We social conservatives hold the line on same-sex marriage not because we think it is more destructive than abortion and no-fault divorce (obviously it is not) but because all of these trends are rooted in the same destructive ideological and spiritual impulses that lead us to discard natural law, privilege adult wants over all other values, and erase even our most long-held liberties in the name of sexual desire.-- and, working our way backwards, try to answer the question: Just how could this character, or anyone, become convinced that homosexuals and fornicators are conspiring to "erase even our most long-held liberties in the name of sexual desire"?
It's a losing battle. The perpetrator is National Review's David French, a nut. Recall him in May shaking his fist at Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the wicked Supreme Court condemned America to freely-available birth control: "Think for a moment of the awesome power of the sexual revolution over law and logic," thundered French. "Is there a single legal doctrine that can stand against the quest for personal sexual fulfillment?" Recall also his 2011 stab at Kim du Toit butchliness, in which he told us that, due to a "collaboration between radical feminism and a particularly sappy and sentimental Christianity... the ideal man becomes—in many essential ways—a woman: emotionally available, always eager to talk, never afraid to shed a tear, and ready, willing, and able to shoulder the household workload."
So we're never going to get a coherent narrative out of this. But we can at least get this frisson: It turns out French's premise is loonier than his conclusion. It's not merely or even mainly the removal of legislative chains from their straining libidos, nor a perverse desire to destroy David French's liberty, that has all these homos and heteros getting it on with such ferocity.
The Sexual Revolution Depends on Big GovernmentI ain't even kidding.
Our fatherless kids are being fed breakfast, lunch, and sometimes now even a school dinner, and why not ban Happy Meals if there’s no competent parent around to say “no”? In fact, much of the apparatus of state entitlement is built around the presumption that citizens should enjoy a certain standard of living regardless of their personal choices and conduct.Were ours again a godly Republic, wastrels such as these would be starving, unable to summon the energy to stiffen or lubricate, much less mount. But like an indulgent parent, Big Government willfully feeds them till, fattened into strapping bucks and welfare queens, they fuck till freedom is no more. (Presumably some of them got a little extra feed, went totally nuts and demanded gay marriage.) This must be why Michelle Obama wants them to eat fresh vegetables -- once they're full of spinach, their genitals will engorge like Popeye's forearms, and their jackhammer couplings will shake America to its very foundations!
If citizens were forced to bear more of the weight of their sexual decisions, would those decisions be different?
This brings to mind a lovely story told by Danny Hutton of Three Dog Night in the Brian Wilson doc, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, about the night he and Iggy Stooge went over to Wilson's and the addled Beach Boy had them singing "Shortnin' Bread" for over an hour. Hutton says Iggy turned to him and said, "I'm gettin' out of here -- this guy's nuts!" I like to imagine Robert George saying that about French.
Actually, I think he has a point: earlier sexual moralities were developed in cultures on the margins of survival with an incredibly primitive medical and other technical level, as opposed to the merely primitive stuff we've got now. Though I at least I want to believe I'm not a determinist, those levels did create limits of what could work. I think it likely, for instance, that venereal disease rates in the first large human cities of the early Near East have a lot to do with Abrahamic sexual morés. Alittle later, <10^4 years!, a reasonable, First World, welfare state does in fact allow for greater sexual freedom free of terrible consequences...but where French derides this freedom because (at least so far) it requires a State palliating or removing consequences, I think better of such a State therefor.
ReplyDeleteBehind this, I think both French and I believe that control of access to sex is an important way for the old to manipulate the young---when a young man cannot have sex without the approval of the patriarchs, and especially when the pool of young women is reduced by pooygamy and patriarchal poaching (and older women aren't allowed to make up the difference), he will naturally tend to, and usually want to, please the patriarchs. (Insert your own joke here...carefully.) French hates the new ways, I think them an improvement, both because I love actual freedom and because in an increasingly novel environment much old wisdom turns out to be either kruft or actually injurious....