Let’s talk about sex.
That is to say, let’s really talk about sex. Let’s be completely honest about it. The “Duck Dynasty” freak out calls for no less. Further, let’s once and for all abolish the double standard that, before Phil Robertson, allowed the libertine left to speak freely, but not the conservative right (and this includes conservative publications and websites).
I have two observations about homosexuality. The first I am always allowed to express. The second, never.
The first observation: Homosexuality has been around forever, and always will be around. A reasonable person can conclude that gays are born that way. As such, they should be treated with respect and given the same rights as other couples. Arguing that it can or should be cured is delusional, and harmful.
Observation the second: as Mr. Robertson put it, an anus is not a vagina. One was designed to allow something to go inside it, the other was not. This medical fact leads one to conclude that that the bodies of men and women are different from each other. Thus, marriage is about the complimentarity, both emotional and phsyical, between male and female.
Observation number one is allowed and celebrated. Observation two is banned. We now live in a fantasyland where we can no longer make the observation that a man’s body is different from a woman’s. This is how insane we’ve become. For the past decade and more we’ve had a debate about homosexuality and gay marriage, and in that entire time we have been prevented from speaking freely about the genuine hard wired differences between male and female. Gay marriage advocates like Dan Savage write acres of copy gleefully celebrating all kinds of unusual sexual practices. But the rest of society is prevented from making an observation about basic human plumbing. And then Duck Dynasty dared.
You could be a gay marriage advocate. You could be the world’s greatest libertine. But if you tried to say that men and women are different, and perhaps even complimentary, you would be censored — including by the conservative media.
We keep being told by the left that we need to have an honest conversation about sex. In the next breath we’re told we can’t. Because to them, a conversation is but the first step to coercion, and coercion entails denying what is in front of your nose.
When it comes the the realities of sex, America for the last few decades has been in fantasyland, a term that I use because it was once used by the great philosopher Josef Pieper in his small book Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power. Pieper argued that for propaganda to work, it’s perpetrators and recipients need to enter a psychological, linguistic and spiritual “fantasyland.” They need to enter a world where uncomfortable words and concepts have fluid meaning, or are even considered taboo. In short, the connection between language and reality is severed. This is a totalitarian practice, and it has infected the United States and the rest of the West. Not for nothing did Camille Paglia call the reaction to Duck Dynasty “utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist.”
Liberals keep telling us that all that matters is love, but then can’t answer the question of why a father couldn’t then marry his daughter, or why two brothers can’t marry each other. Or why six people can’t get married. They have officially moved to fantasyland, and are trying to drag the rest of us there also.
This is not to say that gay people shouldn’t be given the same rights and responsibilities as straight people. If the left has ensconced itself in alternate universe, conservatives had a distorted perception of reality for decades, at least when it comes to sex. Gay people were invisible or “nature’s mistake,” forced to pass as straight. There were cruel attempts to cure them, and awful cases of bullying and even death. The gay rights movement has been about escaping that particular fantasyland.
But it has replaced a Pleasantville purgatory for a Stalinist Brave New World. We simply are not allowed to talk about certain things at the risk of our jobs and reputations. One is human anatomy, another is the problem of promiscuity in the gay community. I saw this firsthand when I worked at a record store in a predominantly gay part of Washington, D.C. in the 1980s. The store was right next to a gay bar, and the bizarre and dangerous behavior I would see spilling out from that bar to the street filled me with pity and sadness. There were transvestites, drug addicts, public sex, men I saw each week with a different partner. This kind of recklessness was documented in the film “Gay Sex in the 70s.” I didn’t think that any intellectually honest person would deny that this was a problem in the gay communities, and led to AIDS. It would be like denying that in late 19th century New York there was a crime, alcohol and hygiene problem amongst the immigrant Irish — my people. There was. Pretending there wasn’t didn’t make it so.
Men, women, our biological differences, sex and marriage: All of this should be cause for intelligent debate amongst compassionate people. But what I will not do, what I cannot do, is fly off to that never never land where human language is separated from reality — where we cannot convey concepts accurately through precise words. Where we can’t say that promiscuity was, and is, a problem in the gay community, they way alcoholism was, and is, in a lot of Irish communities. “Duck Dynasty” has ripped open a the real problem of politically correct suppression, and for that we can be grateful. A deeply insecure and tyrannical language Nazi telling me, Phil Robertson, or any other free thinking person that they cannot make an observation about something as basic as human anatomy is the worst kind of totalitarianism. It is a forced flight to fantasyland. I preferred not to live there in the 1980s, when it was the conservative version of a world without homosexuality. And I won’t live there in 2013, when the liberal fascists are telling us what to say and think.