I received an email from an irate reader who claimed that the bathroom wars were all about “idiotic stuff.”  Abortion, marriage, and other such issues are all the “frivolous nonsense” by which political parties rile up their bases and control the narrative.

The reader claimed that the real issues are economic and foreign policy.  He rejoiced at the fact that the present outsider candidates have excluded the “idiotic stuff” from the debate narrative.  He has a point, since the remaining candidates are doing everything possible to sideline these moral issues.

Between the lines, my irate reader was saying that a nation should submit itself to the rule of money, making it the principal measure of all relationships and values.  Everything should be reduced to trade and commercial contracts with a corresponding foreign policy.  The rule of money introduces the frenetic intemperance of intense economic activity, which is cold and impersonal, fast and frantic, mechanical and inflexible.  If one holds to this conception of life, then money becomes the most important consideration; it rules.  All else is indeed “idiotic stuff.”

But what my reader did not understand is that life is not only about money.  The rule of money facilitates merely the creation of a soulless, materialistic system.  What is really at stake here is a conception of man that has been long envisioned by “enlightened” thinkers according to which men are just evolving animals that exist to gratify their passions.  As society “evolves,” there comes the call for an ever increasing suppression of moral laws, limits, and now restrictive identities.

That is why the bathroom wars are so very important.  “Transgenderism” has nothing to do with “rights” and everything to do with changing the very concept of man.  If this battle isn’t important, why is the government (and the media) doing everything possible to force anti-moral bathroom diktats down the throats of Americans?  If this battle is of such little consequence, then why are the candidates doing everything possible to exclude these issues from the debate narrative?  The ruthless ferocity of the war only confirms that moral issues are powerful forces to be reckoned with inside society.

Make no mistake about it: the target is the human element, so essential to the proper functioning of society and economy.  This distorted concept of humanity that hates all restraint aims to destroy the natural restraining influence of those human institutions such as religion, custom, morals, family, and community.  

With the bathroom wars, a cruel new phase in the battle now begins.  The main target is no longer the external restraints of institutions, but the internal restraints of logic, identity, and sexuality.  People can no longer be limited by what they are – they must now be free to be that which they imagine themselves to be.

In other words, reality no longer matters, and fantasy reigns.  And when fantasy rules, there is no limit to the proposed absurdities.  Deep calls unto deep, as nothing is sacred anymore.

If man is but an evolving animal now free to live out fantasies, then no spiritual values are recognized.  They can all be sacrificed on this altar of the absurd.  There is no one who cannot be stripped of his human dignity and privacy in the name of imagined rights.  Unlike past engagements in this battle, there is no opting out.  A person no longer indulges in a fantasy alone, but all society is forced to pander to it.

The worst thing about the bathroom wars is that they target the most vulnerable.  The government mandate puts the children on the front line of this cruel experiment.  The modesty that protects their tender innocence is now fair game.  To the commissars now executing the bathroom diktat might be addressed the cry: have you no decency?

This is not “idiotic stuff.”  It is a religious war, since it involves a denial of the human nature God created and the wish to replace it with another which He did not.

John Horvat II is a scholar, researcher, educator, and international speaker, and author of the book Return to Order, as well as the author of hundreds of published articles.  He lives in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania, where he is the vice president of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property.