful for the many liberals, like Ruben and Peterson, who have moved to the political and cultural right over the last five or ten years, and who believe in truth over “The Narrative.” I’m happy to be co-belligerents with them against the Marxist woke left and the globalist elites who despise our liberty, and hate America as founded. That, however, doesn’t mean we call evil good, and good evil, even if it comes from those who claim the mantel of “conservative.” The homosexual and transgender agenda come from the same evil source, the same (im)moral framework, and you can’t accept one and reject the other; they are a package deal. Conservatism without the package is not conservative.