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The Flame at the Heart of the Gay Rights Movement
The problem with the gay rights movement is that it is, in its very essence, insatiable.
A clear demonstration of this was on display with the recent LGBT primal scream in response to the Indiana law on religious freedom signed by Mike Pence and later “clarified” by additional legislation. The law was substantially the same (although admittedly broadened somewhat in scope) as the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” signed into law in 1993 by Bill Clinton and supported by a nearly unanimous legislature (three U.S. Senators opposed it). Nevertheless, the potential for business owners to be protected by the Indiana law from having to participate in business activities that violate their religious principles – specifically with regard to opposition to gay marriage – detonated an IED (Indiana Explosive Device) of furious destructive force.
The Democratic Party is, as a whole, a patchwork of grievance groups that seek government redress for perceived injuries. My friend, Boston area radio personality Todd Feinburg, argues all the time that the principle activity of the party is to appropriate the common weal and create bureaucracies whose functionaries are employed to study social problems and then distribute the dough to petitioners – in return for which said petitioners (to say nothing of said bureaucrats and researchers) vote and campaign for the election of the party. According to Todd, no one votes for the Democrat Party who isn’t paid to do so.
As scams go, this is not very subtle.
Critical to this whole enterprise is the identification of the petitioners with the grievance group. For example, not all of those who receive Social Security checks think of themselves first and foremost as Social Security dependents. They may rely heavily on those checks. They may vote for the continuance of those checks. But they are not obsessed Social Security true believers. They do not interpret every nuance of every article they read as a veiled threat to Social Security. They do not want to join in the grey grievance wing of the rainbow coalition of the Democrat Party because, frankly ,without the checks they’d find some way to get by after all.
But identification is stronger in some precincts. Social liberals are cut from a different cloth than groups with mere economic grievances and the LGBT movement is particularly monomaniacal.
Tucker Carlson, appearing on Fox News’ Special Report, recently put the case powerfully. He noted that exceptions have always been made for deeply-held religious beliefs, such as for religious groups like the Quakers, who are allowed to be conscientious objectors in time of war:
So you have a country where religious minorities get to choose which wars they fight in but not whether they serve cupcakes at a wedding that would violate their religious principles, it’s insane.
He goes on about the “tolerance” of social liberals:
These are absolutists, these are jihadis, these are people who want to make you obey. They don’t brook any opposition to their worldview at all. They will crush you…That’s not tolerance, that’s authoritarianism.
But why is that so? What makes social liberals and the LGBT community in particular so intransigent?
Why is the LGBT movement more obsessed with LGBT rights than Social Security recipients are with Social Security checks? Or unions are with union rights? Or even than African-Americans are with civil rights?
The question really answers itself. The process of becoming gay is (irrespective of social or parental tolerance) psychologically wrenching at the deepest levels. The identification with the desires and temperaments of the gender that is different from the one of the body you inhabit has to be an earthquake for any who undergo it. Sex, after all, makes up an enormous part of human existence.
Add to that the fact that many, if not most, gay people encounter resistance from their parents — who typically would prefer, all else being equal, that their children grow up to be heterosexuals — and that they then experience the subsequent guilt toward them, and you have the recipe for lifelong obsession with those choices made in adolescence (if indeed you want to insist that they are even choices).
In the end, political organization for gay rights in the public sphere is not about protection from discrimination (in hiring, for example), or visitation rights at a hospital, or tax-related rights previously reserved for heterosexual spouses, or any of the other legal, practical matters. Rather, the radicalism of the LGBT movement is a projection of the psychodrama of the inner lives of gays onto the whole of society who are forced forever to play the role of their parents.
It’s not about legal treatment. It’s deeper than that. It’s about acceptance. And nothing will ever be enough. Nothing can ever be enough.
This specifically explains why marriage is so important to the gay rights movement – and not just the practical benefits of marriage (as in “civil unions”) but the actual word marriage. Because marriage is a ceremony wherein society (or some sub-society like a religion) confers recognition onto a union. Gay marriage forces all of us, as members of society, to recognize and to acknowledge that the union of man and man or woman and woman is equivalent in every meaningful way with that of man and woman. Insisting on the word marriage — as opposed to simply being granted the complete set of legal benefits in a civil union — imposes an obligation not merely on our behavior, but on the beliefs of every member of society.
And that, as Tucker Carlson says, is authoritarianism.
Published in General
This is why the LGBTTQQIAAP movement will not be satisfied with just legal marriage. No they will require the churches to conform, made to marry them, accept their way of life, celebrate it. This is why bakers, photographers, rental halls, or anybody else will not be allowed to deny them. They want validation that their way of life is as good or better than any other way and nobody that disagrees will be allowed to exist in peace. Because anybody that does not support homosexuality tells them what they know if their heart. That something about them is not quite right. This is what they can not, will not abide.
Rather, the radicalism of the LGBT movement is a projection of the psychodrama of the inner lives of gays onto the whole of society who are forced forever to play the role of their parents.
Dang! You’ve been cribbing from the old school Feminists haven’t you?
Michael, do you have any thoughts about where we go from here? Also, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the consequences for children, both wrt children being produced by artificial means so that gay couples can be as like heterosexual couples as possible and children being socialized to being gay. People can be socialized to pretty much anything–not everyone, but some can. What happens when our society cannot even agree that it is best for children to be raised by their own Mom and Dad? In my mind, it’s chaos as far as the eye can see. Do you have any words of hope for us?
Kate, that feminist stuff is still part of the heteronormative gender paradigm. Quit the bashing. ;-) and get yourself to the reeducation camp.
To the point of the article, spot on, the movement is insatiable.
Is that a real acronym? What’s it stand for?
They are only 3% of the population. Pretty soon they are going to have more letters than people.
You sir are correct in this assessment, that at the heart of the LGBT struggle is not the notion of legal equality but rather social acceptance. To me it seems incredibly obvious that what homosexuals want is to be confirmed as normal. This though is a concession that numerous people will not and can not make based upon their religious convictions. This argument can not be resolved until one party concedes. Either the religious must accept homosexuality as normal or homosexuals must accept that they are abnormal. The Government finds itself also bound by this dilemma since the government and the laws are a manifestation of the collective understanding.
I don’t think it is possible to compromise on this point and as such while the two views hold equal sway publicly legal and social tensions will keep flaring up until one view becomes dominant and then there is a chance that it might find a way to tolerate the opposing view secure in its own majority, but until then both sides can’t afford to back down without conceding defeat.
Here’s what I find interesting about the normalization thing. Right now gay people will swear that no one chooses to be gay because it would not fit their narrative. People would not like to hear that under the new regime some of their children who are not gay, or who could have gone either way, will be socialized to be gay. So you can’t say that. Pretty soon, though, they’ll admit, as some have, that yes, kids can be socialized to be gay, but so what? Gay is completely normal and so as a parent you should be happy either way. You CANNOT however, try to deliberately socialize your own child to be straight. That would be bigotry. And it would be bigotry for an organization like Boy Scouts to explicitly get heterosexual Scoutmasters to teach heterosexual boys to be heterosexual men. It would be great for a gay man to be a role model for boys, but you will not be allowed to promote your culture, or practice a religion that thinks male and female are meaningful and at the heart of life because only gay culture can be promoted.
Since this thread is destined to hit 500+ comments and go on for a month, I’m just gonna make some popcorn, grab a great spot for a seat, and claim my stake so I don’t miss the action. The usual suspects will be here soon.
Some of us already are. Pass the popcorn please.
Apparently it’s real. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual. At least according to Wikipedia.
I miss the innocent simplicity of the good old days, like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror.
Hi Merina! Thanks for the question!
I have a very radical idea about this. I think that homosexuality is going to be cured. Either in utero (where homosexual inclination, at least in men, might originate) or in childhood, I think that some kind of endocrine therapy will be developed that safely guides the brain to a heterosexual disposition. In the uterus there is evidence that lack of testosterone in the woman’s body early in pregnancy is correlated with homosexuality (in humans and in animal studies). If this were the entire matter I think it would be an easy thing to diagnose and compensate for. It is, after all, only replacing a hormone that is already part of the body. More complicated origins later in life would require more complicated and potentially dangerous treatments. But I suspect they will be worked out.
How many years? Ten, twenty?
Parents want their children to grow up to be like them – heterosexual. They want it strongly. Science and the market will respond. Over the years as the incidence of homosexuality decreases it will reach a tipping point where no one wants their child to be the last homosexual.
Let me add that I don’t think that homosexuality is the worst thing in the world and I don’t believe it’s a sin. I think that people who are that way as adults should be left to live their lives however they want. I don’t think they are bad people. But like diabetes it is a condition that parents would rather not have for their children.
Until then, of course, we’ve got a mess. But by the time science figures out how to produce children by artificial means it will have figured out how to prevent homosexuality, thinks I.
Now that is a much more interesting proposition—why not let that be the OP?
I once had an employee tell me she was “omnisexual.” I don’t see an O in the acronym. Exclusive, bigoted sons of guns apparently won’t recognize her.
I never actually asked her what it meant. The whole conversation felt like a lawsuit waiting to kill me.
Tommy De Seno:
I never actually asked her what it meant. The whole conversation felt like a lawsuit waiting to kill me.
lol Tommy.
Kate: you’re not allowed to use the D-word (“disorder”) when talking about LGBT people. Otherwise I might have. (But *you* can extemporize on that here!).
Stick with condition—but the notion that it might be alterable, and should it therefore be altered? That’s a novel prompt for the usual suspects to chew on (along with the popcorn…)
For homosexuality to be “cured” a source of the cause would have to be found. Don’t hold your breath. People have been looking for a gay gene, or a homosexual hormone, etc etc, for years. No one has found one. I don’t think anyone is going to.
BUT… lets allow for the possibility, for arguments sake, that there is one. Let’s say a gay gene is found. Fine, there’s your cause. What then?
Look for an absolute poo-storm the first time someone suggests a “cure”, via gene therapy, or gene substitution during development, and… wait for it… amniotic tests to detect the gene so a parent could abort if they wanted.
Here’s my bet. Suddenly, the very same people screaming “Abortion on demand, without apology!” would very, very quickly seek to carve out an exception on this ground. The very same people would demand that a “gay” fetus be a protected class of some kind, and that it would be a hate crime to abort one of those babies. Further, they would demand the complete and total banning of any and all gene therapy to remove the gay gene during development ’cause “God doesn’t make mistakes”, as that silly rock star put it (“Well that’s comforting” – all the kids born with sickle cell, hemophilia, missing limbs, etc). A gay gene would be proof that homosexuals are analogous to a race in their eyes, and any steps to eliminate their birth would be called genocide.
Its real, it stands for (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, panssexual) . Unless they have added some more initials since the last time I checked.
Have you heard of NAMBLA? They have been around for years and I suspect would love to take the place of the Boy Scouts in showing boys on how to become men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Man/Boy_Love_Association
gives a new meaning to “I’ve got your back.”
You guys need to use Google more. I found the LGBTTQQIAAP acronym in a half a Google-second, and was curious enough to wonder what pansexual meant.
Am I still allowed to say that I was pleased that the pan in pansexual did not refer to the genus of the chimp and bonobo? Or is my feeling too old-fashioned and, um, humanonormative?
In any event, pansexual and omnisexual are synonyms (for “all of the above,” I suppose). I guess the idea is that bisexual isn’t inclusive enough, as implies that one limits sexual activity to men and women. What about sex with a woman who thinks she is a man, or with a woman who thinks she is trapped in a man’s body, or vice versa, or . . . what, exactly? A woman who thinks she’s a root vegetable? A man who thinks he is a pumpkin that looks like Napoleon?
I wonder if the very existence of these categories is a sign of the apocalypse.
By the way, doesn’t this whole discussion prove Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s point about “defining deviancy down?”
NAMBLA used to march in pride parades in the 70’s… at least in California. When the PR got too bad, they were banned. Into the 80’s, you still had activists like Harry Hay pushing to get them back in.
Michael,
I agree with your assessment of the politics of the situation. However, I think that there is a root cause of this that is similar to the Man Made Global Warming situation. The left has managed to sell a huge lie and now screams that anyone who questions MMGW is a denier.
The huge lie with LGBT (or however many letters) is that this is just an accident of nature and has no correlation to anything like mental illness. LGBT is a text book definition of schizophrenia. The most obvious way to deal with a mental problem would be through psychological therapy. However, conversion therapy has been demonized. Meanwhile, at the same time, permanent mutilation of the sexual schizophrenic by transgenderism is now completely acceptable and in fact unassailable. Anyone who suggests that conversion therapy actually makes sense and that transgenderism is a horror, is immediately branded a homophobe.
When the winds of mass hysteria blow at hurricane force it is hard to hang onto the truth. Faith is required and maybe a constitutional amendment.
Regards,
Jim
Given that homosexuality is inimical to the survival of the human race, how can it NOT be labeled a disorder, and ABnormal?
Those who pushed for civil rights for African Americans knew that deep down, most people’s conscience would tell them that it was wrong to discriminate against black people by denying the vote and such. There was no need to scream and yell and intimidate people the way the LGBT movement does, and for the most part the civil rights movement didn’t need to operate that way.
Not so with LBGT rights. There are tons of people whose consciences don’t tell them that SSM is a right, and never will. That’s what the LGBT rights movement is up against and that’s why they have to scream so loud and demonize the opposition.
According to Google, it only has the one T.
Well, this is a start. Maybe a Rand Paul inspiration.
And I never acquired the notion that heterosexuality being normal resulted from religious convictions. Do others here believe heterosexuality is a norm for humanity without resort to religion?