Please, Carol
A new tower of Babel
Today’s charity is The Trevor Project. G.O.T.H.S. is free and any money you’d spend on reading one of my posts will be put to better use at a charity.
A fun fact about Pentecost is that, as with Easter, there is a separate extended vigil Mass for the solemnity that includes a whopping six readings and the sacrament of Confirmation in the middle, and your parish can choose to say that Mass without telling you in advance even though you showed up to Saturday evening Mass hoping to get in and out as quickly as possible. Weirdly, even with six readings, you still don’t read the account in Acts of the descent of the Holy Spirit. But the first reading, from Genesis, is the story of the Tower of Babel.
Pluribus is great, obviously. It’s great because Vince Gilligan created it, and because Rhea Seehorn stars in it, and because, given the nature of the series, Rhea Seehorn has the large majority of screentime and lines of dialogue. The first season ended about five months ago and I’m going to describe a fair amount of what happens in the series and you may want to watch the show first, so:
In the first episode of Pluribus, an alien virus spreads throughout humanity, joining the entire human race into one shared hive mind. Everyone knows everything that everyone else knows, all of the time. Humanity is united into a common consciousness and common project. There is no more war or crime or violence of any kind; human beings can no longer hurt any other forms or life, and can no longer lie. They also cannot, interestingly enough, make art, defend themselves or each other from harm, or refuse to do things that are asked of them. But they go about re-allocating the world’s resources and living peacefully and happily. The conceit of the series, of course, is that twelve human beings were inexplicably immune from the virus, including Rhea Seehorn’s character Carol Sturka, a depressed and alcoholic romantasy author, who scrambles to navigate the new world and find a way to undo the hive mind before the hive mind can find a way to assimilate her.
The main reason I like the series - besides Seehorn’s stunning performance - is that there are so many different ways to slice what is a very original dystopian story. It’s a metaphor for severe depression and grief when everyone else has somehow found a way to be happy. It’s a metaphor for post-COVID isolation when everyone else has sunk into an idealized online projection of themselves. It’s a metaphor for navigating an endless churn of smoothed-over AI slop and flattened culture. It’s the modern Babel. And the series interrogates ideas of individuality and community in really interesting ways: Carol Sturka is desperate to hold on to her individual consciousness, but it’s not always clear why, as her life is pretty miserable and, honestly, the hive mind people are all exceptionally friendly and accommodating to her. Babel was probably a pretty chill place most of the time, too.
But it turns out there’s a personal reason why Carol is so wary of her new happy neighbors, mentioned only once, and briefly, in the series. Carol is a gay woman, and, as she tells a member of the hive mind, her parents sent her to a conversion therapy camp when she was sixteen years old. That’s why Carol can’t trust the hive, ever. Because she’s been surrounded by smiling polite people before, people who were truly evil and fervently trying to change her, even if it did lasting damage to her, even if it permanently erased who she really was. She fought it then, and she’s going to fight it now.
The Supreme Court, as it turns out, are huge fans of conversion therapy. On March 31st of this year, they announced their 8-1 decision in Chiles v. Salazar and struck down a Colorado state ban on conversion therapy for minors. The case was decided on free speech grounds; to slightly oversimplify the Court’s logic, therapists are just people who say things, and you can say whatever you want, so a therapist is allowed to say whatever they want to a minor client.
In August of 2024, I wrote five essays on a very similar case in the state of Michigan, which the plaintiffs were also arguing on the same free speech grounds. The Becket Fund, which was funding the Michigan case, filed an amicus brief in the Colorado case (and I assume the decision in the Colorado case will make the Michigan case moot). You can go back and read my old writing if you want the details on what I think of conversion therapy and why I think it, but to put it as bluntly as I can: people will likely die because of this decision. The medical literature on conversion therapy goes back decades - decades! Not a thing the woke left just invented a few years ago, but an actual thing doctors have been looking into for a very long time! As I wrote back then:
“If [the Michigan case] Catholic Charities v. Whitmer is really “about helping children who experience distress over their biological sex,” we know what helps them. We have known it for a while. When the plaintiffs argue that “there is no sound evidence that such [gender- or orientation-affirming] medical interventions provide any long-term benefits. And there is mounting evidence that they impose lasting harms,” they are saying something that contradicts the easily available evidence found in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, pediatrics, and public health. They are either lying or being willfully obtuse, and I don’t really care which one it is. More importantly for understanding their whole thing, they’re being, very explicitly, not Catholic. See, the Catholic church has a position on what we should do with thorough scientific research, and it isn’t “ignore it and sue the state so you can still get licensed as a clinician”. If you want to market yourself as a Catholic therapist, I suppose you can, but your selling point can’t be “we kind of do our own thing since our faith is more important than the research,” since that approach is explicitly opposed by the church.”
That passage was followed by a quote from Gaudium et Spes (which is also re-quoted in the Catechism) on the responsibility of Catholics to trust scientific and methodical investigation in every branch of learning. It’s there, the church wrote it down, this is not a new position. The “free speech” argument rings hollow for me too, since we’re dealing with a regulated field, as I also wrote back then:
“We’re supposed to be dealing with professionals here! Lawyers also lose their law license if they repeatedly try in court to blame crimes on magical elves! They won’t go to jail for it, but they won’t be taken seriously as lawyers either! So they can go on the street corner and talk about the magical elves all they want! That’s what’s at play in Catholic Charities v. Whitmer as well. In fact, it’s almost exactly the same set of claims, which were already decided. Under current federal case law, the [plaintiffs] are more than welcome to meet with people struggling with their sexual orientation or gender identity and tell them “have you tried being not gay?” in their personal capacities. They can stand on a street corner and yell “HAVE YOU TRIED BEING NOT TRANS” at any passerby that they assume are transgender by making bizarre assumptions about dress and gait. They will not face any criminal penalties for doing so, ever. But they can’t do these things on the clock, while working as a professional in a regulated field which often comes with life-or-death stakes.”
All of this seems to have escaped the Supreme Court, and the Becket Fund (although I’m assuming they’re well aware of this and just don’t care), and the USCCB, who also filed an amicus brief in Chiles. The USCCB wrote, incorrectly, that “The question in this case is whether, when individuals seek advice and counsel on these questions, the First Amendment permits the state to regulate the viewpoints they may hear in response.” Again, private citizens can tell you to try and stop being gay (I guess). Therapists, people who receive licenses to practice health care, should not be able to do that. My gastroenterologist does not get to tell me that my illness is punishment for mortal sin and that I will need to go to confession if I want to stop having diarrhea. She has a responsibility as a medical professional to treat me with certain standards of care. Therapists no longer have that responsibility, and the USCCB is rooting for them to use standards of care that can double the risk of suicidality in patients. The bishops, who are uniformly old men, hear about people that they don’t understand, and the response of most of these bishops is not to encounter these people, not to learn from them or about them, but to work as hard as possible to change them back to the bishops’ standard of “normal”, to petition the courts to reshape laws to make it easier for others to force these strange people back to the bishops’ standard of “normal”, to get these outliers as close to everyone else as we can, and barring that, I guess we’ll be fine if they just die off, let’s just please try and have everyone as much “the same” as possible. As I also wrote in 2024 (conversion therapy and gender essentialism were on my mind a lot):
“Who the fuck is she [Abigail Favale]? Who the fuck is she, who are any of us, to dismiss the social constructs of gender, something so obvious, so beautifully varied that it seems like God must love how unique it is to each of us, something that can connect us to others and to God so closely, as a thing that doesn’t even exist, that needs to be stamped out in childhood, even if doing so brutally harms those children? Who are we to say we’ve fully boiled down the intentions of the Creator? Who are we to draw a line, to say there are only two ways to do this, and everyone else is sick and deluded?”
I suppose that the question I have for these assholes is whether their approach sounds more like the kingdom of God or the old days of Babel. Now, I’ll be honest, the Babel comparison is kind of forced and it was just on my mind because it was the first reading at my extra-long Mass this weekend. I’m probably the only guy who is giving any thought to the Tower of Babel right now, outside of biblical scholars. So I’ll just enjoy my television show, and while I’m waiting for season 2, I’ll crack open Pope Leo’s new encyclical:
“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible.”
Well, that’s interesting.
Today’s charity is The Trevor Project. G.O.T.H.S. is free and any money you’d spend on reading one of my posts will be put to better use at a charity.