X-Files creator Chris Carter confessed that one of the show’s two principal characters was named after a voice: Dodgers play-by-play announcer Vin Scully.

“You know, Vin Scully was always the voice of God. When I was growing up my mom would fall asleep with Vin Scully in her ear on the pillow,” Carter said in a 1998 interview with CNN. “I can hear his voice. and I named (Gillian Anderson’s character) Scully after him.” The Scullys had something else in common. In the show, FBI agent Dana Scully always wore a small golden cross, even when she was away from Mass for a time. The man she was named after was always a regular Mass-goer, who used his voice to, among other things, record a recitation of the rosary.

Chris Carter had a vivid imagination, and the world Mulder and Scully inhabited was sometimes bizarre, generally dark, and always threatened by one evil or another. But not even Carter imagined a world as bizarre, as dark, or as evil as the one we Americans now call home. In America 2023, the FBI is much more like the Stasi than the FBI, even the FBI that kept Agent Mulder in the basement. The Scullys of our world wield far less political power than those who believe that drag queens are the only people fit to read to young children.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church enjoys less esteem in Los Angeles—a city named by Catholic missionaries in honor of the Virgin Mary, “Lady of the Angels”—than a gaggle of gay men styling themselves “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” who dress up as nuns, observe Easter by holding X-rated “Hunky Jesus” and “Foxy Mary” beauty contests, and who make their acidic contempt for Catholicism crystal clear.

If the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” had shown their mascara-drenched faces at Ebbets Field at the start of Vin’s long stint in the broadcast booth in Brooklyn, the only question is who would have ejected them first: the largely Irish cops, the predominantly Italian and Irish fans, or players from both benches. Today, the furor arose when the Dodgers temporarily rescinded the award scheduled to be presented to the “Sisters” at “Pride Night,” a relatively recent addition to baseball’s calendar, but now observed by every MLB team except the Texas Rangers.

The Los Angeles Times even speculated that the Dodgers might lose their ace pitcher, Clayton Kershaw, an evangelical Christian, because he publicly criticized the team’s decision. Kershaw’s courage stood in contrast to the actions of many on the Catholic left, who praised the “Sisters” and reserved their vitriol for the American bishops who had criticized them. Sister Jeannine Gramick, a long-time dissenter from Catholic teaching, opined that “the choice of clothing, even if offensive to some, can never trump the works of mercy.” One doubts that Sister Gramick would be as indulgent of men who enjoy wearing the flowing robes of the Ku Klux Klan or the Hugo Boss-made uniforms of the SS, no matter how many soup kitchens they ran.

The constant celebration of all things LGBTQIA may be reaching its peak, though. The reason that Americans generally made peace with gay marriage and have not strongly objected to “Pride Month” as is quickly becoming, borrowing a phrase from Sam Francis, “the month otherwise known as June,” is that most Americans became persuaded that sexual orientation is not chosen. Given the traditional American belief that life is much easier with a partner and the modern belief that life without sex is almost unthinkable, greater rights for gay couples were inevitable. If such rights had been secured by appeals to tolerance and privacy and expressed in legislation that provided for nonsexual unions as well as sexual ones, it is possible that the madhouse of Drag Queen Story Hour, the 37 genders, and the lionizing of anti-Catholic fetishists could have been avoided.

We are where we are because activists made their successful case for gay marriage by appeals to unfettered personal autonomy and absolute equality. If those are your guiding principles, our current destination is inevitable, as is the legalization of pedophilia. The only way out is by recognizing that the one thing that can be said with certainty in this area is that gay unions are in no way equal to real marriage.

If you doubt me, try this thought experiment. The habitable world is reduced to two desert islands. One island is given to 100 married couples; the other is divided in two, with one half going to 50 gay couples and one half going to 50 lesbian couples. A century later, which island will be a cemetery, and which a growing human habitation?

Let’s just hope that Western man remembers this inescapable truth, and all the other truths flowing from it, and begins climbing out of the grave now being dug for him.

If we can recover the truth about marriage, the rest should be easy. After all, God and science essentially agree: “the Creator made them male and female.”

(This article will appear in the August print edition of Chronicles.)