Time to face facts: Gays gain victory

townhall ^ | June 20, 2003 | Jonah Goldberg

[TLBSHOW]

Time to face facts: Gays gain victory

The gays have won. The problem is no one will admit it.

The biggest and latest news is that Canada is poised to legalize same-sex marriage. But the signs of the gay victory have been all around for us for years.

The sitcom "Will and Grace" features openly gay characters who joke about their sex lives in ways that little more than a decade ago would have sparked complaints if uttered by heterosexuals, let alone homosexuals. Showtime's "Queer as Folk" depicts random gay sex in precisely the same trivial terms that HBO's "Sex in the City" depicts random heterosexual sex, which is to say with an air of unbridled celebration.

For the popular culture this signals the final stage of mainstreaming homosexuality. After repeated protests from gay groups in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hollywood stopped casting gays and lesbians as villains (think of "No Way Out" and "Basic Instinct"). By the end of the '90s, gays could be found all over movies and TV, but they were depicted as virtuous celibates. In movies like "Sling Blade," "My Best Friend's Wedding" and that execrable drek by Madonna "The Next Best Thing," gays were cast as the only decent and honorable white men around.

My favorite example was the gay character from the Fox nighttime soap, "Melrose Place," which ran for most of the 1990s. Every straight character in the show was having sex at the drop of a hat. Except, for the gay guy, Matt Fielding, played by Doug Savant.

Almost every episode featured the gay pretty boy lecturing his straight friends about their reckless promiscuity or bailing them out from their dysfunctional relationships while he remained as chaste as Greg Brady on "The Brady Bunch."

But the gay victory doesn't just manifest itself in the popular culture. The mainstream media has collectively decided to mainstream gays. The New York Times runs gay "marriage" announcements alongside straight ones in its wedding notices section (aka "the chick sports pages").

On Father's Day, CNN "Sunday Night" ran a long interview with the Asian-American gay actor B.D. Wong about his book Following Foo, which chronicles his efforts as a gay parent. Never raising a hint of controversy, let alone objection, to the issue of gay adoption, the interviewer closed the discussion by noting how much better off the world would be if all fathers were like Wong.

That may or may not be true, but such a comment would be unimaginable in a world where gays were on the defensive.

Indeed, at the same time as all of this, it is all but impossible to say a negative word about gays in public settings (unless you're gay yourself). For example, in March, when Senator Rick Santorum echoed almost verbatim the language of a Supreme Court decision in an interview with an AP reporter, he was widely denounced as a "bigot" and "homophobe."

Earlier this month, Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly tried to cancel a scheduled Gay Pride Month celebration at the Department of Justice for lesbian and gay employees. He failed. Despite pressure from social conservative activists, DOJ reversed course in the face of protests from gay groups and a sympathetic media (and, probably, pressure from the White House).

When the most famous and powerful member of the Religious Right in the U.S. government can't stop a gay pride event in his own office building, held by his own employees, you know that social conservatives are losing this fight.

And now Canada is moving rapidly to legalize gay marriage from coast to coast above the 49th parallel. Gay activists, liberal legal scholars and sympathetic journalists (i.e. 95 percent of the media) say this will have huge repercussions in the United States for, among other reasons, American gays will marry in Canada and come home with an extra argument for why the U.S. government should honor their marriages.

There may be some wishful thinking in this analysis, but when so many elites offer wishful thinking it often translates into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's certainly true that Great Britain is not that far behind Canada on the issue of gay marriage, and the developments in Canada only promise to expedite that process.

In short, it's a global trend and, like it or not, the traditionalists have lost. This isn't a value judgment, it's simply dispassionate analysis. Many conservatives refuse to accept this fact. But refusing to acknowledge a fact doesn't make it any less real.

The challenge for social conservatives, it seems to me, is to make the best of what they consider a bad situation. But that would require making some painful capitulations -intellectual, moral, philosophical and financial. It would also require gay activists to understand that they've won and that the best course of action for them would be magnanimity in victory. Unfortunately, this is all unlikely since both camps are in denial about how far gays have come.

[Alberta's Child]

All the legal recognition in the world isn't going to make a severe personality disorder "normal" in any sense. The Justice Department may as well start celebrating Alcoholic Pride Day and Wife-Beater Day.

[TheWillardHotel]

Goldberg can stick "it" where the sun don't shine. I am never lowering my standards. I don't care what the NY times or some television show says.

[TLBSHOW]

when principal is gone we get this.....


Despite pressure from social conservative activists, DOJ reversed course in the face of protests from gay groups and a sympathetic media (and, probably, pressure from the White House).

Goldberg

[Norse]

As long as there are people like you, they will never truly win. And, in the end, they lose. They may win a million battles, but they will lose the war. It is already written

[ex-Texan]

Canada is in the grips of the powers of darkness. That is the reality.

[AntiGuv]

Yep. The writing's clearly on the wall. What remains is just so much sound & fury, signifying nothing..

[TheWillardHotel]

Privately, I've come to a conclusion that the west has become lost. Nothing short of a r*volution will save our country and our culture.

We can only pray that men like Washington and Jefferson will lead the way.

If there is no revolution, all we can expect is a grinding and ratcheting up of tyranny.

[Humidston]

This whole thing just stinks. I say we BAN network TV in our homes because it's only going to get worse.

Just think - we have the shrinks now trying to decide whether or not to state pedophelia is normal behavior!

[gcruse]

Since social conservatives are incapable of letting go of the notion that homosexuality is a 'severe personality disorder', rather than stew in hatred, maybe the best response, "What the hell do I care?"

[TLBSHOW]

trash your TV you will be happy you did.

[TheWillardHotel]

I got rid of my TV several years ago.

The real world is scary.
I understand why so many people DRUG themselves with television.

TV is the great destroyer.

[Norse]

Friend, I hear you all the way. The west is going downhill fast...we can see the train coming, but too many people don't see it. Honestly, you're right, a revolution will eventually be the only way to save it. Our kids + grandkids will deal with it within the next 150 years, i'm sure.

[Humidston]

We have no more children in our house and we spend all our TV time watching FNC and C-Span, History, A & E. But that's IT. If someone bombed the alphabet networks tomorrow we wouldn't miss any of it. They're all trash!

[Alberta's Child]

Maybe I ain't much of a "social conservative," and I sure as heck don't "stew in hatred."

Any honest professional psychiatrist who doesn't have a political agenda to push will tell you exactly what I told you.

Nobody here is suggesting that we ought to hate anybody -- but I'm certainly not going to call homosexuality any more "normal" than I would call someone with a drug problem.

[Angelus Errare]

So traditional conservativism on the issue of sexuality is lost because Hollywood (and Europe, of which Canada can be viewed as an extension) says so? My God, were we to apply the same standards to the portrayal and view of Republicans and Bush we might as well concede the ideological battle right now and prepare ourselves for the coming socialist utopia.

The problem is that time is ultimately on the side of those who champion traditional morality in the form of reproduction. Large chunks of Western Europe have completely secularized itself to a degree that would have made the French Revolutionaries and their Goddess of Reason smile down with pride. There are still people trying to turn around that continent and I hope to God that they succeed, but every indication that I get out the northwestern sector of the continent (you notice Goldberg doesn't cite opinions on homosexuality from say ... Poland or Croatia or Bulgaria) is that this is a civilization that is deep in decline and has long since past its zenith as far as cultural or social innovations goes. And Canada, as I said, is primarily in its current proto-European state as the result of domination by the Liberal Party for an extremely long period of time, which is in part due to the Canadian conservatives' decision to abandon their commitment to traditional morality. There is a direct correlation here.

BTW, since when did how the rest of the West views an issue become a standard for how the US should conduct itself? A lot of European states are all giddy over the ICC (as is Hollywood), but I don't think that Goldberg is going suggest we sign on because "the elites" think we should.

[TLBSHOW]

I hear you.

[Angelus Errare]

Glad to hear it. You and I have had our disagreements before on Islam and the like, but we both recognize the need to maintain the idea of moral law as a concept within a national culture, especially as it relates to homosexuality. If a nation loses its moral compass, then literally everything is permissible. And if you want to see the point where a civilization starts to decline, that would be it. If traditional morality loses the "culture war," then take a good long look at Western Europe today because that is precisely what your children and grandchildren are going to be growing up in.

The type of whining defeatism I've heard from some social conservatives in this forum (as well as the gleeful articles from some polyannish social liberals) quite frankly sickens me as a social conservative because, taking my own optimistic view of history (I'm a Molinist, so I believe we live in the best of all possible worlds), social conservativism currently has an opportunity for a definitive victory. If you look at the raw polling data, most Americans may well think that sodomy laws shouldn't be on the books, but they aren't all bru-hahaha over most of the homosexual agenda. I suspect that a lot of people over in Canada feel the same way, assuming they can open their mouths without being prosecuted for hate crimes for stating their views.

What we're witnessing right now is the vestiges of the 1960s counter-culture to have its sexual views mainstreamed before its pioneers die off. As I said, time is working against these people and so long as we continue to stand our ground on this and other issues (and the NRO has had some excellent articles to discuss just how to do that when the subject of gay marriage comes up) we can win. Remember that Elijah faced off against over 400 Baal cultists at Mount Carmel and came out on top. No doubt that "elite opinion" was against him, but 20 centuries of Western morality trumps 40 years of social activism. We'll win in the long run one way or another, but right now we can win it big time if we just stand tall and stick to our guns.

Speaking of which, since he seems so concerned with opinion, perhaps Mr. Goldberg could note how much damage Santorum's remarks did to his approval rating in Pennsylvania despite week after week of media coverage?

[Clint N. Suhks]

gays have won.

Except for the Quinnipiac University poll; Voters say 58 - 27 percent that homosexual behavior is morally wrong…

[TLBSHOW]

Thank you for the post. We can't agree all the time and I see nothing wrong with that.

Anyway, you are correct, without Morals or Principals as the compass for this nation, this nation will be lost and we the People will become the slaves.

There is lots of work to do if we are to stop the end result from happening.