SILENCE = DEATH
September 2014
The Conservative Surrender in the Culture Wars
By Tom Bethell
Tom Bethell, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is the author, most
recently, of Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher (Hoover
Institution Press, 2012).
In 1992 conservative commentator Irving Kristol observed that “[the
culture wars] are over, and the Left has won.” The reception of Robert
Reilly’s new book, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything
(Ignatius Press), underscores that judgment. We would expect liberal
publications to ignore Reilly’s book. And they have. But conservative
journals have followed suit. Various magazines, including The Weekly Standard, edited by Irving’s son William Kristol, have ignored Reilly’s book. National Review, edited by Richard Lowry, and its online version, NRO, refused to review it. The same goes for The American Spectator, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell.
Making Gay Okay has received a number of favorable reviews, almost all from conservative religious sources. Robert Royal endorsed it at The Catholic Thing
website; Austin Ruse, Christopher Manion, and Fr. C.J. McCloskey have
published favorable reviews. Fr. James V. Schall praised the book at the
Catholic World Report website. In fact, the book seems to have
done fairly well, reaching the 700s on the Amazon bestseller list
(better than being in the millions!). It also rose to no. 1 in Amazon’s
“Gay & Lesbian History” category — which Reilly told me he finds
“hilarious.”
But the book’s reception also signals a surrender by many secular
conservatives in the “culture wars.” This phrase seems to have been
popularized by Pat Buchanan, who said in a 1992 speech at the Republican
National Convention that “there is a religious war going on in our
country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to
the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”
Published this April, Making Gay Okay asks why Americans are
expected to consider homosexual acts as morally acceptable, and why so
many have touted the Supreme Court’s acceptance of same-sex “marriage”
as a valid form of matrimony. Until a decade ago, such developments were
unheard of in the history of Western (or any other) civilization.
Reilly reckons that homosexuals constitute two to three percent of the
U.S. population.
The book also explores adoption by same-sex couples, the promotion of
sodomy in public schools and in the military, and the widespread
submission to homosexual propaganda. Reilly mentions that the rainbow
flag was flown over the U.S. embassy in Madrid on Gay Pride Day. “I
guess the Marines have to salute that now,” he says.
Reilly, 67, has been at the forefront of the conservative scene for
decades. He was director of Voice of America, the U.S. federal
government’s external broadcast network. He also worked as a special
assistant to President Reagan and as a senior advisor in the Office of
the Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush. He is the author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind, published in 2010.
In an interview, I asked Reilly what conservative editors are afraid of.
“The homosexual mafia,” he replied.
“Which might do what?”
“It can only create problems. It’s such a toxic issue. Editors might be socially ostracized. It’s more than a faux pas. It can be a career crusher.” He said he no longer has a career, so he
isn’t worried. In some cases, publications that have not mentioned the
book may fear alienating writers whom the editors publish and want to
retain as contributors.
The editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal illuminate the change. Years ago WSJ
published a lengthy piece by Reilly on “Aristotle and the Laws of
Nature.” But today they have largely abandoned the culture wars. “They
did have a terrific piece by a doctor saying why his hospital will not
do transgender operations,” he allowed. But more generally, the paper
seems convinced that as long as markets remain free, economies will
prosper and all will be well. Perhaps we should call it the libertarian
delusion.
Reilly sent a review copy of Making Gay Okay to WSJ,
but he “knew they would turn it down because the only op-eds they run
are on the other side of the issue.” On marriage, “maybe Robbie George
[Princeton law professor and co-author of the Manhattan Declaration] is
published once every year or two.” The paper will publish George’s
defense of marriage “but not his rebuttals to same-sex marriage.”
+++
What about the objection that homosexuals are born that way? There
is no “gay gene,” Reilly replies, but even if there were a genetic
predisposition toward destructive behavior, that does not excuse it.
Alcoholics may well have a genetic predisposition, but that doesn’t
excuse them from getting drunk. They still choose to do so.
Recently, Governor Rick Perry of Texas reiterated Reilly’s position —
in San Francisco of all places. “I may have the genetic coding that I’m
inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that,” he
said. “And I look at the homosexual issue in the same way.”
The governor was duly berated in print. Brian Resnick of National Journal
commented that “this is important, as it reflects the thinking of the
Texas Republican Party at large, which recently adopted a party platform
that supports the legality of gay-conversion therapy.”
Imagine that!
As to homosexuals who want to leave the lifestyle, Reilly said recently in an interview with MercatorNet.com:
Homosexuals who do want to change have a significant rate of success in
changing with the right therapies. It is a sign of how far the
rationalization for homosexual misbehavior has gone that two states now
forbid therapists from treating teenage homosexuals who want to change
their orientation. That’s like telling a teenager that if they injured
their eye, they can’t go to an ophthalmologist! The denial of reality
has gone that far.
Reilly doesn’t see homosexual activists as entirely at fault. Often they
are themselves the victims of sexual abuse, or they suffer from an
absence of love from their fathers. They have also built on earlier
social decisions, such as the approval of contraception and no-fault
divorce. They take those precedents to their logical conclusion. “When
sex was detached from diapers,” Reilly writes in
Making Gay Okay,
“the rest became more or less inevitable. If serial polygamy is okay,
and contraceptive sex is okay, and abortion is okay, what could be wrong
with a little sodomy? First, short-circuit the generative power of sex
through contraception, then kill its accidental offspring; and finally
celebrate its use in ways unfit for generation. Contraception used to be
proscribed, then it was prescribed, and now has become almost
obligatory in the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act.”
(In June, in the Hobby Lobby case, the Supreme Court granted narrow
exemptions to the contraceptive mandate. Notice that the great push to
normalize sodomy and same-sex marriage has come from the —
unrepresentative — judicial branch, with a few legislatures tagging
along behind. Abortion followed the same path.)
+++
Of particular interest is Reilly’s chapter on the health hazards of
sodomy, “The Lessons from Biology,” a sorely neglected topic that
receives almost no attention these days. “Today we seem to know the
purpose of every part of our bodies except our genitals,” Reilly writes.
“As unpleasant as the subject matter may be, it is necessary to report
on the physical effects of sodomitical behavior and of other homosexual
acts. Their consequences are significantly more injurious to health than
smoking, so much so that ignorance or denial of these effects is one of
the most remarkable barometers of the strength of the rationalization
that insists this behavior is normal and normative.”
During homosexual intercourse, Reilly goes on to say, the human body
is subjected to an activity for which it is not designed. “If one
insisted on using a highway exit as an entrance, one would be told that
this is extremely hazardous to one’s health and safety and to that of
others. Why is this so difficult to state when it comes to human
anatomy?” Ignoring or downplaying these perils to health is perhaps the
greatest oversight in today’s highly slanted coverage of the same-sex
issue.
Here are some of the facts Reilly cites:
-A study in Vancouver showed that “life expectancy at age 20 years for
gay and bisexual men is 8 to 21 years less than for all men. If the same
pattern of mortality continued, we would estimate that nearly half of
gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years would not reach their
sixty-fifth birthday.”
-Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, a psychiatrist and the author of Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth,
said in 1996 that “the incidence of AIDS among 20 to 30-year-old
homosexual men is roughly 430 times greater than among the heterosexual
population at large.”
-According to Dale O’Leary, author of The Gender Agenda, “While
men who have sex with men make up for only a tiny percentage of the
population, they account for 72 percent of primary and secondary
syphilis cases plus 79 percent of HIV diagnosis among men and the
significant percentage of other STDs.”
Reilly follows up with two questions: “How is it that there can be
warning labels on cigarettes and alcohol and on almost every package of
food; health alerts for the level of air pollution, mandatory use of
seat belts in cars, and yet no cautionary admonitions regarding
homosexual practices?” Further, “Why are we counseled to change our
dietary habits if we tend toward obesity because of the health hazards
it presents, but not asked to modify our behavior if we engage in sodomy
which can be far more lethal?”
He answers: “There are no warning labels because they would disturb
the rationalization for homosexual behavior by inviting the observation
that there is something in Nature itself that rebels against it. Rather
than face the clear implication that what they are doing is unnatural to
their own bodies, active homosexuals evade or even deny the
overwhelming evidence of the health dangers to which they subject
themselves…. This is like fighting lung cancer while remaining silent
about the dangers of smoking.”
Reilly cites studies showing that some homosexuals have as many as a
thousand sex partners. It’s as though they keep on searching for
satisfaction that they cannot find.
Incidentally, if the figures about homosexual life expectancy are
correct, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination (GLAAD)
might consider filing a lawsuit against the Social Security
Administration. By one estimate, perhaps 50 percent of homosexuals pay
taxes into the retirement system but die before they can receive
benefits.
Pat Buchanan explored a similar theme in a 1984 article he wrote for
The American Spectator,
a magazine that made its reputation by being politically incorrect.
Buchanan’s article, “Gay Times and Diseases,” co-authored with J. Gordon
Muir, shows how much things have changed — and for the worse. They
wrote:
Gay-rights promises to become for the '80s what busing and abortion were
to the '70s — the social issue that sunders the Democratic coalition.
Mondale, Hart and [Jesse] Jackson have all signed on to the
non-negotiable demand of the movement: that sexual preference be written
into the civil rights act of 1964, to designate another category,
homosexuals, against whom it will be a federal crime to discriminate.
Thirty years later it is, instead, the conservative coalition that has
been sundered. We cannot “discriminate” against homosexuals (whose civil
rights have been intact all along, incidentally), and overt objection
to their practices has become
verboten. Any such criticism violates the most closely monitored taboo of our time.
Furthermore, Jeffrey Levi, a former executive director of the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, told the National Press Club in
1987 that “we [homosexuals] are no longer seeking just a right to
privacy and a right to protection from wrong. We have a right — as
heterosexuals have already — to see government and society affirm our
lives.” Needless to say, there is no right to be “affirmed,” whether for
hetero or for homosexuals.
Urvashi Vaid, a lesbian activist and author of
Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation,
said that “we have an agenda to create a society in which homosexuality
is regarded as healthy, natural and normal. To me, that is the most
important agenda item.” Judged by public utterances, it does seem that
homosexuality more and more is
regarded that way, whether or not such a view corresponds to reality.
Reilly describes the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from the 1974 edition of its
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
A key role was played by Franklin Kameny, who declared that the “entire
homophile movement is going to stand or fall upon the question of
whether or not homosexuality is a sickness.” Kameny was praised by
President Obama in a White House ceremony in 2009. “We are proud of you
Frank,” Obama said, “and we are grateful to you for your leadership.”
This was the same
Frank Kameny who was arrested in 1957 by a vice
squad in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House. After Kameny’s
death in 2011, the National Park Service placed his Washington, D.C.,
home on the National Register of Historic Places.
+++
The
Duck Dynasty controversy of late 2013 raises some of the
same issues as Reilly’s book. Phil Robertson and his family, purveyors
of a bestselling duck call, are the stars of a popular reality TV show
broadcast on the A&E network, a show that has attracted the largest
non-fiction cable TV audience in history. A journalist who interviewed
Robertson for
GQ magazine asked him what behavior he considered
to be immoral. “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from
there,” said Robertson, a Christian. “Bestiality, sleeping around with
this woman and that woman and that woman and those men.” He elaborated:
“It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable
than a man’s anus,” he said. “That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s
more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know
what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not
logical.”
In response,
Time magazine reported that the backlash to
Robertson’s comments “was immediate and almost too loud to comprehend.”
GLAAD demanded that Robertson be purged from
Duck Dynasty. A&E duly suspended him indefinitely.
That’s when the
real backlash was felt. Followers of
Duck Dynasty,
both evangelicals and politicians such as Governors Mike Huckabee of
Oklahoma and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, defended Robertson. “The
politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints, except those
they disagree with,” said Gov. Jindal. “It is a messed up situation when
Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended.”
A&E promptly retreated. The
Duck Dynasty audience was too valuable to lose.
“Millions endorsed [Robertson’s] views on what the Bible says and
Christianity professes and promises,” Pat Buchanan wrote. “The battle
revealed an immense and intense hostility in Middle America to the moral
agenda being imposed by our cultural elites.”
Some of our own timid magazines, confronted by Making Gay Okay, might have pondered the same lesson. But they seem to prefer fashionable opinion to rank-and-file readers.
Both Buchanan and John O’Sullivan of
National Review pointed out that GLAAD operated a blacklist campaign against
Duck Dynasty,
not censorship. Censorship involves prohibition of speech by
governments. The old blacklist most famously targeted communist
sympathizers in the 1950s. Today, we are expected to censor
ourselves if we have any doubts about the rationalization of homosexual behavior — sodomy in particular.
O’Sullivan added the important point that what was most offensive to GLAAD about
Duck Dynasty
was that Phil Robertson “did not disavow the traditional Christian
teaching that homosexual acts are sinful.” He didn’t retreat.
+++
The systematic protection of homosexual behavior and the
blacklisting of dissenters should be seen as the consequence of an even
greater lie: the modern pretense that there are no real differences
between the sexes. Camille Paglia, who calls herself an “independent
feminist,” commented on this in a
WSJ interview (Dec. 29, 2013).
She describes an occasion when she “barely got through the dinner” with a
group of women’s studies professors at Bennington College, who insisted
that there is no hormonal difference between men and women. Paglia
attributes much of the current cultural decline to such absurdities.
She also called out feminist activists like Gloria Steinem, Naomi
Wolf, and Susan Faludi for saying that gender is nothing more than a
social construct, and groups like the National Organization for Women
for making abortion the singular women’s issue. In denying the role of
nature in women’s lives, Paglia says, feminists have created a
“denatured” movement, protected their own “bourgeois lifestyle,” and
falsely promised that women could “have it all.”
The ongoing feminist attempt to redefine gender — a war on reality
if there ever was one — may have arisen because at the beginning of the
sexual revolution numerous men abandoned Christian teaching and urged
women to take the Pill, enabling the men to enjoy sex without
consequences. To that extent, the sexual revolution in its early stages
worked greatly to the advantage of men.
Feminists have never been able to accept that, but at the same time
they showed no interest in taking the “reactionary” step of restoring
the old morality. Instead, in a bitter and vengeful spirit, they
undertook to advance the sexual revolution still further, using their
growing cultural power, accompanied by male guilt, to sow the pretense
that there are no real differences between the sexes.
In the end, both sexes ended up either ignoring or disparaging
Christian teaching. On top of that colossal error, the homosexual
activists have built their own defiant heresy.
The rationalization of homosexual conduct is only the most recent
campaign in the war on Christianity, and one of the most virulent. A
century ago, the communist revolution aimed to destroy Christianity, but
before it could do so, it destroyed the economies of those societies
that shared in that goal: mainly the Soviet Union and Red China.
(Communism, of course, lingers on to this day in Cuba and particularly
in North Korea.)
The basic tool of communism was the abolition of property, which had
the effect of concentrating power in the hands of a ruling class. Now
the West confronts a full-fledged sexual revolution, which aims to
destroy the family. As with communism, it could end up destroying the
societies that pursue so destructive a goal. Without a restoration of
Christian morality, Western societies will become immeasurably weaker,
and perhaps before long fall prey to the Islamist resurgence, which has
palpably been strengthened by Christian decline. [Emphasis added by G.N.]
------------------------------------
The foregoing article by Tom Bethell, "The Conservative Surrender in the Culture Wars," was originally published in the New Oxford Review (September 2014), and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.
[Hat tip to GN]
I received the wire about 2:00 AM. It was 
The other day some nitwits did something like a satanic “black mass” in city government facility of Oklahoma City. You know the controversy, so I won’t go over it here.
