Marginalized Pornography

Within the very progressive Diocese of San Diego, a common theme from the pulpit is how we must lift up the marginalized. It's driven me bonkers, but it's taken me a while to understand why.

There is no such thing as the marginalized. The term comes from social justice and cultural Marxism academic literature. It implies all that you would suspect given that pedigree. Its root is the verb "to marginalize" and it's freighted with the Marxist concepts of oppressors and oppressed. Oppressors marginalize people. The oppressed are the marginalized.

Further, it carries with it the woke hierarchy of victim groups. When you talk about the marginalized, people know you mean blacks, LGBTQWERTY, women, the homeless and so on. The flip side is that straight, white men and their allies are the ones doing the marginalizing. Everything is about power and systems of oppression.

Just taking the homeless as an example, you can see that the term doesn't make sense. My middle brother was an addict and an alcoholic. He was homeless when he died. To our diocese, he was a member of the marginalized. In reality, that man was in no way, shape or form marginalized by anyone. He was an utter sensualist. There was no immediate pleasure he would not forgo whether that was sex, drugs or booze. He slept with anything that wore a skirt and consumed anything that made him high.

Our family tried to "uplift" him many times, but that always ended in theft, betrayal and sometimes violence.

The racially marginalized are equally nonsensical.

Here, the white girl was the oppressor. The black guy who had just stabbed her in the throat was the marginalized. Dittos for the black passengers who walked past her as she bled out on the floor. You can find the full story here if you aren't familiar with this iconic image.

Classifying people as marginalized makes no sense at all. As Solzhenitsyn said, the dividing line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart. We're all complex people. Catholics, perhaps not including our clergy here in San Diego, believe that all people are fallible, sinful creatures that cannot perfect or redeem themselves on their own. That includes whoever it is the clergy think they're describing when they used the term "marginalized."

So what's up with all the talk about the marginalized?

When you use the term "marginalized," you put them in the context of the Marxists' oppressor-victim framework. The discussion from that point on forces anyone disagreeing with you to take up the flag of the oppressor. You are airbrushing away the agency of these people the way lingerie models have their flaws airbrushed away in Photoshop. It's porn.

When our clergy tell us to uplift the marginalized, what are we going to say, "No, I don't want to uplift the marginalized?" You force us to accept your unspoken premise that these people are helpless victims of an unjust system created by people like us who are privileged at their expense. We are the villains and now we must pay back what we owe.

It's all nonsense, it's all moral pornography. Your frisson of onanistic pleasure that comes from helping the less fortunate by your speech alone becomes all the greater because now you are helping, not just people who are in a bad way, but utterly innocent and helpless people who are in a bad way. You can't hope to find anyone who better fits Jesus' reference of "the least among you" than the "marginalized."

It's like an AI version of the perfect lingerie model, a chick crafted by your prompts to have just the right hair, the right skin, the right measurements, the right pose, the right facial expression and the right garments to arouse you to the very heights of ecstasy.

The marginalized do not exist in real life because Marxism is utterly wrong, but they do exist in your head. Each of the social justice progressives has their own internal image of the marginalized, just like porn addicts each have their own distinct fetishes.

A good way to put an end to this kind of talk is to bring up concrete examples. My brother, for one. Just how do you plan on uplifting him when he's just going to rob you to get another hit? How about the black guy on the train in Charlotte? Are you planning on uplifting him as he stands with the white girl's blood dripping from his knife, muttering, "I got that white girl?"

Or maybe these guys in South Africa. For the social justice crew, black South Africans are prime-grade marginalized beef on the hoof. Go ahead and uplift them as they destroy their own infrastructure in the process of stealing a few dollars worth of scrap metal.

South Africa is a lawless place. pic.twitter.com/desMSmi3Bt

— Catch Up (@CatchUpFeed) September 17, 2025