The Reactionary Utopian
                      June 15, 2006


TOLERANCE STRIKES AGAIN
by Joe Sobran

     Another media typhoon: "Metro Board Member Fired for 
Comment on Gays." I'm glad I don't have to unpack that 
headline for Grandpa Sobran, who went to his reward in 
1959, when the world was more or less normal. Today you 
may lose your job for using the word "normal."

     Grandpa Sobran deserves to be remembered for one 
priceless remark. When my father asked him, around 1938, 
why he thought there would be another war, he explained, 
"You can't have two bulls in the same pasture."

     That simple, pregnant comment contained a 
presumption about normality that is no longer acceptable: 
that bulls like cows better than they like other bulls. 
In the age of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, we must allow for the 
possibility that a pair of bulls may prefer an 
alternative lifestyle.

     So the Republican governor of Maryland fired the 
guy, one Robert Smith, for saying, "Homosexual behavior, 
in my view, is deviant." Feeling a need to explain this 
quaint view, Smith added, "I'm a Roman Catholic." 
Catholics still believe that bulls prefer cows. A dogma, 
I guess.

     The governor also felt a need to explain his action: 
"Robert Smith's comments were highly inappropriate, 
insensitive, and unacceptable. They are in direct 
conflict to [sic] my administration's commitment to 
inclusiveness, tolerance, and opportunity."

     Such "tolerance" makes the blood run cold. Smith 
made his comment on an obscure cable show, where he was 
giving his own opinion ("in my view"), one unrelated to 
his office. Another Metro board member, speaking as "an 
openly gay elected official," said he was "deeply 
offended," called for Smith's head, and got it. Such is 
tolerance in the year of Our Lord 2006.

     Admittedly, Smith made a poor choice of words. He 
should have said, "Sodomy is a perversion."

     My old friend Ann Coulter has made the remarkable 
discovery that when you say obvious things that everyone 
knows to be true, people listen gratefully. She realizes 
that polite argument with liberals, couched in timid 
euphemism, gets you exactly nowhere. Their "tolerance" 
extends only to people who accept their dubious and even 
absurd premises.

     Yes, I'd rather not hurt people's feelings. But 
there are so many people nowadays who are positively 
eager to be "deeply offended" that you're a sucker if you 
try to avoid offending them. We're dealing with 
aggressors who pose as victims.

     The current vocabulary of hypocrisy includes such 
words as "gay," "lifestyle," and the ludicrous 
"homophobia," which systematically deny the obvious. 
We're talking about an ugly and unsanitary perversion as 
well as an immoral way of living, the sadness of which 
should excite our pity as well as our censure.

     Why should we pretend otherwise? Only because of new 
taboos -- social pressures against candor -- that are as 
perverse as sodomy itself. We are to make believe that 
"marriage" can mean something it has never meant before, 
that the rectum is as suitable a receptacle for the male 
seed as the womb, that a filthy and fruitless union is 
equal in dignity to one that produces human life? And all 
this with a straight face?

     Oh, Lord. Victorian hypocrisy had nothing on the 
liberal kind, which insists that all the generations 
before us were wrong. Overnight we must repudiate what 
everyone always knew and still knows. We have seen the 
same obligatory amnesia with fornication and abortion; 
evils have suddenly become "rights."

     And this is what our children grow up being taught 
in state schools and the mass media. Democratic values, 
you know. Equality. Tolerance. Constitutional rights. 
Raising public awareness.

     But the lies, being lies, don't work too well. For 
some reason, kids still love real love -- the fruitful 
mutual love of men and women. They refuse to accept "gay" 
as something positive; they use it as a term of abuse and 
ridicule. They recognize it as a joke, no matter what 
their elders try to tell them. Reality is insistent. 
Humor remains, as ever, the final revenge of the normal 
on the official.

     The enormous official effort to normalize the 
abnormal is doomed. Note the root word "norm:" G.K. 
Chesterton long ago observed "the modern and morbid habit 
of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal."

     But normality seems to be the one thing liberalism's 
inclusiveness excludes and its tolerance can't tolerate.

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