The devil grips a small midwestern city by the throat

The city of 44,000 where I live has been in the national news way too much over the last few years.

I say "too much" because it's been for bad reasons.

Let me quickly set the table once again for what the general cultural atmosphere is like. The 800-pound gorilla in the local economy is a Fortune 200 company in the power-generation business. It's mostly known for making the world's finest Diesel engines. Its shares trade on the NYSE, but one family, going back to the company's founding, has owned a great deal of it, and members of that family have been high-ranking officers in it. The one at the helm from the 1940s to the 1980s was somewhat nationally known. (In 1968, Esquire ran a cover story on him, entitled "This Man Should Be the Next US President".) He was the first lay president of the National Council of Churches, he sat on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was once dubbed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the most progressive businessman in America. He loved modernist architecture, and made the city showcase of it.

He established a corporate culture that has lived on past his own era. The last several CEOs and other top executives have come from the nation's most prestigious business schools, and, as is made clear from their pronouncements on matters such as "sustainability" and "diversity," fully absorbed the hooey about those matters dispensed during their educations.


The current US Vice President, Mike Pence, is from here. Because he signed a religious-freedom bill that the Indiana legislature sent him in 2013 while he was governor, he has been deemed "anti-gay" by the most influential cultural arbiters in our society.

So said cultural arbiters are having a field day over a local high-school senior getting academic credit for organizing a LBGT "pride" event, to be held next month - in Mike Pence's hometown, doncha know!

The most rancid example I've come across of this gloating coverage appears at Cosmopolitan. I'm not linking to it. The author's name is Hannah Smothers. If you're so inclined, it should be easy to Google. The tone of the piece becomes apparent from the tag line under the title characterizes the organizer as "another teenage girl being an absolute badass." And then the first line of the piece itself reads: "Teenage girls know how to get s--- done." It lauds as admirable teen-girl achievements, "spearhead[ing] national gun control protests and creat[ing] software to help women find abortion clinics."

Consider the layers of cultural rot presented here. There is the vulgar language. There is the fact that civic leaders in our city, as well as local news media, are now in the position of having to choose whether to deal with the article, and what tone to take in doing so. (I have a sense that I know how that's going to go.) Then there is this sick adulation of adolescence for its own sake, an imparting of nobility and moral purity to those who are, from the perspective of learning over an entire lifetime, basically blank slates.

Then there's the Mike Pence angle. Pence actually stands in as the embodiment of what the Left deems as an evil force to be extinguished.

He recently filled that function at this year's Oscars awards show:

[Within] Jimmy Kimmel's fetid stew of ugliness, smugness and banality at last night's Oscars awards show . . . one particular remark of Kimmel's has stuck with me throughout the day, namely, this:

"We don't make films like 'Call Me By Your Name' for money. We make them to upset Mike Pence," Kimmel said.

Let's get real. The bottom line of all this is the removal of the notion of sin from acceptable societal discourse.

There are a lot of aspects of Christian doctrine that we might want to be other than what they are (Hell comes to mind), but acting like they don't exist, and mocking those who assert that they do doesn't make them any less real. What Romans 1 says about natural and unnatural ways for men and women to relate to each other must be grappled with.

Again, I say, this is not a matter of bigotry. Christians will not be cornered into a defensive crouch, made to preface anything they say with, "Look, I have gay friends and this is not an issue." Of course, Christians often have gay friends. Being Christian doesn't stop you from being friends with anybody.

I've also mentioned before that a sizable portion of black clergy in post-America understands Christian doctrine regarding homosexuality, so the attempt to conflate these demographics doesn't wash.

And Christians, contrary to what the Left would have you believe, don't judge, or, at least, are commanded not to. A Christian understands the primacy of volition in human behavior and the motives behind it. Our freedom is the second-greatest gift we have, right behind our lives. So a Christian is going to understand that his or her non-Christian friends are going to make choices based on their own sense of what serves them. It's important to pray for them, yes, but we know it's futile to think we can change them. That's the Holy Spirit's job.

Now, here's the rub: In a civil society, in situations of real friendship, that respect has to work both ways. The gay person has to accord his or her Christian friend the respect of acknowledging the embrace of an understanding of sin. For heaven's sake (pun intended), do we not all have friends about whom we think, "I wish that person didn't have this or that aspect to his lifestyle, or hadn't made this or that moral choice, but I still think of this person as one of my close pals"?


No, the point of our supposed betters is to shame us into tossing out the basis for Christian faith.

And a small Midwestern city is going to have to decide whether to give that effort its official endorsement.

This is supposed to be red-state territory, but there is nowhere in post-America that is immune to demonic permeation.