Does anyone know what the central myth of America might be? I mean, isn’t there a story out there we tell ourselves about our origins?

The answer, from the beginning, has been the belief that, at least in the public life—among friends and strangers alike—no one can tell us what to do or to think. It is our singular privilege, as it were, to remain entirely on our own, at liberty therefore to take ourselves to Heaven or Hell.
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Complete corporate neutrality, in other words, must be the governing norm in all situations that impinge on the private individual, who, in order to remain secure in his or her freedom, must not be constrained in any way, lest our sacred autonomy be compromised or even inconvenienced. In the circumstance, the business of the state is to broaden as far as possible the range of human possibility, including even the right to reconfigure one’s own nature, the very scaffolding of the soul. Not happy about being a boy? Not a problem. Governments exist to ensure that the perfect biological fit is yours for the asking. It is for you alone to decide.

This is all madness, of course. Sheer grotesquery. To insist that my freedom alone matters, that nothing else—neither God nor the gender He gave me—may interfere with the exercise of it, is to nullify the entire order of created existence. And the absurdity of the thing has about as much to commend as the geometer’s attempt to square the circle. <...>The fact that a great swath of lunatics appear determined to impose such lunacy upon the rest of us only confirms the state of insanity in which we now find ourselves.
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That without an overarching vision, a transcendent point of reference, we are less and less able to impose even the most minimal moral discipline. Having removed the ultimate sanction—to wit, a God, who, in His providential care of the universe has enacted laws to allow us freely to choose the good—there can be no commonly agreed upon good with which to try and inculcate the young.