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The 1965 Motown hit, First I Look at the Purse by the Contours, can be rewritten to frame the tragedy at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis with the title: First I Look at the Mother.

Mary Grace Westman, who looks a lot like her son, Robert Westman, the deranged trans woman who killed 8 year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10 year-old Harper Moyski and wounded countless other children and three adults, was described by the legacy media as having worked at the school as an administrative assistant until her retirement in 2021.

The mother — who has hired a criminal defense attorney and refuses to talk to police — was also described as a “devout Catholic” who opposed abortion and engaged in protests in front of Planned Parenthood. Yet this same mother and “devout Catholic” in 2019 petitioned the court to give Robert the legalized name “Robin.”

She then encouraged friends and family to use “Robin’s” preferred pronouns.

Here we have the heart of the problem: the gender ideology/pronoun movement has infected every strata of society, even infiltrating churches and changing traditional definitions of “devout.”

How do you go from opposing abortion to approving and even celebrating your minor child’s wish to change his biological sex?

It was mom, after all, who greased the engines to have her minor son legally identify as a female. She may have had reservations about his trans identity later on, but once the name change became legal, son Robert was well on his way to violent manifesto-land where he began to feel more and more confused and even regretted becoming trans, admitting in his “kill the children” manifesto that he should not have allowed himself to become brainwashed.

Even a mentally ill killer could plainly see that he had been brainwashed.

And who brainwashed him? The media, CNN, the Biden-Harris administration, the Human Rights Campaign, slogans like “Trans Rights are Human Rights,” and the false glamour attributed to men who think they can become women just by claiming they are.

Add to this the fact that so many Democrats have stated publicly they cannot define what a woman is, and you have a culture resembling a southern California landslide.

The Left normalizes mental illness and tries to make it look cool. In Minnesota, a so-called trans refuge state, a child can be taken away from a parent if that child — influenced by the “trans is cool” culture — announces to parents that he/she is transgender and wants treatment but the parents refuse.

The state of Minnesota can also be blamed for this tragedy.  As one social media commenter observed, “What do you expect when you have a lunatic kid raised in a die-hard, Democrat, progressive and liberal state? It was a disaster waiting to happen.”

Let’s also look at the complicit attitudes of clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, for not taking a stronger stand against gender ideology in the pulpit.

Milquetoast clergy err on the side of caution, afraid to offend or alienate liberal members of their congregations, so they leave crucial issues like gender ideology untouched in homilies while concentrating on “benign” sins like gossip without ever mentioning serious sins that carry a heavy weight.

These priests and ministers don’t mention big sins like bowing before the transgender cult’s catechism, which states children can be born into the wrong body. Clergy don’t mention these big sins because they have been normalized and politicized by Democrats.

For a devout Catholic to think that helping to transition your minor child is a show of love and not a sin suggests that Catholicism is failing its believers. It’s also an indicator of how menacing and far-reaching gender ideology infiltration has become.

I recently had a short conversation in my parish church with the mother of three sons. When the subject turned to politics, she announced that while she was neither right nor left, she didn’t want the government telling her — or women in general — what to do with their bodies, and she had no trouble with the use of pronouns.

I backed up in disbelief. Did I hear what I had just heard?

Ironically, just twenty minutes prior to our conversation and in the spot where we were standing, the air was filled with incense and chants to the Virgin Mary. Yet here was a supposedly “devout” woman defending abortion, the use of pronouns, and presumably trans surgeries.

How does the smoke of worship become the smoke of feminism?

If ordinary church-going women like this can become this confused about matters of faith and morals, what happens to a mentally ill 23-year-old who is told by the liberal media that Donald Trump is Hitler, a threat to democracy, and that the United States is on the threshold of fascism with concentration camps around the corner?

In March of this year a number of Catholic clergy jumped on the “equality” bandwagon and released a letter with the Human Rights Campaign condemning violence against transgender people.

While the condemnation of violence is always praiseworthy and the Christian thing to do, there was a larger, more obvious message in the script, since it was released and published on the Transgender Day of Visibility, a day set aside for the celebration of all things trans.

In other words, the text condemning violence was hidden among the larger text that celebrated transgender identity and the freedom to be trans, whether one is an adult or a minor.

Speaking at a press conference following the school attack, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said those attacking transgender people had “lost their sense of common humanity.”

This is the same mayor who scoffed at praying for the murdered and the wounded at Annunciation Catholic because, in his mind, prayers really don’t mean anything. And how could they mean anything, given that the absence of religious theology is primarily responsible for the creation of far-left woke culture.

Far-left woke culture has become its own established faith.

This is why Mayor Frey, as observed by Bruce Bawer at FrontpageMag.com several years ago, “Abased himself at a memorial service for George Floyd, sobbing hysterically for over a minute, his entire body trembling and heaving, as he knelt by the creep’s casket…” You might call Mr. Frey’s tears far left theater, but they definitely were not prayers. Posturing for political gain is a more apt description.

“I have heard about a whole lot of hate that’s being directed at our trans community,” Mr. Frey continued, not even two hours after the tragedy occurred. “Anybody who is using this … as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity.”

Maybe it’s not hate the way you understand it, Mr. Frey. Maybe what is being villainized is a sickness that is being masked as something worthy of celebration.

Meanwhile on Reddit, some trans activists were celebrating the attack with comments like, “More dead Christians, lol,” and, “The trans community will not die laying down without a fight.”

One trans activist on social media even stated that there shouldn’t have been any children in that school in the first place because “we all know what priests and the Catholic Church do to children.”