Why did the serpent in Eden set his sights on the woman instead of the man?  Nothing in this Genesis story is pure happenstance. Let us reflect, beneath the surface.

In being formed from man’s side, the serpent knew the woman was the heart of humanity, Adam being its head. He sensed her gift of intuitive wisdom was a double-edged sword that could be manipulated by his shrewd cunning. Since the man was more apt to be focused on objective truth and following authority, the woman, whose interiority and subjective intuition was admired even by the angels, was the serpent’s easier target: Shoot for the heart and body will fall.

Much ‘ink has been spilled’ over the centuries on observations relating to this monumental scene. I would like to focus on two that point to the deformation of the natural relationship between Adam and Eve, using the head-heart imagery of Pope Pius XI in Casti Connubii. The woman acted as the head in making the decision to eat the forbidden fruit, and the man, in turn, acted as the heart in following the ‘head’ by eating it.  She did not wait for his decision nor did he lead her to avoid making hers. By betraying their own nature they betrayed God. The rest, unfortunately (although the Easter Exultant echos Augustine’s words, “Oh happy fault”) is history.

This scene is being played out in a particular way within mankind today. With the radical feminist movement, women have decided to act more like men, and after a few decades of this experiment, men have begun to act more like women.  Humanity couldn’t remain a two-headed body with no heart for long, as was the case through the thirty years following the invention of the birth control pill – which neutered women resulting in them seeking fulfillment in the traditional masculine realm. Something had to give. It began with the ‘sensitive man” represented by Alan Alda and others. As contraception enabled women to storm the workforce in great numbers, the economy shifted to eventually make a one-salary household impossible for most people to make ends meet. Hence, the need for two paychecks even further solidified the women’s plight against her own nature, as the two-child family became in vogue. As the pill enabled the marriage age to rise higher and higher, with much more divorces, and with more people remaining single, the average child per woman reached around 1.5, necessitating the unspoken policy of allowing illegal immigration to keep our economy afloat.

Nature not only abhors a vacuum, but it abhors an imbalance. In order to regain some kind of sexual equilibrium, as more women were filled with unnatural hormones and becoming more like men in their life choices, men were becoming more like women. Being leaders didn’t seem to come natural to me in the confusion of the newly imbalanced social milieu. Fewer men went to college, to Church, and to the marriage altar. Temporarily neutered young women on the pill enabled the fornication revolution to take root, and hence men were able to “milk the cow without having to buy it.”  Not only were men becoming less responsible, but inevitably more and more confused. Homosexuality became more “acceptable” in society, same-sex marriage” became legal, and the transgender movement was not far behind. All this is fallout from the sexual revolution begun in the 1960s, whose foundation and material cause is modernity’s new fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: the contraceptive pill.

This is where we are at now. As a result countless women today bemoan that there are no more good men, and by countless men that there are no more good women. We live in a magnified version of the third chapter of Genesis. The fig leaves tell us, among other things, that each sex wasn’t happy with being just half of humanity (Gn 3:7). Their hiding in the woods from God tells us something even more poignant (Gn 3:8): Once we hide from God or deny His grace due to our own guilt and shame, we disallow His sovereign reign to guide us. Hence, lose touch with who we are as human beings, male and female. Utter confusion reigns.

There are only two options at this point. We can continue to perish in our sins, or we can reject the new fruit of death (contraception) and reverse the sexual revolution against God and its subsequent culture of death. We must get our consciences out of the spiritual woods and muster up the courage to face God (Gn 3:8). This means having to face the truth about ourselves, which can be very scary for a people hiding from God (Gn 3:8). America and the world must make the choice soon. God or self. Life or death. Let us hope the decision is made to finally reject the serpent, and to follow the One who clearly shows us objective truth and the will of God. Only in Christ will we find the truth about ourselves as sexual persons in harmonious and complementary union, with each other and with God, in the wonder and beauty of being the divine image (Gn 1:27).