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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
How you consummate your marriage is your business, so long as you’re consenting adults, not mine.
That’s at the core of it.
And yes, I know that marriage between a man and woman has been the understanding of all cultures so far. This culture is changing, for a number of reasons, and it’s changing because a lot of people who aren’t gay are also asking why it’s anybody else’s business, why it’s a good reason to discriminate when we’ve decided that religion or ethnicity or gender are not.
Iow, please do keep the concept, but you can no longer assume I will accept that it’s important to everybody without you explaining why. “It’s always been this way” isn’t convincing.
How you consummate your marriage is your business, so long as you’re consenting adults, not mine.
That’s at the core of it.
And here the fundamental disconnect rears its head yet again. Marriage exists as a civil (& religious) institution precisely because how a marriage was consummated “the marital act” (at least the potential consequences of it) was understood to be of interest to the rest of the community.
That seems to be where society is being honest about what marriage is today for many people. At which point it becomes about equality.
That seems to be where society is being honest about what marriage is today for many people. At which point it becomes about equality.
Society? I believe in every case except one, where the people were asked, they chose to keep marriage as it had been understood throughout our history.
Perhaps you’re right, Klaatu. My feeling is that it isn’t a make or break voting issue for most people, but gay equality isn’t really being forced on an unwilling America.
Perhaps you’re right, Klaatu. My feeling is that it isn’t a make or break voting issue for most people, but gay equality isn’t really being forced on an unwilling America.
I’m not sure what is meant by ‘make or break voting issue’ but the fact remains this is not an issue where the people of a society are deciding of their own accord to redefine one of their central institutions. The change is largely being imposed on it by an out of control judiciary.
Every time a straight person treats a gay person as his or her equal, and gives that gay person’s domestic partnership the same respect they accord other straight people’s domestic partnerships, that’s what they’re doing.
It may not be an issue that gets them to the voting booth, but they’re still changing society by “being that change”. I don’t particularly like the term, but I think it fits.
There is a group of gays that are pro life for that very reason. Of course I think the gay gene is a myth and that kind of cute will never happen. At least I hope not. That kind of Brave New World stuff is worse than homosexuality.
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……
Really? No need for drastic steps to get people’s consciences to take over in regard to civil rights for race? I was born in 61, so I personally don’t can’t attest to it. But my history book talked about the civil war, the underground railway, the emancipation proclamation, freedom riders, blocked schoolhouse steps, race riots, lynchings by the kkk, the contentiously passed civil rights act, and to top it off, affirmative action. all done because consciences weren’t so easily persuaded that a equal spot at the table was to be afforded to African Americans.
As to why social security recipients haven’t coalesced into a more strident advocacy group. Have SS recipients ever felt it necessary to hide their identities for fear of violence, arrest or unemployment? The geezers and their issues are commonly referred to as a untouchable third rail of politics because they have immense political power. Have gays ever had anywhere near this kind of power?