Look Before You Leap – Some Decisions are Irreversible

When I was six years old, I knew that I could fly if I had a red cape. I made such a cape out of a piece of a red curtain in my room. I made a cape for myself and my three-year-old brother who would follow me everywhere, and I set out to FLY. I took out the screen from our bedroom window, and if it weren’t for the commotion that was raised by the other kids in our neighborhood outside the second story window, my parents would not have been able to stop my three-year-old brother from taking the “test jump”. I was going to have Pete jump first just in case. My uncle Joe Gaskill was a NASA/Navy test pilot, and I knew about “test flights”.

My father was livid at me for two reasons. First for being a “dumb chowderhead “—a Naval term not of endearment, and secondly for putting my brother at risk. He told me that ‘You would feel worse if you had hurt your little brother than if you had hurt yourself”. That was precisely the opposite of the way I had been thinking at the time, but as I grew older, I learned to appreciate his reasoning. I also at one time grew up wanting to be Mickey Mantle—I even got a “Mickey Mantle butch (are you allowed to use that word still?) haircut, Davey Crockett, Zorro, and Captain Hook. Tommy Comer my next-door neighbor and I sharpened a stick and scratched big “Z’s” on our chests thus becoming “blood brothers”, and “sons of Zorro” at the same time. The event had a lifetime impact on both of us. I became a surgeon and Tom became rich becoming a Medical Malpractice Plaintiff attorney. His wound became infected and if we had been kids today, he probably would have sued me for practicing without a license.

The first point I want to make is that kids don’t know who they will be when they grow up. As children they imagine themselves to be many things. The lines between fantasy and reality are blurred. There is a purpose for this because it allows children to learn about worlds beyond themselves and possibilities that are unimaginable to adults. In my lifetime we have seen fiction become non-fiction. The “Bat phone” has become the iPhone. Fiction creates a wonder in the mind that a scientist turns into reality. One couldn’t exist without the other. A turning wheel (a changing magnetic field) creates an electrical current! Next thing you know we will be able to transmit images and sound across airways. One must wonder the things that Edison, Bell and Westinghouse thought about as kids.

Issues of sexuality and sex are complicated. The human brain isn’t completely developed until the age of 25-30 yrs., scientists inform us, but issues of selfness go beyond science. Who and what am I? What is my purpose? Am I good or am I bad are questions that increasingly are being answered by social science that isn’t science at all. Many “medical experts” have allowed themselves to be influenced by nominalist and humanistic philosophies that have no moral basis in philosophy, theology, or logic. This is not new. Within the last 70 years doctors and scientists have moralized and codified in law “Hitler’s Final Solution”, thalidomide babies, frontal lobotomies for psychiatric disease. And let’s not ever forget the racist “greater good” arguments used to justify the “Tuskegee Experiment”, or the argument for not using DDT to suppress Malaria that resulted in over 100 million deaths and even more from starvation because of insecticides being more harmful to the environment than the good they do in saving human lives. An argument that has unequivocally been proven wrong by ( I have to say—expert scientists) These are all issues that are answered by our faith. Let me paraphrase:

1. We are all made by God in his Image. Because of that fact alone we are good
2. We are made to love God, love each other, and glorify his name.
3. We are all made in a specific way with a specific purpose with a specific plan in mind (God’s mind not our own)
4. We are given “free will” that should be used for the sole purpose of serving God and each other—not ourselves.
5. We have been given stewardship over all our possessions including our physical appearance, our talents, our intelligence and imaginations, and our personalities.
6. There is no sin greater than God’s forgiveness.

If you don’t believe those ideas, then you are free to make your own rules for living but remember the rules above have successfully allowed for people to negotiate their lives in ever increasing complex societies for 15,000 years. And they have allowed men to advance socially, politically, and economically in ways that even people living 2000 years ago couldn’t imagine. (“Bat phones!).

In College for two years, I lived in a fraternity house with 80 other guys. I think we had 80 different ideas about what sex was about. The eighty girls living in the Kappa Delta House across the street probably were in the same boat—sometimes it was a bed. At the beginning of the sexual revolution in the late 60’s, with birth control and Woodstock and free love—an interesting concept, and with College Professors who we looked upon as “experts” telling us that everything was “relative” and that there were no absolutes, it was easier to embrace a moral philosophy that was fun, when what we all were looking for was joy and fulfilment. The results of a philosophy of “moral relativism” have been personally devastating to many of us. It took more years of maturing to realize like Aristotle and Aquinas that there are different types of loves with different purposes (Agape, Filia, Storge, and Eros) Different loves for different times and places directed towards different ends. Unfortunately, the “experts” in the medical and scientific worlds that are advising us about transgender issues are about as emotionally mature as the guys and gals living in fraternities and sororities in the age of “free love”. They have constructed their own moral predicates—so did we.

Here is the question outlined by Douglas J. Kramer MD a practicing academic pediatric clinical psychiatrist for over 40 years in a letter in the Wall Street Journal 9/28/22: “Is it right for parents and physicians to take important decisions away from the adult versions of the child for whom they are now caring?” We should allow children to become who they are destined to become; not what adults believe they should be. Only at that time can that person’s own “free will” be appropriately exercised. To assume such a responsibility is making ourselves into our own gods and taking away the child’s (patient’s) “free will”. Which raises the issue of who gives “informed consent” —exercises a third parties “free will”, acts in a legal agency position, in a non-emergent situation? We may have to find a Christian attorney to answer that question. I am told there are a few!

Unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, sexual love for man and woman is designed with a purpose, beyond procreation. In Genesis we are told that “We were made from dirt”, and we are also told that “the breath of life” was breathed into all of us by God. We are material and spiritual. Sex and love when used appropriately combine our spiritual and physical natures in a way that furthers God’s purpose.

In the end we all take “jumps” in our lives that those more knowing would not make. Thank God for His forgiveness. Issues like transgenderism and abortion are ultimately issues about “free will”, the sanctity of life, and God’s plan for us. Scientists have proven throughout the last 100 years that they are not equipped to make those kinds of decisions.

Finally, 67 years after almost killing my little brother I still believe like I did back then that if all things were right—the scientist would say “all things being equal” —lift, drag, airspeed, angle of flight, I had a chance of being successful. It is nice to know that I might have been successful rather than knowing that it was and still is impossible. Thank God there was an adult in the house!

You don’t need to be a pilot to know that your kid can’t fly even if he has his own Superman Cape. You just need to be a father with real world experience. You don’t need to be an “expert” to know that mutilating an immature child is wrong even if some expert says it isn’t. You just need to be a person with common sense and real-world experience.