Nail. Head.

The Pillar peers through the fog, and with panache gets it exactly right. Regarding the controversy of valid form they rightly state:

There is, of course, the irony. Outlets like the Times and the Post have run myriad pieces in recent years about the use of “preferred pronouns,” including referring to someone in the singular vs plural, and how failure to get it right is an abuse of power and a tool of oppression. 

Speech like that, I have read more than once in zer pages, is a kind of violence; words have real effects, and ze are usually the first to insist on it. 

It requires a particular kind of doublethink to hold that the Church is being absurdist and quibbling in saying there is a material difference between saying “I” and saying “we,” while holding that saying “she” instead of “they” is akin to assault. 

It would be funny, if the setup to the joke wasn’t the descent of our public discourse into self-referential existential madness. 

Aside from the tragicomedy of the pronoun wars, we as a society normally have little difficulty in accepting, even demanding, that the use of the right words at the right time by the right person is essential. As one reader pointed out to me in an email this week: when the police fail to properly Mirandize an arrestee, no one disputes (especially no one at the Washington Post) that a legal event has become invalid, with all the consequences that entails. It’s only in religion, it seems, that words become just noises squirted through our throats. 

At the root of much of the incredulity we have seen is, I think, the belief that all that really matters is what one wants. Religion and liturgy, as with all beliefs in secular society, have value only in as much as they are affirming, not causing problems for people. This is how someone can rationalize dismissing sacramental matter and form as just dress up and make-believe, but insist that, say, a kindergarten boy pulling a dress out of a costume box is medical science. 

Where the two examples converge is the central tenet of modern philosophy: it’s not about what anyone says or does, it’s how you feel inside that matters, and religion is all, to the modern mind, about feelings, not reality.