Rod Dreher comments on the metaphysical commonalities in Planned Parenthood's harvesting of fetal tissue from the aborted unborn and the celebration of Bruce Jenner's "triumph" over biological reality. Man's triumph over nature must extend to triumph over (what was once called) human nature. We are beyond that. All that counts now are the arbitrary desires of conscious subjects. There is no external standard for evaluating those desires--certainly no standards arising from the biological nature of the human person.
Eliminating such standards requires overcoming our instinctual revulsion toward things that are disgusting, ugly and shameful, and this is another common element to the justification of Planned Parenthood's fetal organ harvesting and the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism.
In an earlier article, Dreher links to Amanda Marcotte, arguing that, well, of course harvesting organs from the unborn human beings we're killing is "gross". But lots of things are "gross"--childbirth, abortion itself, etc. and we don't let "grossness" stop us from defending those things. People who work in medicine (driven by scientific objectivity) have inured themselves to these instincts in ways that might shock us sometimes, but "gross" has no rational meaning.
It is the same, we are told, with any instinctual revulsion toward homosexual sex acts or the falsified or mutilated bodies of the transgendered. It seems reasonable to me that, with the evolution of distinct orifices for reproduction and defecation, humans and other mammals would naturally come equipped with instincts directing us toward their proper use and that such instincts--while not absolutely determining the moral question in themselves--might meaningfully point us toward some sense of what it means to use our bodies properly.
But this is all swept away and condemned as prejudice. If a man wants to show his love to another man by accepting his reproductive organs into his rectum, then this is truly love, and my instinctual revulsion is just prejudice--hatred. If a man wants to express his true inner self by presenting himself as woman or even mutilating his body to remove his male reproductive organs and create a wound that mimics female reproductive organs, then this is true self-expression, and my instinctual revulsion is just prejudice--hatred.
Such instincts must be subverted if all desires are to be considered equal, if the triumph of subjective desire over human nature is to be complete, and we're hard at work subverting them--from popular entertainment which gets a laugh or a reaction through "gross out" elements that undermine modesty to pornography which twists the sexual desires of young men toward progressively more deviant sex acts.
Absent some kind of reaction, we're headed toward transhumanism and That Hideous Strength.
