Fred Clark at Slacktivist, commenting on a lurid fantasy being peddled by conservative Christian commentator Rod Dreher, about gangs of "transgendered" thugs who are, we're told, terrorizing upstanding theater-going Texas suburbanites:
The current trans-panic, like the earlier Satanic panic it imitates, isn't mainly a matter of misinformation that misleads the credulous. It's a fantasy that its proponents want and desire to be true despite, on some fundamental level, already knowing that it's not. They need it to be true because it provides the basis for their identity as the special people, the extraordinarily virtuous, the heroes and champions of righteousness. Take away the fantasy story and what does that make them? They can't bear to think about that. And so they won't.
And that, I am afraid, is "the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils."
As Fred notes, the final quotation is from C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. As I recently asked my "liberal" Catholic brothers and sisters who think it's possible to applaud the papal exhortation on the family Amoris Laetitia, which treats LGBTQ human beings as an invisible part of the human community and vilifies them to the extent that it even sees them: What kind of holiness is bought at the expense of making the lives of a targeted minority group miserable?
Is holiness purchased at such a price even holiness at all?
The graphic: the opening pages of J.G. Chandler's book The Remarkable Story of Chicken Little (Roxbury, MA, 1840), which is in the public domain and is available for sharing at Wikimedia Commons.
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