That Buttigieg is a monster should be self-evident to anyone still possessed of an active moral faculty.  The same is true of all the Democrat candidates as they all advocate what Buttigieg does.  But in this parade of fiends, trouping from one place to another to vie for the votes of a rabid constituency largely composed of the living dead, it was Buttigieg who took the lead in virtue-signaling the path into the abyss—walking the walk, not just talking the talk, all the way to total depravity.

Yet no one in the political arena, absolutely no one, was willing to point out that this shameless pervert should never have been taken seriously as a candidate for President in the first place, but rather banned from holding public office at any level as a threat to whatever is left of the common good. Not even the staunchest pro-life Republicans, not even Trump, would say a word against Buttigieg’s “marriage” or, for that matter, “LGBTQ rights” in general or the newly invented imaginary right to gender self-determination. Worse, from Republicans as well Democrats there is either express or tacit approval of an increasingly institutionalized sexual depravity that signals the end of a civilization.  A growing catalog of sexual perversions has joined the canon of “fundamental rights” in America and all the other terminally corrupt Western polities.

The rapidly shifting sands of political modernity have all but buried the memory that in the mid-1990s both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were opposing “gay marriage” and defending marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman.  It was none other than Bill Clinton who signed into law the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996.  While he was critical of the legislation as “divisive and unnecessary,” in a public statement prior to his signing of the bill he declared: “In 1992, I stated my opposition to same-gender marriage, and recently, when the issue was raised in Congress, I said that if a bill consistent with my previously stated position reached my desk, I would sign it.”  And so he did, if only (so he claimed) to stop what was then a groundswell for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

But as of today, a mere 24 years later, the Supreme Court has declared that no state may pass a law forbidding recognition of a “same-sex marriage” contracted in any other state (the Obergefell decision) and has also struck down as unconstitutional Section 3 of DOMA, which prohibited any federal recognition of “same-sex marriage” (the Windsor decision).  Monsters like Buttigieg now roam the political landscape wearing a cloak of respectability that no one dares remove.

How did this happen, and happen so quickly?  It was not because of the legislature, the federal courts, or even the Supreme Court. These institutions, the Supreme Court included, never act without a prior impetus from the source of all evil in a mass democracy: the tyranny of public opinion as formed by the organs of public opinion swaying majority sentiment. 

Pew Research reported that in 2004, Americans opposed same-sex marriage “by a margin of 60% to 31%,” whereas in 2019, “a majority of Americans (61%) support same-sex marriage, while 31% oppose it.” Even among Catholics, support today stands at 51%, according to Pew. Gallup likewise reports that public support for “gay marriage” remains steady at north of 60%:

Twenty years ago, a majority of just one group – 18- to 29-year-olds (52%) –  supported legalizing gay marriage. By 2009, majorities of both young adults (59%) and Democrats (55%) supported legal same-sex marriage. Today, majorities of most groups support gay marriage – with the exception of adults aged 65 and older (47%) and Republicans (44%).

Note that this massive shift in public opinion had occurred before the Supreme Court’s decisions in Windsor (2013) and Obergefell (2015), not because of those decisions.

While a majority of registered Republicans (thanks to Protestant evangelicals) still oppose “gay marriage,” Republican politicians, including those in the over-65 age group, will do nothing to stand against the rising tide of institutionalized sexual perversion, except perhaps to object at the margins to attempts to coerce active participation therein by schoolchildren, wedding photographers, cake makers and the like. And even the victims of such coercion profess the right of the perverts who oppress them to engage in their perversions!  That sexual deviancy as such is now a protected class is suddenly beyond dispute by anyone who hopes for a career in politics or public life. To question this is to incur immediate sociopolitical excommunication, including social media account suspensions, terminations and de-platforming that effectively end the public existence of dissenters.

Not even what passes for a conservative political commentariat in America has offered any real opposition to the utter depravity Buttigieg represents, even though the tiny minority of conservative spokesmen in the major media are paid to express supposedly bold contrarian opinions and are not vying for public office. For example, the Fox News talking heads, not excluding even the otherwise exceptional Tucker Carlson, now passively accept “gay marriage” and “LGBTQ” rights as indisputable givens, uttering nary a peep against the sodomitical status quo. Among prominent conservative voices, only Rush Limbaugh, perhaps emboldened by apparently terminal lung cancer, had the temerity to suggest that Buttigieg’s sexual depravity might be a political drawback:

They’re [the Democrats] looking at Mayor Pete, 37-year-old gay guy, mayor of South Bend, loves to kiss his husband on the debate stage. And they’re saying, “OK, how’s this going to look, 37-year-old gay guy kissing his husband on stage next to Mr. Man Donald Trump? What’s going to happen there?” And they got to be looking at that, and they’ve got to be saying, that despite all the great progress and despite all the great wokeness, and despite all the great ground that’s been covered, America’s still not ready to elect a gay guy kissing his husband on the debate stage president. They have to be saying this, don’t they?”

No, America—at least the current tenuous electoral majority—is not ready to elect as President a “37-year-old gay guy kissing his husband.”  But here’s the thing: no one in a position to oppose that revolting outcome is willing to say so openly and publicly. The tyranny of public opinion demands outward conformity to what most people still know inwardly is an abomination. Under that pact of silence in the face of evil the unthinkable will advance until it becomes unstoppable.   

Indeed, what would even Limbaugh say if pressed to answer the question: “Do you think gay people have just as much right as heterosexual people to marry each other to show their love?” It is a very safe bet that he would answer in the affirmative, and a virtual certainty that, even as he nears death, he would not have the candor to say what really has to be said, and what I believe he knows to be true: that “gay marriage” is a radically immoral contradiction of the divine and natural law whose dire consequences are both temporal and eternal.

Let it not be thought that the tyranny of public opinion in America is merely an artefact of the rise of the liberal mass media and the Internet.  Pope Leo XIII saw our situation coming as early as 1888.  To quote Leo’s prophetic admonition in his landmark encyclical Libertas, regarding the modern liberty of absolute freedom of speech: “If unbridled license of speech and of writing be granted to all, nothing will remain sacred and inviolate; even the highest and truest mandates of natures, justly held to be the common and noblest heritage of the human race, will not be spared. Thus, truth being gradually obscured by darkness, pernicious and manifold error, as too often happens, will easily prevail.”

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In other words, when all restraints on public opinion are removed, error prevails and truth is censored because public opinion had turned against truth—exactly our situation today.  But it was also, at least germinally, the situation in America during Alex de Tocqueville’s sojourn there. Writing barely forty years after ratification of the First Amendment, Tocqueville already marvels at how the tyranny of public opinion in America has subjugated the individual mind in a way not seen even under the “absolute monarchs” of Europe. He offers his famous damning assessment: “I do not know of any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America.” (Democracy in America, I.II.7)

“[I]n the heart of a democracy organized as that of the United States,” Tocqueville continues, “one encounters only a single power, a single element of force and success, and nothing outside it.” That is, one encounters the popular face of the monism of power that is the essence of what the moderns call Liberty, the other face being the instrumentality of “representative” government. In America, Tocqueville observes, “the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Inside those limits, the writer is free; but unhappiness awaits him if he dares to leave them.”  The writer who is so bold as to offend public opinion will not be subjected to an auto-da-fé or other physical restraint, but he will most certainly be “the butt of mortifications of all kinds and of persecutions every day.” Tocqueville describes the sorry lot of anyone who—then, as now—sins against political correctness by publishing the wrong ideas:

A political career is closed to him; he has offended the only power that has the capacity to open it up. Everything is refused him, even glory. Before publishing his opinions, he  believed he had partisans; it seems to him that he no longer has any, now that he has uncovered himself to all; for those who blame him express themselves openly, and those who think like him, not having his courage, move silently away.  He yields, he finally bends, under the effort of each day and returns to silence as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth. (Ibid.)

The great irony here, Tocqueville noted, is that even under  the worst of the absolute monarchs “despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul; and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.” Public opinion says to its victims: “Go in peace, I leave you your life, but I leave it to you worse than death.” And once the sentence has been passed, “When you approach those like you, they shall flee you as being impure; and those who believe in your innocence, even they shall abandon you.” (Ibid.)

It did not have to end this way.  The dynamic of public opinion could have been altered to block or at least impede the rise of militant homosexualism and transgenderism just as the dynamic of electoral politics was altered with Trump’s election here and the rise of Christian populism in places like Brazil, Hungary, Poland and Italy.  All that would have been required was a sufficient number of Christian politicians of national stature to join in uttering a resounding "No" to the movement to legitimize sexual disorder and depravity.  But none of them said anything, and now it is too late.

When I see the moral cowardice of our supposed leaders in the face of the relentless advance of evil in his country, I am always reminded of that classic episode of The Twilight Zone, “It’s a Good Life.”  The little town of Peeksville, Ohio finds itself under the thrall of six-year-old Anthony Freemont, an enfant terrible who has caused the rest of the world to disappear and who uses his mental powers to eliminate residents who think bad thoughts about him in various childishly creative ways. 

One of the townspeople has finally had enough and confronts Anthony directly, imploring “some man with guts” in the room to step up and “lay something heavy across your skull and end this once and for all” while the little monster is distracted.  But all the other men cower in fear as Anthony turns the lone dissenter into a jack-in-the-box whose bobbing head is the man’s. At the pleading of his father, Anthony wishes the jack-in-box into “the cornfield,” never to be seen or heard from again, and the townspeople resume the craven subjection from which they could easily have been freed if only the men in the room had had the courage to do something.

America today is the Town of Peeksville writ large. The monster writ large is the tyranny of public opinion, imposed by little monsters like Buttigieg, from which we could be freed if only enough men with guts, above all those in positions of power, were willing to lay something heavy—the Law of God—across its skull.  Instead, like the residents of Peeksville, they all cower in fear, leaving an isolated dissenter here and there to be picked off and banished to the cornfield of social and political oblivion, while (to recall Tocqueville’s words) “those who think like him, not having his courage, move silently away.”

In the Year of Our Lord 2020, Liberty has entered the Twilight Zone: a place where men who engage in sodomy and pretend to marry each other are depicted as virtuous without protest, boys use the girl’s bathrooms, and little children are told in the public schools, without parental notice or consent, that their gender is a matter of choice.  Were there not a Lord of History who will “end this once for all,” we would have no cause for hope.   But hope we do, even if we must still contend with the monsters of our age, the likes of which the world has never seen before our time.