Posted on 06/19/2003 9:18:40 PM PDT by 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.
Thank you for your comment, and for reminding us of some of the Leftist antics through the decades.
Any Conservative who is afraid to debate the issues with the Left has never really grasped the issues that need debating. The one thing the enemy fears most, is the articulate Conservative who understands the issues on which Leftists usually pull out all ethical stops in their efforts to shout down and intimidate. It has always been the fact that the Left is weakest on those issues on which their rhetoric is most strident. Their tactics have always been the Big Lie, and hatred and envy directed against any social segment that has its acts together.
This is so obvious to any of us who have actually engaged the enemy in the intellectual trenches, that I am finally losing all patience with those who want to continue what, but for a few brief shining moments, has been a 71 year old retreat.
Any Conservative who feels defeated on a particular issue, ought to have the decency to stand aside, and at least listen to those who want to engage the forces of social disintegration and corruption. If one has lost his own fight, at least do not try to undermine the morale of those who haven't.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Homosexuality is clearly a disorder (isn't any feature of our physiology out of order if it can't perform the function it was designed to do?), we're just not exactly sure where things went haywire yet.
I earlier denounced this essay, as an example of "whipped cur" Conservatism, and made the obvious points that we have all the sound arguments that we have ever had against the corruption of our Society, and that we will start to win, when we fully engage. As, stated, that is all perfectly obvious; however lost on some Conservatives, who seem beaten in their very souls.
But there is another point, which should also be made here, because Jonah Goldberg is not alone in the erroneous assumption, that underlies his defeatist attitude. There is a fundamental error here, common to those who pose as hisorians, but lack any perspective on the historical human drama: And that is this--a belief that social history moves in only one direction. Actually, social history--social values, especially on sexual themes--swing far more dramatically than do economic cycles. Even if the acceptance of homosexual claims was as widespread as Jonah asserts, there is no reason to believe that it will last very much longer, before the reaction sets in.
For an obvious example of my point, consider the Victorian era, which was a dramatic 180 degree reversal of the easy going Regency era, that extended through the actual reign of George IV and into that of William IV. The openly indulged sport--along with gambling, roadside fisticuffs and racing--was promiscuous seduction of any thing within reach. While that, for all its bad points, may not have been as repulsive as flaunting deviant behavior, it still triggered a reaction, which brought the most restrictive era, ever, in the Anglo-Saxon world. One suspects that what will be coming, fairly soon, may make Victorian England appear to be very tolerant indeed by comparison.
There were, of course, other such swings both in the English speaking world, and in other lands, at various times in human history. All of which just demonstrates how absurd the idea that certain issues are somehow over, simply because one side is less popular at a give moment in time.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Look at that! This is rare -- a complete surprise!
Nobody has ever so much as whispered that thought to me -- nobody. And I play poker with a Buddhist once a month or so.....but he's pretty low-key about his beliefs.
Very interesting, and something to think about. Thanks for mentioning it. It had never occurred to me even to wonder about that.
More damage from Marx, I suppose, and his fanciful cavalcade of dialectic progress. The "forces of history" and all that -- I wonder, why hasn't Marx ever been called for promoting teleology?
Social historians of the United States note how much colonial mores and values differed from those which gave birth to the religious reformism of the 1830's and 1840's, whose handy label I forget at the moment. Was it "the great reawakening"?
Likewise, there is a course taught at the University of Houston that emphasizes the differences in thinking (and in values) promoted by visual media -- primarily the movies, and later on TV -- from the usual word-based and audio-based thinking of the nineteenth century. I guess you could call it gestalt thinking versus rationalism, or something like that. Someone who's studied these topics formally could supply the vocabulary.
Most posters here are familiar with the modern reaction -- and I like now to emphasize its reactiveness to the destructiveness of the Great War -- and the change in mores, styles, and standards of behavior that took place 80 years ago, and were basically incumbent up to, and arguably past, the Counterculture challenge of a generation ago.
Discussion?
Yes, but a gay cabal in the American Psychiatric Association got it delisted as a paraphilia from the standard Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ("DSM") in 1973, and they have stood guard over that delisting ever since, using certain gay-dominated standing committees to cut off and throttle dissenters' attempts to discuss it. Research, however, continues.
Notwithstanding the gay propaganda within all three APA's (the aforementioned APA, plus the American Psychotherapy Association and the American Psychological Association, which pilloried and expelled dissenting researcher Paul Cameron 20 years ago), a survey of opinion within the American Psychiatric Ass'n. a few years ago, which was posted on their site until a year or so ago, showed that in the debate over essentialism (nature versus nurture), large pluralities of mental-health professionals continue to believe that there is a large, and possibly critical, psychological element in homosexuality. In other words, there remains, despite organizational and political pressure, a substantial dissent within the first professional bodies that the gays "went after" in their campaign to "overhaul America" on the subject of homosexuality.
Hi, nice of you to come troll FreeRepublic today.
Is that what keeps people from being homosexual, the fact that they can't marry?
No. Try:
1. Moral injunction against abomination.
2. Hygiene.
3. Disinclination.
4. Self-respect in the face of attempts to demoralize.
5. Desire to build strong, healthy families with strong, healthy, unmolested children.
Want more?
Angel; How can you fight it. "The Boy Scouts of America" won all the way to the Supreme Court. What did that do. All the major Corp.quit funding them, they were banned at the Olympic Games in Salt Lake, and I understand a lot of the public venues they were allowed to use for meeting halls, have now been denied.
When you have the entertainment media promoting the likes of michael jackson and the rest of the TV trash shows, you are done for.
Regards
Yep. It took us 300 years to take over the Roman Empire. It'll be a little less difficult to do the U.S., I think.
The biggest and latest news is that Canada is poised to socialise health care. But the signs of the socialist victory have been all around for us for years.
OK Jonah, if it's good enough for the Canadians and Europeans, it's good enough for me!
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.