Rod Dreher explains why your faith should be as fragile and hollow as his

Let's review historically: first, cradle Methodist, college agnostic Dreher first becomes a Catholic because, from his own account, as a country mouse from Starhill, LA in Paris for the first time he was wowed by the architecture of Chartres Cathedral. One can only wonder what he might have become had he encountered a Parisian sex show first instead.

Then, having embraced Catholicism as the one true faith, all it took for him to renounce it formally and completely were the sinful and criminal acts of some human priests in its employ. Easy come, easy go.

Now we have the prime time pop cultural spectacle of Bruce Jenner talking to Diane Sawyer over Kleenex about his delusions of becoming a woman.

Naturally, Dreher is as fascinated as any 19th Century country boy at his first hoochie-coochie tent show, albeit a country boy who ultimately quotes Nietzsche to frame his reaction. Commenter Matthias offers Dreher a paper bag to breathe into:

Sure, the media like to dramatize things, but this article makes the same mistake; it is sensationalist and completely ignores available data. The handful of surgical sex changes every year will certainly not “cause this society to careen off the cliff”; on the contrary, statistically speaking it is completely insignificant. And as far as regret goes, this study finds a “regret rate” of about 2%. I guess this margin of error is acceptable (not to the individual, but on the whole).

Dreher rips the bag away:

[NFR: You completely miss the point. There is no question but that the number of transpeople among us will always be small. My point is that what we as a society have to do to go from seeing those people as suffering human beings who bear the image of Christ, however distorted by our common humanity, to celebrating them as avatars of courage and so forth, requires giving up so much philosophical ground that it amounts to removing the guardrails, especially given what technology is empowering us to do. -- RD]

Speak for yourself, Neville Chamberlain of philosophical ground.

First, as someone whose tabloid writing was not only forged in the fiery caverns of the New York Post but which has carried its stylistic imprimatur into everything you've touched since, let's not be disingenuous here.

Matthias is right, and anyone who has read you for any time knows you're only sorry you're sensationalistically behind on the story because you were tied up slurping oysters with Mollie. The only people I've seen remotely "celebrating" as opposed to gawking over the Jenner story have been his family tweeting - as if they could publicly do anything else.

Second, the only one promoting the notion of giving up philosophical ground is you. Most everyone else is responding along a range from pity to disgust. Is there a Bruce Jenner book gleaming in your eye in line behind the yet un-pitched Benedict Option book in line behind the yet unsold Dante book?

And guess what else technology empowers us to do. Beat a child to death with a cast iron skillet. Bugger scruffy little dogs named Roscoe when the wife and kids are off visiting Mam and Paw. Shoot up your local movie theater.That technology genie escaped its bottle when Eve started peddling apples and Cain found a suitable rock.

Maybe the problem isn't so much some aging former athlete turned celebrity reality star getting his lonely freak on by hitting himself up with estrogen as it is with your own congenitally fragile and fluid philosophical ground and its imminent potential to send you careening off your own personal and social guardrails.

That hardly argues for anyone else joining you in your fragilely principled state of mind.

If nothing more than your family being mean to you can send you into a narcoleptic depressive "dark wood", I'd tell old Roscoe to quit showing his belly and maybe head under the bed tout de suite. As for other social conservatives, surely there's a better prophet than Rod Dreher to be found.

Maybe even some 2,000-year-old Jew.