In the ordinary course of my day, I came across your typical news story: the  latest attempt of lesbians to sue their insurance company to pay for artificial reproduction. Ho-hum. Given the way the culture is collapsing in great bleeding chunks all around our heads, that’s just the stuff of a regular Monday. What makes this story of interest is the weird parallels it has with a great work of Southern literature, since today’s attempt to deny the reality of sex is the mirror image of an old American heresy: making a fetish out of race. Once we made almost everything out of differences that in the end amount to nothing, and now we repent by pretending that one of life’s crucial truths is … nothing.

As a native New Yorker with neither a driver’s license nor a clue, I went down to Baton Rouge in 1986 to get a Ph.D. in English, focused on Southern literature. My first interest was in Walker Percy, but I was soon drawn also to Faulkner, and fell in love with his grandest tragedy, Absalom, Absalom!

Its hero, Thomas Sutpen, is a kind of Andrew Jackson, a fearless warlord and empire-builder, who carves a vast fortune out of the pathless wilderness by fire and sword. His dream is to establish himself, to build a family legacy that will outlast him, endure, and by enduring wipe out the shame of his squalid beginnings in Appalachia. To make his fortune, he starts in the West Indies as an overseer and cruelly suppresses a slave revolt. He takes his savings to Mississippi, where he swindles an Indian chief out of a large swathe of land, and builds a vast plantation — complete with Tara-style grand chateau — on the sweat of American slaves.

So far his plan is going smoothly. But there is a worm in the apple. Sutpen had fathered a son back in the West Indies, with a woman he’d made his wife. However, soon after the child’s birth, he learned that her blood was “tainted” with a touch of African heritage, and so he abandoned them both. Twenty years later, that son returns and unknowingly wins the love of Sutpen’s new (“pure-blooded”) white daughter. Sutpen forbids their marriage — not because it is incest, but because it is interracial.

The intrigue and violence that results destroys the lives of three of Sutpen’s children, and he is finally left heirless, and the vast plantation he’d built is utterly desolate. Sutpen has ruined himself by his obsession with a bizarre and unnatural abstraction: the fantasy that human races are starkly separate, and must be preserved in “purity,” free of the taint of “lesser” breeds.

The story is so overwrought that if it weren’t written in such magnificent prose it would be all too easy to parody. (There’s an annual “Bad Faulkner Contest” devoted to just such efforts.) But at its heart Absalom, Absalom is a genuine tragedy, a story of someone who strove greatly to accomplish something grand, who wrecked himself on the shoals of his culture’s governing delusions.

The Faulknerian Lesbians of New Jersey

Which brings us to two pairs of lesbians in suburban New Jersey. The New York Times tells their story with such desperately high-minded earnestness that it’s tempting to rebel, to rewrite these women’s narrative as a savage mock-Faulkner story. But that would be cruel, and these women have punished themselves enough — enough to remind us that the natural law is not something dour moralists have set up to enforce. It is more like a law of physics, along the lines of gravity. When we see people plunge off cliffs in makeshift Icarus costumes, flapping feeble paper wings, it is not for us to snicker. Our elites, our laws, and many of our churches are inviting people to leap, assuring them that they can fly.

The Times reports on a legal case which two lesbian couples are filing against their insurance companies, demanding more extensive coverage for expensive fertility treatments, to help them in ever more desperate attempts to evade the basic facts of biology. The laws of New Jersey demand that medical providers and insurance companies take part in the charade, and treat same-sex couples as interchangeable with couples whose parts fit and can actually generate children. It seems that the insurance companies’ policies require that for advanced fertility treatments, some evidence be shown that the couple has engaged in potentially fertile intercourse for an extended period of time — which of course, for these lesbian couples is impossible.

The legal tangle that has resulted is both absurdly funny and spiritually tragic. Reading their stories — of painful ectopic pregnancies and awkward attempts at artificial insemination — will wipe the sardonic smile from your face. These are people — people who have been lied to, whose lives are being slowly poisoned by those lies.

In fact, the whole enterprise of the fertility industry is ugly and unnatural, regardless of who’s involved. It is no less repugnant (perhaps it is more) for a man to wish to see his wife inseminated mechanically with the sperm of another man, than for two lesbians to flip a coin and let one of them undergo a similar process. Nor is it any more moral for heterosexual couples than homosexuals to engage in IVF when it generates dozens or hundreds of “surplus” human embryos, who will live a weird eternity frozen in technological limbo, and when they see to it that “extra” siblings are “reduced” by abortion.

We are already in the land of madness and monsters, where the best interests of children come a distant third or fourth to the whims of willful adults, the profits of doctors, and a legal system completely divorced from reality in its two most important components: biology and morality.

The fertility industry, our legal system and the thundering moral chaos that reigns supreme today, have left these four women in New Jersey not much better than Thomas Sutpen: nearly bankrupt, close to despair and bereft of a human legacy. “Gender ideology” is just as false and inhuman a construct as racism ever was — a fact that our grandchildren will realize, and shake their heads at us as we do at our grandparents’ fondness for Amos and Andy.

Just as in Faulkner’s fiction, where Thomas Sutpen was ruined by pretending that race is absolute, real and decisive when it isn’t, in New Jersey these women are ruining themselves by pretending that sex and human sexuality is simply a fantasy, a “gender construction” that emerges from our wills and libidos. My apologies, ladies, but that isn’t sex. That, in fact, is porn.