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Tolerance Strikes Again
 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.
![[Breaker quote for Tolerance Strikes Again: The wisdom of Grandpa Sobran]](2006breakers/060615.gif) 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.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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