The Morning's Reading

I ran across the same article twice this morning. Once in the May number of Chronicles and again in extensive quotation in The Wanderer's "From the Mail" column. An omen, to be sure. So herewith the quoted section of Thomas Fleming's Chronicles article:

The sexual revolution is coming to an end, and it is clear that the revolutionaries have won. Naturally, there are a few pockets of resistance here and there, but the clerical sex abuse scandal – some of it manufactured by the media – is finishing off whatever residual power the Church had to discipline the morals of hedonist Americans, while, judging by their books, movies, and TV shows, conservative Protestants, even as they are repudiating secular humanism, are rushing to embrace the modern world. Many evangelicals express their capitulation every week, dancing in the aisles before the god of the big screen, and no serious Christian who has watched the Trinity Broadcasting Network, with its fake news shows, its phony history, and just-so theology. . . can expect to find allies among the sentimentalized and pop-addled members of its viewing audience. . . .

The revolution who made us who we are began during the great revolt against Christianity known as the Renaissance, and it entered an acute phase with the French Revolution. Although it has taken many forms and aimed at so varied a set of targets --- monarchy, aristocracy, the Catholic Church (then all Christianity), classical education, political liberty, and free enterprise, the revolution has hardly ever deviated from its most basic goal: the liberation of what one of the most virulent revolutionaries termed the libido. From the erotic escapades of Lorenzo de' Medici to the orgies in the Palais Royal in 18th-century Paris to the efforts of D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley to tear down the last barriers, sexual revolutionaries have devoted themselves to destroying Christian marriage. . . .

[W]hen ordinary people, ignorant of their own traditions, turn to government as the final arbiter of problems within the family, they are acting out a scenario scripted by revolutionaries such as [Bolshevik] Alexandra Kollontai, for whom fornication was only a means to an end, and the end was a socialist state in which the family was only a holding pen for the working cattle.

Chronicles only puts a bit of each issue up on the website. And the May issue isn't up at all yet. Odds are, you will need to get your own copy, which you can do here given how extremely unlikely it is that your local library, Borders, B&N, or whatever passes for a local newstand these days will carry it.