Very early in her new book, Mary Eberstadt notes that a new kind of intolerance is “strangling open discussion across the West.” And as she argues in her text, this new brand of intolerance is linked closely with the sexual revolution. Now, at first hearing, that just doesn’t sound plausible. The sexual revolution was about an end to repressive moralizing. It was about greater tolerance for individual sexual freedom. It was about a healthier, more relaxed, less shame-infected attitude toward sexuality in general. And I know what I’m talking about. I was there in the late 1960s, and I thoroughly enjoyed its early stages.

But here’s the catch, which the author explores so persuasively in chapter 3. The new intolerance around sex is not an accident or “passing nuisance, but a full blown, quasi-religious substitute faith for Christianity. Its dogma both derives from and is designed to protect the sexual revolution . . . [and it’s] rooted in a rejection of the Christian moral code.” Thus, a virtue like modesty is not merely laughed at, but resented as a weed in the garden of sexual ecstasy. Celibacy is either incomprehensible, or seen as emotionally crippling. Normative heterosexuality has the unpleasant smell of a stable human nature; a nature that establishes one form of sexual behavior as normal, and others as wrong, unhealthy, and destructive.

So where does this lead; or rather, where has it led?

[Everywhere. Pope Paul VI was prophetic in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, in which he warned that man was arrogating the authority of the Creator in reordering human biology. It only began with contraception and abortion, and now it has led to the rejection of objective reality and science in human biology in the transgender movement. — Ed]