March 04, 2013
Lech Walesa
One of Walesa’s critics lamented:
Oh, how the once mighty have fallen….He has now condemned himself and his legacy by his own works and deeds. He once stood up to Soviet puppet communist oppressors for the good of the working person, and now he seeks to oppress those who have less rights and freedoms than he has. The oppressed had become the oppressor.
But one might well say the same thing about gay activists”they once claimed to represent a group that historically had been shunned and beaten and ostracized, but once they acquired a bit of power, they immediately tried to humiliate and isolate their opponents while accusing them of being evil at worst or mentally ill at best.
Walesa’s comments about how a “minority should not impose itself on the majority” raise questions about democracy. If most citizens are against gay marriage, as they appear to be in Poland as well as most other places on Earth, why shouldn”t the majority’s will be expressed through public policy?
Tellingly, Walesa was accused of simultaneously agitating for “mob rule” although his opinions were “outside the mainstream.”
Sorry, but you can”t have it both ways. So which is it? If your opinions are outside the mainstream, you wouldn”t have the mob on your side, anyway.
Shortly after Bill Clinton became president, the subject of gays in the military seemed to seize the national attention for weeks, and I always wondered why. What percentage of the public is gay? Five percent? And what percentage of them has the remotest interest in becoming soldiers? Another five percent? So why did an issue that, at best, directly affects only one in four hundred Americans assume such prominence?
Likewise, gay marriage concerns a similarly tiny sliver of the population, yet somehow it’s been shoved to the forefront as the most pressing social issue of our times.
In the Telegraph, Brendan O”Neill suggested that “Gay marriage is now the issue through which the elite advertises its superiority over the redneck masses.”
This whole ridiculous brouhaha appears to be little more than a power struggle, a fight for the right to define what’s moral. If it’s a hate crime to suggest that perhaps the sudden and almost struggle-free ascendance of gay-related issues in politics has very little to do with “democracy” or helping the so-called oppressed and more to do with ignoring the popular will and strengthening state power at the expense of the nuclear family, then color me guilty.
For now, people such as Lech Walesa and the Catholic Church in Poland stand as obstacles to this grand new moralistic scheme.
