As Martin Luther wrote, “The time for silence is past and the time to speak has come.”

DW News out of Berlin recently ran a major story on its evening newscast, which is broadcast in America on PBS. No, it wasn’t about skyrocketing energy prices due to Green policies. Nor was it about Russia holding Germany hostage by controlling its natural gas supplies. Nor was it an investigative story on the alienation and self-centeredness that compels so many Berliners to paint graffiti on the marble and granite exteriors of beautiful classical buildings.

Instead, the chirpy story was about Superman’s son coming out as bisexual. A visual accompanying the story was an artist’s rendition of the action hero’s son kissing another man. The visual was followed with a fawning interview with the cartoonist or publisher—it wasn’t clear which he was—who was treated like a prophet who had divined the true meaning of life.

Earlier that day, I had read that gender activists are demanding that the term “pregnant woman” be replaced by “pregnant person,” because the latter is gender neutral.

And earlier that week, I had read an article about a new California law that prohibits insurance companies from revealing to the policyholder (i.e., parents) the “sensitive services” of anyone on their policy, including minor children as young as 12. Sensitive services include such “gender-affirming care” as puberty blockers, hormone therapy, vaginectomy, scrotoplasty, and voice modification.

Such stories have become so commonplace that hardly a day goes by without my libertine and libertarian leanings being tested.

This is all part of the incessant sermonizing and proselytizing from the Church of Woke, which is the dominant religion in the West. Its mission is to convert everyone to its values, beliefs, and lexicon, regarding not only sexual preferences and gender identity but the full panoply of so-called social-justice issues. Even those who are open-minded and enlightened on such issues can be punished as heretics if they don’t agree 100% with church dogma.

Strangely, orthodox Muslims seem to be exempted from the church’s rules and wrath. They aren’t canceled on campus or in the workplace, although they aren’t exactly enlightened about women’s rights, gay rights, transgender rights, Superman’s rights, or rights in general. If you know why they get a pass, please explain it to me.

In any event, not being Muslim, I’m ready for my punishment. Due to the constant bombardment of sophistry from the church, I’ve become a heretic, which, given my background, is a dramatic reversal. My guess is that many others have become heretics but are afraid to say so.

I’m not virtuous, so don’t misinterpret the next sentence as virtue-signaling. The fact is, over my career I was at the vanguard of equal rights, during a time when doing so required heavy lifting and career risk. Granted, my efforts paled in comparison to others of my generation who risked their lives marching and fighting for civil rights and voting rights on Selma’s Pettus bridge and elsewhere in the Deep South. But compared to today’s hollow rhetoric, my efforts were herculean.

Today, members of the Church of Woke seem to believe that root problems in disadvantaged communities can be solved by joining a Twitter mob and tweeting their outrage over some supposed violation of church scripture, or joining their woke coworkers in showing their moral superiority by posting clichés on their company’s message boards about social justice and diversity, or socializing with well-paid and well-educated “minorities” while being clueless about the plight of the underclass and the complex reasons for their plight, or applauding Superman’s smooching to show their open-mindedness.

In another example of symbolism over substance, Berkeley, Calif., recently caved to activists who had their gender-neutral underpants tied in knots over the word “manhole” still being in common usage. The city went through the expense and trouble of changing the word to “maintenance hole” in the city code.

Meanwhile, no one in Berkeley seems to care about the number of diversity administrators at the University of California-Berkeley. At least Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, determined that his university has nearly 100 diversity administrators.

In spite of their efforts, whatever the number of diversity apparatchiks at California-Berkeley, they can’t figure out a legal way of keeping Asians from being admitted to the university in far higher percentages than their percentage in the U.S. population. Actually, the solution is simple: Since Asian academic and economic success is largely due to having a higher percentage of two-parent families than other “races,” the apparatchiks should increase the rejection rate of applicants from two-parent families.

The Church of Woke would bless that solution. After all, its guiding philosophy is a rewrite of Barry Goldwater’s famous quote: Extremism in the defense of diversity and inclusion is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of social justice is no virtue.

Speaking of extremism, Critical Race Theory is one of the church’s holy books. Its core tenet is that all whites, and only whites, are racist. The fatuity of that tenet can be revealed in a syllogism:

Racism is believing that a given race is inferior or evil in some way.

We wokes believe that all whites are inherently racist.

Therefore, we are racist.

There are parallels between the Church of Woke and the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages.

In the Middle Ages, faithful Catholics went to extremes to demonstrate their devotion and virtue, but they had to keep upping the ante if they wanted to remain in the good graces of church authorities. Buying indulgences became inadequate and gave way to increasingly difficult demonstrations of faith and repentance, such as wearing sackcloth and ashes, engaging in self-flagellation, and breaking out in stigmata.

Such virtue-signaling did nothing to advance Christian values about leading a good life and helping the poor. Likewise, the virtue-signaling by members of today’s Church of Woke does not advance anything, other than their self-righteousness.

Church authorities in the Middle Ages were as hypocritical as corporations are today. Back then, cardinals and popes often had lives of opulence, authoritarianism, and debauchery while preaching the word of Jesus. Similarly, companies with historically dirty hands have figured out how to make money from wokeism. Their insipid commercials and pronouncements have driven this capitalist to start questioning capitalism.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, one of the worst of the lot is Goldman Sachs. It repeats the right platitudes about racial justice, it advocates for diversity in its executive ranks and the ranks of its corporate clients, and it gave millions to Black Lives Matter. But it is the same bank that played a key role in the Malaysian 1MDB scandal, in which poor Malaysians of color were defrauded of tens of billions of dollars.

The book Woke, Inc., by the brilliant East Indian-American Vivek Ramaswamy, gives scores of other examples of the hypocrisy of corporate executives, who have become acolytes of the Church of Woke and enriched themselves in the process. Unfortunately, the book starts out strong and then gets lost in the weeds when it turns to solutions.

Martin Luther came up with a solution in 1520 when he posted his treatises on the need to reform the Catholic Church. The first of the treatises opens with this line: “The time for silence is past and the time to speak has come.”

If Americans were to take Luther’s advice and stop being cowed into silence about the excesses of the Church of Woke, the United States would be a better place for all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.

Even Superman would like it.