With more news articles appearing with every passing day about how many politicians, even among Republicans (which should further demonstrate the futility of voting for that forlorn party expecting any serious social conservatism out of them) have offered their support for gay “marriage”, it has become obvious that the cultural and political elite very badly want this issue on the forefront of the national discussion. Much has been said about the obvious ridiculousness and immorality of gay “marriage”, and there is little more that I can add to it. More interesting, however, is why this issue seems to have come out of nowhere and so quickly become something that the elites, especially on the left, want to do battle over. Of course the left is degenerate; of course they hate religion and tradition and embrace every sort of immorality, sexual and otherwise. But this is really about more than that. As with so many things in our time, this is primarily about misdirection.
The true origins of this as a new hot-button political issue lie in the left’s shocking (even for them) abandonment of true civil rights issues, which evaporated along with their opposition to useless Middle East quagmires on the day that Barack Obama became President. Yes, there are a few principled exceptions on the left; the likes of Glenn Greenwald, Ted Rall, and Cindy Sheehan come to mind – and yes, leftist groups like the ACLU occasionally must save some face by making a perfunctory muted growling here or there about the continuance and expansion under Obama of the horrendous civil rights abuses begun under Bush. But these are but pitifully small exceptions to the vast, bleak overall picture: that the left has failed at the one time it was really needed and could have shined. Its Bush-era posturing on war and civil rights – not to mention corporate welfare and Wall Street’s alarming hold on Washington politics – vaporized overnight as soon as a man with a (D) after his name came to occupy the Oval Office and began engaging in or benefiting from these things.
So what do you do to save face, or even to be able to look yourself in the mirror, when your massive, shocking refusal to live up to your own professed principles or to do genuine good becomes undeniable? You engage in misdirection and distraction. In this case, you fall back on two reliable old leftist tactics: turning the sexual into the political, and using excessive pathos on a weak-minded public. Or, more plainly, you mask your failure to protect actual, ancient, universal civil rights that are actually in the Constitution by grabbing on to a phony-baloney, made-up “civil right” that nobody had ever heard of before 1995 or so, and making that your new deeply-impassioned cause. If you are the elites, this is how you misdirect your base into continuing to support you and treat you as if you were important. If you are the rank-and-file of the left, this is how you live with yourself; it enables you to say, to yourself and others: “Of course I still defend civil rights – see how strongly I fight for gay marriage?” Meanwhile – a precious few exceptions, as I have noted above, aside – the left stands silent as genuine civil rights erode away, slowly and steadily, under “their” man just as they did under the men they opposed.
Here again, Aldous Huxley stands as the one of the great prophets of the age, as it was he who said: “As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.” Just so.
And there, dear reader, is the awful truth: the elites (especially but not exclusively of the left) want this as a distraction from the loss of genuine freedoms, leftists are snakes who cannot be trusted to live up to their own rhetoric, the Republicans are a corporatist party who do not genuinely care about faith or tradition and thus are of little real value to the faithful and traditional, the voting lumpenproletariat are damn fools who are ridiculously easy to sway with a little pathos, you will end up both with less morality in public life and with less freedom at the end of all this, and this issue demonstrates as clearly as can be demonstrated both how bad things have gotten and how bad they will continue to get in the future.
AntiDem 