This week, in my neighborhood, a non-orthodox rabbi and cantor sanctified in a religious ceremony the declaration of a person to be non-binary, sexless, neither male nor female. 

Half of those Americans who hear this story will think it’s just some passing fad or maybe a nice new energizing twist on religion which often feels a bit worn and stilted. Many will actually feel that it’s a wonderful new movement toward moral elevation, progressive values, liberalism, social justice, the bending the arc of history toward the good. I’d presume the rabbi and cantor feel they are hearing the words of a good and caring God, words muffled or hidden for four thousand years of Jewish history -- “go out my human creation, celebrate and sanctify those who feel they are not a man or woman.” Uhh, what happened to the part about “I created humans, male and female and that was Good?”

This new attack on America is not cute. It’s not progressive. In essence, it's actually cruel.  It’s a regressive return to a pre-Biblical, pre-Enlightenment, prescientific worldview, a view spoken about in the opening chapters of the Bible. It is a return to the world of darkness and chaos before God in his love brought light and order to the universe.  Only after order was accomplished did He (not Xe or They) go on to create man in his image. The cruelty lies in the call to chaos and disorder such a mindset and religious service engenders.

One of the fundamental parts of Judaism and the western culture it helped to spawn is the concept of order and distinction in the world. Good is different and separate from evil, animal from man, holy from unholy, right from wrong and, vitally, male is essentially distinct from female. There are no other choices than male and female in humans or any vertebrate species for that matter. Our kids are not “assigned” one of 150 genders at birth. This concept is moronic hogwash, a return to the darkness, ignorance, chaos, and disorder we humans struggled for millennia to crawl from.

And from whence does all this come from here in 21^st-century America? Where do all these well-intentioned men and women come from pushing this incredibly destructive nonsense on our kids, religious congregations, and American communities?  It comes from a strain of malevolent values that have invaded modern America, including our synagogues and churches. This is the variant of American Marxism. 

The traditional form of Marxism practiced by barbarians like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao did not accomplish the overthrow of the liberal, Judeo-Christian, wealthy peoples of the West. Marx’s ideas were based primarily on economics and hatred for the bourgeois capitalist wealth producers.  His views only helped direct and encourage the true believers of this new secular pagan ideology to murder, impoverish, and enslave hundreds of millions of people over decades.  

Despite the grand failure in the West, the true believers of this evil dogma persisted in trying to bring their utopian Communist paradise to Paris, London, and New York.  Radical Marxists emigrated en masse from Germany to form the Frankfurt School of social research at a welcoming place, Columbia University. A new version of Marxism, cultural Marxism, blossomed here and spread its poisonous ideology from coast to coast. This Americanized form of Marxism has now spilled out into almost all of our institutions from our nursery schools, the Democrat party, our media, sports, entertainment, and now even our mainline non-orthodox churches and synagogues.

Antonio Gramsci was a critical figure in formulating this variation of Marxism. He was a passionate and vocal Italian Communist working in the 1920s. As Paul Kengor stated in an excellent essay on this subject, “Gramsci looked to culture instead of economics. If the Left truly wanted to win, it needed to first seize the cultural means of production, the culture forming institutions, such as the media, universities and even the churches. Not until Leftists came to dominate here would they be able to convince enough to support the Marxist revolution…. Gramsci and his heirs insisted that these leftist intellectuals needed to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. This is where we got professors fulminating against everything from “the patriarchy” to “white imperialism” to “transphobia. “Even biological sex was no longer considered a settled issue.” 

Tragically, half of America has never heard of cultural Marxism or Gramsci. This is the half fully plugged into the Pravdalike media of this country and mentally parasitized by its daily relentless American- leftist intellectual virus. 

So, in response to this week’s attack on American culture, I’d say, “no Rabbi, no Cantor, we do not in the Judeo-Christian America or the West sanctify, celebrate or affirm all that is inside our minds so that it may become normalized in public or that it may receive the imprimatur of holy sanctification by our religious American elites. Indeed, we are called by our values and traditions to be sensitive, loving, and kind to anyone with a deeply disordered mind. We hope and pray for this person. We hope they find health, peace, and order. We do not use or, rather, abuse disturbed people to rally on the disorder and chaos of the Americanized version of Marxism, its Cultural Marxism, now marching through all our institutions trying to tear them down one at a time. We’ve seen the horrid results of the first march through human history of the Marxists. This second one – merely a variant of the first -- will only bring similar horror if not stopped. 

Image: Rhys Asplundh