Desecration’s Path

 Desecration’s Path

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) Feb. 25, 2023

            In his notable biography of Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, Timothy Colton describes Yeltsin’s boyhood, accentuating the poverty, police brutality, and other hardships that Yeltsin’s family endured at the hands of the Communist Party. When Yeltsin’s father was arrested and imprisoned for “anti-communist agitation,” Yeltsin, his mother and younger siblings experienced grinding poverty. It is little wonder that after edging his way into politics, serving in many administrative positions and eventually being invited to join the administration of Mikhail Gorbechev, Yeltsin commenced to do everything he could to dissolve the communist system. Colton points out that Yeltsin was driven by memories of what communism’s labor camps had done to his family and to all other Russian families, particularly those in the Urals where Yeltsin grew up.

            One might ask just what has been the lasting effect of government, whether totalitarian or democratic, on the family? In totalitarian nations, the answer is clear. The village rules. Its chieftains, whether in the jungle or in industrialized advanced nations such as China and Russia, run the show, even, as in China, telling families how many children they can have. In democratic nations the appearance is that the family is an honored institution, but drip, drip, drip has been the historical reality of anti-family policy even in Western Europe and America. The family is being desecrated.

             To desecrate is to profane, to mistreat, or to diminish anything that is viewed as having high purpose. Desecration typically regards principles, institutions, or symbols that have served as honored landmarks in a given culture. Freedom of speech and obedience to parents are principles. The family, the school, the church, and the law are institutions. Flags and in many cases buildings are symbols. But which of these is the most foundational? Which came first? Which is the most influential toward a child, no matter what kind of government his or her family lives under?

            The family preceded the tribe. It comprised a little unit of government that preceded the village. For purposes probably practical and beneficial, villages united to form governmental territories. Territories merged to become societal entities called states or nations. All the while except perhaps in America the village and its chieftains or the great nation and its emperor became the focus of attention. Rendering unto Caesar became onerous. Government policies such as taxation and regulation of every stripe undermined the family. Enter, even in supposed democracies, the nanny state.

            It is reported that former president Jimmy Carter is approaching death. We should wish him and his family well. As careful students of our own governance we might want to recall that it was Carter’s Conference on the Families in 1977 that opened the door to the re-defining of family. Ostensibly held “to discuss ideas for family policy” and to garner the support of conservatives, particularly Catholics, the three-session conference became a brawl. With gay rights activists and feminists in attendance, the goal soon became “to decide what constitutes a legitimate family.” Ever since the Carter presidency the word family, like male and female, has been in flux.

            No matter what the crazy left wants or likes, no matter if “Heather has two mommies,” every person on the planet has a mother and a father. Is this fact alone not enough to indicate, yea prove, what a child needs and was intended by nature and nature’s God to have? With a president leading the way in every facet of our sexual chaos (gay marriage, transgenderism, etc.), with many public schools and practically all universities joining in on the chorus, and with pro sports and corporations lending unabated support, it should be easy to see where this path of desecration has led. It has led to “Think as I think or you are abominably wicked; you are a toad,” as Stephen Crane put it in his shortest poem. It has led to the desecration of family and marriage, to the village (the government) offering to take care of our babies within months after they are born, and to dependency. It has also led to tyranny fostered by the elites of academia, sports, and corporatism.

            Russia is still ruled by a brute, but Yelsin, as president of Russia, made life much better for that part of the world that has had a sordid history. As for Stephen Crane, he ended his 5-line poem with the words, “”I will then be a toad.” 

            When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who paid with his life for opposing Hitler, came to America in 1939, he stated in a letter to a friend, “There is no theology here. Christians have become an accommodating lot.” Maybe Americans of all faiths should ponder Bonheoffer lest the desecration continue.