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.

....maybe the best response, "What the hell do I care?"

Tell us that one again, the day after your teen grandson spent all night out on the town with someone named Bruno.

Gays tell us publicly that "lifestyle homosexuality" is a canard -- and then we catch them chatting about it among themselves, and bragging about how they can induce it in teenaged virgin boys.

exactly.......ask a few homersexuals who Matthew Shepard is, then ask them who Jessie Dirkhising is.........

I liked the response Brent Bozell got when he really cornered a news executive and wouldn't let him go without a straight answer on why the media wouldn't touch the Dirkhising story.

The weasel's response? "It didn't resonate."

Yeah, right. Case closed.

That's not commenting on the media cabal, by the way -- Bozell in that instance was reporting on it.

I would hope that any intelligent third grader would understand how abysmally stupid this whipped cur Conservatism is.

In the mid-1950's, liberals openly patronized and reviled conservatives and treated them publicly like retarded or wayward children. Schoolbook publishers printed American History textbooks like the one I had in a Louisiana public school that defined "liberal" as "any person who desires the best for his country". No, really, it said that.

In the mid-1960's, liberals openly used profanity on conservatives and made them infotainment whipping boys. They made libelous movies about them like Seven Days in May and Executive Action (both written by the Communist Dalton Trumbo and led by Burt Lancaster). They borked Barry when he was down and didn't bother even to inquire if LBJ had used the FBI honestly when he bugged Barry's campaign to help his own "negative advance" team badger Goldwater. (It would be renamed "dirty tricks" after the fact, when Dick Nixon was found doing it.) Liberals tried to manufacture an "imperial presidency", turning the presidency into something like Captain Kirk's command chair on "Star Trek" -- push a button, a bill happens. Push another button, and someone gets hushed up. They tried to turn the government into a liberal button-pusher's wet dream. Then it turned into a nightmare: Dick Nixon climbed into the command chair and began pushing buttons. Horrors!

Conservatives didn't fold their tents in the Fifties or the Sixties, and you have just reminded us of what character sounds like in action, and of the proud accomplishments of the 50's and 60's conservatives who didn't knuckle under but fought for their principles instead.

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?

Excellent question: "Inquiring minds want to know"!

They want to know, who called the play on Santorum?

They want to know, why doesn't Goldberg report the play on Santorum as a press/advocacy "gotcha" rather than a Santorum gaffe?

They want to know, where was the President for his hard-pressed soldier?

Not sure whether it's the Bush family or the Republican Party apparatus ....

The Bush people have had the Party sewn up tighter than a drum for some time. There are very few conservatives left in the Party hierarchy, and Bush is openly casting about for someone to run against Tom Tancredo, the openly anti-immigration policy Colorado congressman.

Far from keeping hands off down-ticket races in Texas, Gov. Bush definitely played favorites and tried to knock off social conservatives from e.g. the state education board. He also was talking to the Log Cabins before the national convention in 2000 -- what about, and why, I don't know. He didn't invite any conservatives to the meeting.

Short answer: Bush himself is doing this, not Racicot or anyone else.

It must be about money and corporate culture and connections.

My own preference would be to connect the gays 100% to the Rat Party and then run against them.

Thanks, though to be fair the line is Chesterton's, not mine, in reference to "the democracy of the dead." A lot of people who were a lot smarter and braver than I was saw no problem with the traditional moral view prior to the counter-culture movement of the 1960s. All of the planet's major religions are quite clear that this type of activity is not cool with the transcendant, even if they disagree on the nature of said being. That in of itself should make one pause before embracing this type of radical advocacy, at least IMO.

"They want to know, who called the play on Santorum?"

I figure that it was the Kerry campaign, given the identity of the reporter in question.

"They want to know, why doesn't Goldberg report the play on Santorum as a press/advocacy 'gotcha' rather than a Santorum gaffe?"

Because then liberals would immediately attack Goldberg as "homophobic," which is equivalent to de facto heresy among elites these days. The faux attempts by many on the left to make a comparison between Lott and Santorum are quite telling as far as the kind of litmus test that some liberals seek to impose among serving members of the legislature. Heck, Schumer has already essentially stated that no orthodox Catholic can serve as a judge because they might have pro-life rulings. So long as homosexuals have a monopoly on the meaning of tolerance these types of incidents are just going to repeat themselves again and again.

"They want to know, where was the President for his hard-pressed soldier?"

Unlike some on FR, I generally think that Bush did the right thing by not intervening on Santorum's behalf because it would have simply broadened the scandal and played right into the media's hands. The story in question died several weeks after it broke, despite the Democrats' attempts to recreate the Trent Lott scenario. While many social conservatives are mad that Bush didn't make an effort to help Santorum, I think that Bush has correctly recognized that now isn't the correct time to confront the gay lobby because of the current nature of the playing field. In order to break America free of the cultural indoctrination that has been taking place ever since the 1960s, one needs a situation with which to galvanize the masses. I suspect that the judicial activist legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts will be that spark.

More to the point, through voucher programs and various other means, Bush has helped to ensure that the children of the next generation are not going to be hopelessly indoctrinated with liberal propaganda on any number of issues, social issues among them. That helps to pave the way for the eventual defeat of the counter-culture, particularly if the GOP can work to make in-roads among the socially conservative black and Hispanic blocs.

Thank you for your long and considerate post.

I'll just demur as I did before, and say that I rather don't think that President Bush wants to spend capital supporting social conservatives.

If Bush manages to break the power of the NEA over classroom content, fine -- but he had a chance to back attractive social conservatives in Texas and kept them at arm's length instead. Some of them were strong Christians, some were home-schoolers and people fed up with left-wing social agitprop and disciplinary/safety problems. These were attractive people, too, not shriveled old geeks wearing black, and they were making strong, coherent statements about curriculum content and values. But he didn't support them and instead tried to beat one or two of them in the primaries.

Meanwhile the rot progresses in the schools, with the gays getting into the schools now with "toleration" training, ostensibly.

For the children, you see.

Actually, I don't think it should be all that a shocker that Islam has prohibitions against homosexuality, as anybody you ask will tell you that it borrows quite a bit from Judaism and certain heretical sects of Christianity. However, you'll notice that it's almost never discussed that Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Shintoism (which many lefties think of as being far more "spiritual" and "enlightened" than us Westerners) also contain similar prohibitions against the activity.

These doctrines aren't commonly advertised by the religions' main proponents (which is often the Hollywood crowd, who know about as much about real Buddhism as they do about real Christianity), but the Tibetan Buddhists recently had their own miniature version of the Catholic sex scandal in Southeast Asia, though they've done a far better job of rooting out the source of the problem than my church's own bishops.

Hinduism similarly condemns homosexuality quite explicitly in the Vedas and I believe in the Mahabharata as well. A lot of people have this image of Hinduism as being fairly erotic because of the whole kama sutra thing, but that only deals with straight sex and (in its original version) only then between a man and a wife.

Similarly, Taoism sees homosexuality as being in conflict with universal order because Taoists regard each human organ as having a specific function. I think you can follow things from there.

Shintoism sees homosexuality as being in conflict with one of the fundamental duties of its adherents: reproduction, so as to provide more servants for the Emperor (who is the descendant of the sun goddess).

It's a lot more complicated than that, but suffice it to say that religious taboos against homosexuality are about as universal as you can hope to get, right up there with rules against murder, theft, and the like. But I wouldn't wait around for the multiculturalists to point this one out to you.

So, in your opinion, is this article by Goldberg an attempt to demoralize conservatives from within their own camp?

Yes. If you check his archives, he has already come out in favor of civil unions. I am sure I'm not the only one who wrote him. He is rolling over on this because it represents his position. Clever tactic, I guess, if you don't mind underhandedness. Show me one issue he's against that he would give up on so easily.

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