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rfmcdonaldBefore I knew that I wasn't straight, I was startled to come across a remarkable suggestion by David Frum. I thought that the proposition came from in his 1995 Saturday Night article "The Case Against Gay Rights." On perusal I can't find it there, but I do find it quoted by Andrew Sullivan (as a 1996 article from the Weekly Standard) in Sullivan's 2004 article ("Right Frum Wrong") at The New Republic.
As it turns out, "The Case Against Gay Rights" is included in Frum's 1996 collection What's Right, pages 261 through 273. By the end of the article, he concluded that although it might not be justifiable to exclude non-heterosexuals like myself from the protection offered human rights laws on purely rational grounds, it must nonetheless be done for the sake of, um, the children. Oh, and the lower classes. Presumably his advocacy of the sodomy laws recently tossed out by the US Supreme Court, though perhaps justifiable on grounds of human rights, were convenient for reasons ultimately secondary to their primary purpose.
I'd like to conclude that Frum is an anomaly in the ranks of the neo-conservatives, but then there is the example of famed neo-conservative intellectual Midge Decter. Decter had an interesting article included in the August 1980 issue of Commentary, "Boys on the Beach," in which she argued that the gay movement or gay identity or gay sex or all of the above was contributing to the death of gay men and the sufferings of people unfortunate enough to see them. Was this a temporary opinion? Was this something that was changed, perhaps in the 1980s when she saw so many of her friends and acquaintances dying of AIDS, perhaps in the 1990s with the richness of time. Alas, no.
Of note in this essay, as in all of her essays relating to non-heterosexuals, is her exclusion of non-heterosexuals from the group "we," from the circles of people that she as a person cares about and that she as an essayist is interested in reaching and that she as a neoconservative consider worthy of determining the future of society. A sense of aesthetics might enter into it inasmuch as she might dislike the mechanics of sex among non-heterosexuals, but reading her oeuvre I'm more inclined to believe that she shares Frum's opinion that non-heterosexuals are embarrassing to her project of revitalizing an ideal of heterosexual childbearing marriage for everyone. Never mind that it never existed, not really, not in the way that she wanted. What's important is the project, the goal, the Platonic ideal state.
Perhaps you could present these unfortunate bigotries as the solo projects of Frum and Decter. Perhaps. Two objections present themselves:
Please tell me that I'm wrong, on either of these two assumptions.
All that I can do right now, at the end of this brief survey, is to recall the argument of Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons that "[t]his country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?" Laws need to be rooted in defensible realities or realizable hopes else they fail. Plato might have argued that ruling classes need convenient lies to keep the lower classes in order, but then Plato was concerned with defending the ideological bulwark of a regime that killed a single-digit percentage of the Athenian population. Even before I realized that I wasn't straight, I tended to gravitate towards political movements and ideologies congenitally unlikely to end up inflicting mass suffering for abstract ideological goals. Would that the people governing the world's last superpower were of a like mind.
In extremis, states may even want to consider one final, distasteful expedient: reaffirming or re-enacting sodomy laws. In the best spirit of tolerance, half the states repealed their sodomy laws in the early 1970s, and the other half stopped enforcing them. That was the right thing to do. These laws not only invade precious rights of personal privacy, they confer dangerously arbitrary powers on the police as well. But the fact is, these laws remain constitutional. And--should the courts ever make it necessary--they can serve as a legal weapon of last resort. First, in a state with a sodomy law, gay marriage could not be legally consummated. Second, a state with a sodomy law can, if challenged in court to defend its "sex discrimination" in a marriage case, do what Colorado and Hawaii could not in defending their "discriminatory" legislation: cite a compelling state law enforcement interest, the prevention of a criminal act. Third, and most serious, the reaffirmation of a sodomy law would signal the courts that their attack on marriage risks triggering a legal convulsion even grimmer than that touched off by the decision in Roe v. Wade.
As it turns out, "The Case Against Gay Rights" is included in Frum's 1996 collection What's Right, pages 261 through 273. By the end of the article, he concluded that although it might not be justifiable to exclude non-heterosexuals like myself from the protection offered human rights laws on purely rational grounds, it must nonetheless be done for the sake of, um, the children. Oh, and the lower classes. Presumably his advocacy of the sodomy laws recently tossed out by the US Supreme Court, though perhaps justifiable on grounds of human rights, were convenient for reasons ultimately secondary to their primary purpose.
I'd like to conclude that Frum is an anomaly in the ranks of the neo-conservatives, but then there is the example of famed neo-conservative intellectual Midge Decter. Decter had an interesting article included in the August 1980 issue of Commentary, "Boys on the Beach," in which she argued that the gay movement or gay identity or gay sex or all of the above was contributing to the death of gay men and the sufferings of people unfortunate enough to see them. Was this a temporary opinion? Was this something that was changed, perhaps in the 1980s when she saw so many of her friends and acquaintances dying of AIDS, perhaps in the 1990s with the richness of time. Alas, no.
So if the lady tends to be against a constitutional amendment and opposes unequivocally the idea of civil union, what does she want? The answer is, I want us to stick up for ourselves and the way we live, be as mighty a force in the culture as we are entitled to be if nothing else by virtue of our sheer numbers. I want us to resist all attacks on the way we live, whether from our kids, our grandkids, their momentary culture heroes, or from the overpaid, mindless, sheep-like followers of fashion in the press and academic community who make so much noise in the world around us every day. In other words, let's take back our country. Let us be decent, civil and even loving to our homosexual fellow citizens; but draw the line on what they stand for and on everything else that makes light of our existence.
Of note in this essay, as in all of her essays relating to non-heterosexuals, is her exclusion of non-heterosexuals from the group "we," from the circles of people that she as a person cares about and that she as an essayist is interested in reaching and that she as a neoconservative consider worthy of determining the future of society. A sense of aesthetics might enter into it inasmuch as she might dislike the mechanics of sex among non-heterosexuals, but reading her oeuvre I'm more inclined to believe that she shares Frum's opinion that non-heterosexuals are embarrassing to her project of revitalizing an ideal of heterosexual childbearing marriage for everyone. Never mind that it never existed, not really, not in the way that she wanted. What's important is the project, the goal, the Platonic ideal state.
Perhaps you could present these unfortunate bigotries as the solo projects of Frum and Decter. Perhaps. Two objections present themselves:
- If you exclude these two seminal writers from the neoconservative movement, though, what is there left to it?
- Are the other major neoconservative writers really of very different opinions?
Please tell me that I'm wrong, on either of these two assumptions.
All that I can do right now, at the end of this brief survey, is to recall the argument of Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons that "[t]his country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?" Laws need to be rooted in defensible realities or realizable hopes else they fail. Plato might have argued that ruling classes need convenient lies to keep the lower classes in order, but then Plato was concerned with defending the ideological bulwark of a regime that killed a single-digit percentage of the Athenian population. Even before I realized that I wasn't straight, I tended to gravitate towards political movements and ideologies congenitally unlikely to end up inflicting mass suffering for abstract ideological goals. Would that the people governing the world's last superpower were of a like mind.
