Vladimir Putin on Tuesday delivered a state-of-the-nation address to the Russian people, and the contrast couldn’t have been sharper with Old Joe Biden’s Feb. 7 barrage of Leftist propaganda in his State of the Union address. Putin hit the West hard for its trendy gender madness and other manifestations of the dominant woke ideology. He even warned that if it kept up, Western nations were heading for “spiritual catastrophe.” One doesn’t have to think that the solution to all this is invading Ukraine in order to grant that the man has a point.
There are many in the West today who are ready to take the opposite of any position Putin takes just because Putin has taken it, and it certainly must be granted that the Russian strongman may only be saying such things in order to weaken support for Ukraine among American conservatives (many of whom are turned off already by the lingering suspicions that the whole thing is a money-laundering operation for Democrats). Still, if Putin’s disdain for “woke ideologies” is a put-on, he sure has mastered the lingo. Even if he doesn’t walk the walk, he certainly talks the talk.
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“The Anglican Church,” Putin said, “is considering a gender-neutral God. May God forgive them for they know not what they do.” They certainly don’t. The idea that the Church of England would consider itself empowered to change something so fundamental about Christianity’s teachings regarding the nature of God indicates that it doesn’t really believe in Christianity at all, and thinks that the faith is infinitely malleable, able to be adjusted in any way the believers deem necessary in order to suit their own perspectives and proclivities. This is the opposite of what Christians have believed throughout the ages. Putin seems to understand that, while the learned Anglican divines do not.
“Millions of people in the West,” Putin added, “understand they are being led to a real spiritual catastrophe.” That is also true, and Putin knows why: according to a Tuesday report in the UK’s Daily Mail, he declared: “Look at what they do with their own peoples: the destruction of the family, cultural and national identity, perversion, and the abuse of children are declared the norm. And priests are forced to bless same-sex marriages.”
This coincides with the March 2022 statements of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow: “We have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance. … Pride parades are designed to demonstrate that sin is one variation of human behaviour. That’s why in order to join the club of those countries, you have to have a gay pride parade. If humanity accepts that sin is not a violation of God’s law, if humanity accepts that sin is a variation of human behavior, the human civilization will end there.”
At least some people on the other side appear to agree with this understanding of the conflict. On March 4, 2022, just after the conflict began, Vanity Fair published an article entitled “‘People Are Not Coming Back to the Closet’: The Fight for Ukraine Is Also a Fight for LGBTQ Rights.” It began: “On the seventh day of the war, Olena Shevchenko posted a message of despair on Facebook. Shevchenko, who leads the LGBTQ organization Insight, was not just voicing the heartbreak of watching her city destroyed, feeling the bomb blasts in downtown Kyiv. Or fearing what the prospect of Russian occupation might mean for her and other queer activists. It sounded like she had lost faith, questioning whether all the tools she had used over years of fighting for LGBTQ rights, Ukrainian self-determination, and democracy had proved futile.”
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In the West, it isn’t the LGBTQ forces that are embattled and on the defensive, but those who object to the prevailing gender madness, the drag queens in primary schools, and everything else that comes with conformity to the woke agenda. What is harder to see is how an aggressive campaign against Ukraine is really a battle for traditional values and the Judeo-Christian tradition against this institutionalized insanity. Putin’s observations about the West may be correct without his war being justified.
In the final analysis, it is a shame that we don’t have, and likely never will have, an American president who will speak with this much courage and insight about the damage that wokeness leaves in its wake. Or at least we won’t until that damage is patently obvious to everyone.
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