Time to face facts: Gays gain victory

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.

What arrogance!

So if I don't accept homosexual behavior, I "don't think for myself" or I'm not "enlightened"???

You have it backwards. You have been brainwashed by the NY Times / ABC news type media. Ask yourself - when is the last time the mainstream media portrayed a homosexual as evil? Perhaps you are not aware of an ongoing agenda?

If homosexuals are supposed to be just like everyone else, then shouldn't they have an equal proportion of evil people? But when a movie comes out like "Basic Instinct", severalhomosexual groups came out in protest of the movie - not because it portrayed homosexuals as evil, but because a lesbian committed a murder. They want the public to believe that homosexuals are incapable of being evil!

Do you ever hear the mainstream media describe how homosexual behavior significantly shortens life? You hear about AIDS, but you never hear about the numerous other diseases that is spread by homosexual acts. I've read that gay men live to be an average of 41 years old, while the general population of men live into their late 70's.

Homosexuals know that the "10% of the population is gay" is 5-20 times too high. But they continue to repeat the larger number as part of their agenda to demonstrate that they are "normal". They have to lie to show they are normal.

Wake up.

"Gays indeed have become mainstreamed. It's inexorable. Women having careers. Blacks having equal rights. Tolerating gays. It's called being enlightened."

Tolerance and respect for them as possessing the same rights and privileges as we do under the American constitution is one thing, special rights are another altogether. Sodomy laws may indeed be going the way of the dinosaur, but the fact that so many are willing to tar those opposed to the gay rights movement with the brand of "intolerance" (which may as well be heresy in today's society) rather than debate the issues concerning gay marriage as have been laid out on the NRO as well as other places only serves to reinforce the perception that those claiming intolerance are themselves too intellectually bankrupt to support their positions.

"The ultimate proof are the number of us on a right-wing Web site who are gay-friendly."

I disagree. That merely demonstrates that we are willing to tolerate a difference of opinion for the sake of advancing the broader conservative movement. Unlike say, the Democratic Party, where one MUST adhere to a set position and ideology on the issue of abortion or homosexuality in order to be elected or represent the party on a national level. This creates friction between the different wings of the party, but even while you may find some on Free Republic who don't favor certain aspects of traditional morality, I very much doubt that there is a sizeable number of people here who would willingly embrace the gay rights movement, which in of itself simply utilizes Marxist class warfare as applied to sexual orientation.

"America is on an inexorable liberal path on social issues, and has pretty much seen its realization."

Perhaps so, but there are any number of societies that have gone from social liberalism to social conservativism in roughly short periods of time. The formerly atheistic communist states of the Soviet Union, for example, are currently hotbeds social conservatism. More to the point, time and simple reproduction arithmetic is on the side of social conservatives.

"However, on economic issues, America is on a path towards the right. America has seen the failure of New Deal socialism and is moving away. 10-15 years ago, when I tried to talk about privatizing social security, or replacing the IRS, it was laughable. Even among Republicans. Now, they're taken seriously, and you'll see significant steps toward these goals by the end of Bush's second term."

Indeed. However, the passage school vouchers is very likely to get children out of the decaying public school system and once there is serious reform in the higher levels of academia, I very much doubt that current social liberalism is going to be as popular in 30 years if we pull things off right than it is today. And it is precisely that position that scares social liberals so much, which is why there are so many analogies to the Nazi regime being floated about the Bush administration on any number of liberal sites.

"But if you're focused on social issues--you have a lost cause."

I agree, because the three are intertwined. Respect for private property is itself derived from the concept of natural and American national security as it is currently defined is based primarily on the fact that our national culture retains some moral clarity on the part that we can at least call a spade a spade and use the word "evil" without everyone going freaky like in Western Europe, that bastion of enlightened thought. You have a veritable example of any number of "socially enlightened" societies today in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, and to a certain extent England. Now there are still groups working hard to turn these countries around and they should be commended for their efforts, but I still cannot for the life of me understand why people desire to jettison the concept of moral law when there existing examples of what happens to nations that do.

"Social conservatives will eventually win all of these issues. It's just a matter of time."

Actually, I'd say it's also reproduction. Western Europe's birthrates are rapidly declining and the place is going to completely Islamicized in 30 to 50 years. Assuming Islam doesn't fix the current state that it's in, that in of itself is worrying enough, but either way the enlightened EU and its bureaucratic social engineering will either be long dead and buried or altered beyond recognition by the time that occurs. In the US, if the Republican Party can successfully coopt the Hispanic voting bloc (which tends to be extremely social conservative in my own experience), that's pretty much the death knell to gay marriage any time soon. Canada will likely endure a little longer, but ultimately it too will crack and dissolve or be altered beyond recognition by some type of internal reorganization. So where does that leave the gloriously enlightened social liberals of the US? In the dregs of defeat, one assumes, one way or another.

"Better get used to tyranny."

Why? We have a chance right now to stop it, if we act fast enough and don't let ourself get bogged down in defeatist rhetoric from people who have long since written us off as a viable force. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will the unreveling of the damage of the counter-culture did to our country. Deciding that we've been defeated before we act is a de facto acceptance of Goldberg's argument, that social conservatives have lost and we should simply adopt the ostrich approach and bury our heads in the sand waiting for ... something.

Maybe the odds are as great as everyone says they are, maybe they aren't. My point is that not trying is simply a concession of what some polyannish social liberals have already said: we've lost and there's nothing we can do about it. You could've said the same to any number of groups or causes in history, like say ... a religion that was founded by a group of fishermen whose leader had been executed by the state a little while back. Funny, they seemed to do rather well for themselves.

>>Gays indeed have become mainstreamed. It's inexorable. Women having careers. Blacks having equal rights. Tolerating gays. It's called being enlightened. <<

What a hodgepodge of completely unrelated concepts you have linked together under your rather presumptuous label of "enlightened."

Women having careers AFTER CHILDBIRTH AND VOLUNTARILY IN LEIU OF CHILD REARING is a net bad. Children pay the price of the mother's selfishness. I used to try to be "enlightened" and say that either parent could be the chold-raiser, but I was wrong. Women and men are different and in their formulative years, kids need the female parent.

Tolerating Gays is like labelling an eating "disorder" a "disease." This is simply a matter of choice and will. Homesexuality is 100% about sexuality and most pedophelia lays directly at the feet of the homosexual community. Very soon, the same parents who are now staying home to raise their own children (out of an adverse reaction to how THEY were abandoned by their "career" moms) are going to realise that homosexuality is a net bad that threatens thier children. And the worm will turn -- BIG TIME.

The idea that blacks having equal rights is somehow "enlightened" is insulting to blacks in particular and americans in general. Recognition of the even-handed application of the laws and rights established by the Constitution of the United States to ALL people, blacks included was REALIZATION, not "Enlightenment."

Presumptuous putz.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.