Disgusting Things Ought to Disgust Us

About a year ago, I came across a rather nasty news story about a house in Iowa. Neighbors were complaining about the smell and eventually the police were called to investigate. As it turns out, there were dozens of cats in the house, some living, some not, and their waste had accumulated to a depth of roughly 6 inches throughout the home.

Even apart from obvious issues of health and animal welfare, situations like this are fundamentally disgusting. And everyone knows that it’s disgusting—its so revolting that absolutely everyone would recoil from living in a home like that.

Except… it’s not absolutely everyone. After all, at least one person was quite willing to live in such a disgusting manner—the homeowner who allowed the situation in the first place.

That’s the thing about disgust. It’s an incredibly useful feature of our innate emotional life that helps prevent our circumstances from devolving into all manner of wretchedness. But at the same time, it’s a feature that we train. Like shame, our sense of disgust is something that needs to be cultivated as we mature.

A well-formed person ought to be disgusted by disgusting things.  It’s entirely possible to become disgusted by something benign or positive (for example, just look at how so many of us see motherhood, fatherhood, and children in the West.) And, as we can see from the cat scenario, we can also be trained to become used to something that should be utterly revolting. How can someone live with 6 inches of cat feces covering the entire floor? It’s actually pretty simple: one turd at a time that they just didn’t think was worth cleaning up.

Why am I bringing this up? Because of something that we should find even more revolting than living in a house full of cat shit:

That is so disgusting that I feel soiled just having it on my blog. Unfortunately, words alone don’t do it justice, and the subject must be done justice because there are forces at work in our society trying to retrain our sense of disgust so that this kind of thing is accepted. And it happens exactly the same way as the cat house: one small turd at a time that people don’t want to bother cleaning up.

There are any number of ways they try to normalize this grotesquery. One of the most recent examples is “Drag Queen Story Time” cropping up at libraries across the nation—including my own local library this weekend. These are “family friendly” performances in which an adult cross-dressing degenerate does an exotic dance in front of a roomful of kids while their abusive parents encourage them to give the dancer money. This is accompanied by mass media fawning over children who follow perverted examples because they were praised for doing so by the very people who were responsible for them. And, of course, there’s the constant cry of “BIGOT! HATER!” against anyone who dares point out what anyone with an un-seared conscience knows.

This retraining of disgust is the same purpose behind the massive over-representation of LGBT characters in film and television. It’s the reason every new character in the Arrowverse needs to be gay. It’s the reason the guy in Capt. America’s support group in Avenger’s Endgame needed to be gay. It’s the reason My Little Pony needed gay ponies. And, of course, this was all preceded by the normalization of all manner of fornication and the vilification of natural family through the same means.

None of this is accidental. It’s precisely how “grooming” works for pedophiles. They try to get their targets used to small actions they would ordinarily find disgusting so that when they finally act, the child’s revulsion doesn’t reflexively kick in and interfere until its too late. Right now, the Spirit of the Age is grooming both children and parents at the same time. It wants the kids growing up thinking disgusting things are normal. It also wants the parents to back off from our God-given responsibility to train and attune our children’s innate sense of disgust towards disgusting things. It makes sure our kids are exposed to a constant diet of perversion while making parents so scared of being seen as pearl-clutching bigots that we fail to do anything about it.

Parents, you cannot afford to step aside. This will not pass you or your family by.  Whether you stand alone or with others, you need to know what is going on and refuse to submit to it no matter how loudly people scream “bigot” at you.  Do not let it pile up so deeply in your children’s lives that you all become used to it.

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.
-1 Peter 5:8-10

About Matt

Software engineer by trade; lay theologian by nature; Lutheran by grace.
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