Posted on 04/26/2003 9:35:59 AM PDT by knighthawk
I have a much greater sense of how difficult it is to come out as a gay man or woman since the United States won the war. There is a distinct chill in the air, I don't call or write my arty left-wing friends and they don't call me. It's not that I don't love them, but the left has had to make such massive intellectual and emotional convolutions to come up with reasons why the Iraqis shouldn't have been liberated that I can't handle it. No doubt, in those tight little talking cabals, they are manufacturing even more insane conspiracies, of which, no doubt in due time, we will be informed.
However, there are compensations. I'm making new friends, and while not arty, they tend to be much better read and are definitely younger. In desperation for someone to talk to in the last days of the war, I went to the Fraser Institute's Annual General Meeting, walked into the hotel ballroom and my jaw actually dropped. Yes, really, dropped. So this is where they've been keeping all the incredibly handsome men in really beautiful suits, I mused. It was a little like a room in heaven that God had made especially for me.
Plus I even have my first new gay friend in more than a decade, who charmed me by writing in his tag line that he was "more right-wing than you." Thanks God for the e-mail, let me tell you, cause I had forgotten how much fun, how light and glancing, how completely surprising friendship with gay men can be. Since my best friend for seven years died horribly, I'd kept my distance, in a simple disinclination to be so saddened again.
I didn't actually know I was conservative until a couple of years ago when people started calling me right-wing, with a faint sneer (faint at first). I wouldn't be your average conservative perhaps. For instance, I think gay men and women make a unique contribution, without which my life and yours would be a lot poorer and plainer. I also think that it is a very good thing that corporations are held to account by some activists, though most are destructive idiots. The over-compensation of some executives is so destructive to the human community it sickens me. Equally, I think that if you want to know what's killing Air Canada, look to the unions. I believe in conservation, but not bad science and regulation to the point of suffocation of all initiative. I am intensely curious about races other than mine, have several friends with mixed-race children, had a long affair with an Indian (dot not feather), and consider one of my best new friends a Cowichan tribe activist.
However I also like (a lot) religious conservatives. And I understand their fear of the senseless, seemingly shameless decadence of some urban gay males, and I equally understand why they don't want their children taught about anal sex at the age of eight. I'll leave the theology to the theologians, but will remind you that in Leviticus, Romans and Judges there are a lot of weird proscriptions that would be useless in today's world. But when I was married, I had a store with my husband in New York's Soho, and every single one of the many talented funny beautiful gay men we hired is dead. Inclusion in the tribe of humanity brings with it responsibility, and to many religious conservatives, and I pretty much concur, a large segment of the gay population has brought fear, not peace.
In any case, coming out as Christian or conservative is terrifying, as is, I'm certain, coming out as gay. You will be discriminated against. The crimes of the past will be held against you. Your income, unless you stick close to your kin, will be threatened. People will frown when they look at you. People will hate you without knowing you, they will call you names if you say anything, they will send you coruscating hate mail, you will suck it up. This will make you crazy and you will understand extremism because you'll see it in your own soul, called up from the depths by the hatred in which you are held.
The reason it will make you crazy is that so many things that need deep public discussion are ignored. Voting surveys for the past 30 years have identified that as many as 90% of all journalists are left-wing. This war, along with polarizing social life and opinion, has revealed that weakness in all its glory. If during the first weeks of the war, it was on the front page of the Globe or The New York Times, it was pretty much guaranteed not to be happening. Why were these stories not previously, exhaustively investigated: Saddam's insane brutality, and his decades of theft from the Iraqi people? The repulsive corruption of the Food for Oil program, the direction of which was personally overseen by only-I-can-confer-legitimacy Kofi Annan? The utter head up your ass-ness of Hans Blix inspection routine? Those with a clear choice voted with their feet. In the States, Fox News now has 4.52 viewers to CNN's 3.4. Hello?
There are many more conservatives in Canada than you would think, given most of our news sources. Intimidated by charges of racism, sexism, homophobia and fascism, they are silent. My gay friend told me Monday that three of his friends told him they were fed up by the left, hated being portrayed as victims by the press, and were turning right. Perhaps they can teach us a little about courage.
The left is a bowl filled with dirty water. As the water slowly evaporates, what remains becomes much clearer, and finally it is so obvious that reasonable people are disgusted and appalled.
Then it' time to FLUSH em like the turds they are.
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