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Nearly 30% of American women aged 18 to 26 identify as LGBT—three times the number of men in their cohort. A recent Gallup poll showed a clear majority (56%) of Americans aged 18 to 29 affirming the fluidity of gender identity. This is no surprise, given that their generation has been propagandized by gender ideologues in schools and in popular culture—in fact, by events like the Paris Olympics opener.
These are women in their peak childbearing years, coming of age in a culture and a civilization entering a fertility-rate death spiral. No country that wants a future for itself can allow that kind of mind virus to infect its young. It might be too late. In his 1947 classic Family And Civilization, Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman examined the way changing family forms affected the fates of the Roman and Greek empires. His historically informed sociological analysis concluded that civilizational collapse is presaged by a dissolution of families, as well as by a loosening of sexual mores, and a rise in both androgyny and homosexuality.
Zimmerman was writing at the start of what many in the West today consider a golden age. France had entered the Trente Glorieuses, its thirty years of rapid postwar economic growth, and the United States was rocketing forward into the American Century. Yet, the sociologist could not unsee the patterns in the tea leaves. He wrote, “The only thing that seems certain is that we are again in one of those periods of family decay in which civilization is suffering internally from the lack of a basic belief in the forces which make it work.”
Watching the degrading Paris ceremony on Friday, with its exaltation of sexual transgression and regicide, brought to mind Hannah Arendt’s line about how uncontrolled transgression laid the groundwork for 20th century totalitarianism: “The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.”
What happened on Friday night in Paris was a globally televised dismantling and mockery of one of the core symbols of Western civilization, as a manifestation of France’s national character. The etymological opposite of “symbolic” is “diabolic.” Draw your own conclusions. But do not miss the symbolism here, when, hours after the opening ceremony, the 18th arrondissement of Paris lost electrical power. The only thing left illuminated was the Basilica of the Sacre-Coeur, built in the 19th century in reparation for the crimes of the Revolution.The light shines in the darkness, and even in Paris, the darkness did not overcome it.
Rod Dreher is an American journalist who writes about politics, culture, religion, and foreign affairs. He is author of a number of books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Benedict Option (2017) and Live Not By Lies (2020), both of which have been translated into over ten languages. He is director of the Network Project of the Danube Institute in Budapest, where he lives. Email him at dreher@europeanconservative.com.