Chapter 11: What We've Done with the Time

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On April 14, 2026, the Vice President of the United States stood on a Turning Point USA stage and lectured the Vatican on just-war theology. In the country I grew up in, that would have been a constitutional crisis. In the country I’ve been describing across this series, it was a Tuesday. This is where the argument reaches its destination—because the manufacturing of certainty is no longer happening at the edges of our politics. It has moved into the core.

I lay out the pattern plainly: a Secretary of Defense opening a Pentagon briefing with a prayer on his knees; a Supreme Court opinion citing a seventeenth-century judge who sent women to die in witch trials; the Ten Commandments ordered into Louisiana classrooms. None of it sold as religious imposition—all of it sold as the restoration of a tradition. But the mechanism, every time, is the same: theology, installed as the operating system of the government. It is the oldest pattern we have, and the founders wrote the First Amendment specifically to keep it from being imported here.

In May 2026, the Vatican released a forty-two-thousand-word encyclical on artificial intelligence—Magnifica Humanitas—in which the Pope called, among other things, for students to be taught to think critically about the technology. I take that instruction seriously and apply it where it matters most: to the institution doing the asking. 

The Catholic Church teaches its own foundational claims as beyond critical inquiry. It is the same closed framework that produced every prior decision the Church has made against a category of human beings—from the African slave trade to the doctrine that still calls LGBTQ relationships “intrinsically disordered.” And it is the framework behind Dignitas Infinita, the 2024 Vatican Declaration that places gender theory and sex change on a formal list of grave violations of human dignity alongside abortion, euthanasia, and human trafficking. Pope Leo has not retracted it. Perhaps someday he or his successor will write the apology. I am not willing to sacrifice another generation of trans lives—including my own son’s—hoping for that to happen.

I explain why this is the closing argument of a series about my son. It is the same mechanism. The false certainty that the state knows better than a transgender teenager and his doctors about what to do with his own body is the same certainty that has women hemorrhaging in hospital parking lots while doctors call lawyers. There is real resistance, too—a bishop asking a president for mercy, judges still striking these laws down—and what those institutions need now is us.

So I end where the book ends: with a bridge. A stone skew arch near my home in Dexter, Michigan, designed by Frederick Pelham, the first African American to earn a civil engineering degree from the University of Michigan—whose name was left off the commemorative plaque. My son studied that bridge in the fourth grade, and his class decided the erasure was a wrong that needed righting. They got the approvals, raised the money, and in 2018 put Pelham’s name at his bridge at last. That is the entire argument of this series, performed by children. 

Hello, world. I’m the dad of a trans kid. And I’m done waiting. 

Are you?