The Reactionary Utopian

Same-Sex What?!

October 16, 2007

[Originally published by the Universal Press Syndicate, December 10, 1996.]

Charles Peguy, the French Catholic poet, made what may be the most prophetic remark of the early twentieth century: “We shall never know how many acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of appearing not sufficiently progressive.”

That insight explains the faddishness of so much liberal thought. One might have thought the idea of “same-sex marriage” was a joke, a reductio ad absurdum of the continuing campaign to obliterate the idea of the normal. (As in “Who is to say what is ‘normal’ for everyone?”) Yet it has become a seriously debated “issue,” and even some conservatives are afraid to argue against it.

Meanwhile, a single judge in the middle of the Pacific Ocean has overturned the consensus of Western civilization: Hawaii is now on the verge of recognizing “marriages” between members of the same sex. You got a problem with that?

Cultural liberals are scornful of “old taboos,” but they’re always eager to establish and enforce new taboos. Disapproval of homosexuality is rapidly becoming one of the new ones. If you say it’s a perversion, you will be accused of “hate,” as if you were targeting people rather than evaluating practices. Liberals never acknowledge their own hatred of Western traditions; they merely ascribe their hostility to their “idealism,” a motive their self-congratulation won’t allow them to ascribe to conservatives. (They also claim to be on the side of science, while holding that science is “value-free.”)

So, as usual when liberals control the discussion, the debate quickly turns into a test of motives. If your motives are generous, you will approve of same-sex marriage; if you withhold approval, your motives must be nasty, and the difference between you and the Ku Klux Klan is only a matter of degree.

This isn’t debate; it’s accusation and intimidation. You can’t have a real debate when one side is stigmatized in advance as bigoted and, heaven help us, “homophobic” — a suitably perverse coinage, which basically means “not sufficiently progressive.”

In the case of same-sex marriage, conservatives are also under special inhibitions. They believe in public reticence about sex and excretion, so they are accordingly reluctant to discuss rather obvious clinical distinctions — reproductive, sanitary, and olfactory — between orifices. The best comment I have heard on same-sex marriage can’t be printed in a family newspaper (and I guess I wouldn’t want it to be).

[Breaker quote for Same-Sex What?!: Redefining nature]

[Breaker quote for Same-Sex What?!: Redefining nature]

Liberals, for their own reasons, want to discuss same-sex marriage as a civil-rights issue, without reference to details of copulation that are central to the definition of marriage. So the question is discussed in euphemisms and pale abstractions, just as abortion is. The details of abortion violate liberal canons of good taste; we are expected to approve it without saying exactly what it is. Otherwise we are “not sufficiently progressive.” As a result, our public debates, at critical junctures, are not only value-free, but pretty much fact-free.

A few years ago liberalism’s bulletin-board orthodoxy (it changes weekly) held, under the sway of feminism, that marriage was an evil, outmoded, patriarchal institution. Besides, what did a “piece of paper” have to do with love?

Now, it seems, marriage is such a vital institution that it’s cruel to exclude anyone from its joys. And you exclude people merely by declining to redefine this ancient institution to suit their tastes. The “right” to marry means the right to overturn not only tradition, but common sense.

This position is not just wrong; it’s also — and this is what makes it somewhat awkward to argue with — stunningly whimsical. You hardly know whether to refute it or just wait it out, hoping it will blow over, giving place to the next morally imperative fad.

Waiting quietly for it to blow over may spare you liberal censure in the short run. If you keep your mouth shut, nobody will call you names. But in the meantime you can’t be sure that the judiciary won’t do one of its creative exegetical jobs, discovering same-sex marriage lurking in the penumbras of our living Constitution.

So far, it’s only been discovered in the Hawaiian constitution. But it may be coming soon to your neighborhood.

Joseph Sobran

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