January 06, 2011
And let me push the envelope a bit further (what the hell”I”ll never be asked to write for NR, anyhow) by citing the voluminous statistical data of Judith Reisman, Paul Cameron, and other research psychologists who have been driven out of professional organizations for failing to be politically correct. Such scholars elucidate what their profession has tried to forget since the 1970s, when it became verboten to call attention to what was self-evident but insensitive: Gays are three times more likely than heterosexuals to be pedophiles; pro-homosexual education in public schools has been used to recruit the young into gay activities, etc., etc. According to the pre-PC American Psychological Association, gays were promiscuous because it was inherent in their sexual orientation, not because they weren”t allowed to marry.
If Jonah’s beloved American liberal democratic government were willing to abolish all anti-discrimination laws, I”d be happy to let people marry their pet hamsters. I just want public administrators to stop telling me whom I should be nice to and who should be treated with special consideration. I personally prefer gays or just about anyone else to government bureaucrats, and especially to those engaged in modifying social behavior.
Why should I trust what TV screenwriters tell me to believe about some alleged neo-Victorian gay lifestyle any more than all the other nonsense they feed me? From these scriptwriters one might learn that most gangsters are white corporate executives but rarely Jewish, while blacks and Hispanics are crime-fighters or surgeons ministering to white people of lesser intelligence. All of this may be true in the alternate reality Jonah shares with his Hollywood friends, but none of this squares with what I”ve seen on terra firma.
How could Jonah miss the big picture? Gay activists seek a moral stamp of legitimacy, not the right to come out of the closet, something they already enjoy in a thousand different ways. Gays wish to gain respect for their anti-bourgeois lifestyle by redefining marriage away from a practice that has existed since at least the end of the last Ice Age. We may also assume that male-female pairing was the rule among primitive hominids a million years ago, as it was for all life forms beyond unicellular organisms. There has been a standard understanding of marriage for millennia, even before Christianity raised it to a sacrament.
The vastly broadened definition Jonah favors would require intensive recoding of everyone who is not on board with the demanded change, a social-engineering feat that has already begun in public schools, the media, and in the courts with the introduction of anti-discriminatory laws pertaining to the treatment of gays. This work is proceeding more smoothly than one might have expected it would back before the managerial state and media became so powerful and before gender roles and traditional families began to erode.
It might still take a lot more work before the imprinted social behavior that has developed over the last million years can be undone. According to Michael Levin, revulsion for homosexuality is deeply instilled in us because the practice subverts the reproductive pattern necessary for our species” survival. Levin argued in The Monist (April 1984) that the twisting of heterosexual intercourse into homosexual activity generates deep distaste in a species that is conditioned to associate sexual relations with reproduction and family-building. But one should not underestimate the reconditioning mechanisms that are at the state and media’s disposal.
I would not underrate our leftward-lunging conservative establishment’s value as facilitators of goofy social change. The reaction of “conservative” commentators, most conspicuously Rush Limbaugh, to having openly gay soldiers in the military was breathtakingly underwhelming. It was as if the “movement,” going from FOX commentators through radio celebrities, had been briefed on what not to say. The ones who did say something, such as Charles Krauthammer, were typically in favor of what the Democratic Congress did. My Canadian friend Grant Havers, after reading Goldberg’s “surprising” commentary, quipped that our conservatives “might want to embrace all of cultural Marxism at one time. That way they could stay ahead of the Christmas rush.”
