THE MAIN REASON I continue to read Andrew Sullivan every day despite his increasingly strident anti-heterosexual screeds (which is precisely what I am beginning to believe they are) is that Sullivan remains one of the best sources I know for links to important pieces of journalism I would otherwise never discover.
To illustrate more vividly, the Sullivan who writes this:
A clear victory in this election - but no landslide - has now apparently led (President Bush) to contemplate Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. And we're also told by Karl Rove that "if we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal, and the ideal is that marriage ought to be, and should be, a union of a man and a woman." By inference, the hopes of gay couples to belong to their own family and society are somehow non-existent; and the commitment of one gay person to another is somehow "indecent." On Meet the Press Rove also argued that even civil unions backed by "a few local elected officials" should be banned. Bill Bennett must be thrilled. I had hoped that this president might use his victory to unite. But he is dividing more aggressively than ever.
Is the same Sullivan who writes this:
MORE ON CHOMSKY: Another must-read on the most poisonous intellectual in America.
Which links here – thank you, Mr. Sullivan – to the most informative essay I have ever read on Noam Chomsky and his truly infinite hatred of the nation on which he has grown rich and famous.
But is Sullivan really a straight-hater who has been outed by the election?
I have been close enough with enough gay people over the years, particularly in Manhattan but also even now here in Washington state, to recognize that there is a tiny gay and lesbian minority who does indeed despise heterosexuals with the very same intensity of venom racists direct at “uppity” minorities. Hence – and very sadly – I can think of no other explanation for Sullivan’s ongoing invective. Especially given the fact he himself is one of a minuscule number of Bush opponents who have actually troubled themselves to analyze the post-election data – data that shows conclusively the (presumably gay-bashing) Amen Corner of the electorate made up only 22 percent of the President’s majority. In this sense it appears Sullivan is no different from Jane Smiley and Maureen Dowd – so blinded by hatred, he seems to reflexively assume all of us who pulled the Bush/Cheney lever did so because we are dangerously violent sociopathic cretins.
Not only that, Sullivan writes as if he fears the nation is now on the brink of unleashing its metaphorical Cossacks on some coast-to-coast homophobic pogrom or mustering its Christofascist Storm Troopers for some 50-state anti-gay Kristallnacht. Sullivan thus portrays himself as ever more emotionally equivalent to the KuKluxKlansmen who believed enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act foretold the “final mongreliezation” (sic) of the white race – and I for one am getting damn tired of the continuing volleys of implicit insults. I expect it from the likes of Dowd and Smiley, but until now I assumed Sullivan was many levels above and beyond the Smiley Dowdiness that has so envenomed the American media we now have to go to the foreign press to find intelligent explanations of our own election results.
Since I am one of those bloggers who is appalled by Bush’s proposed marriage amendment, both by its intrusiveness and by its implicit (and infinitely perilous) manipulation of the Constitution to impose morality (go here for my earlier comments on the subject), I have no fear of being branded a homophobe for my criticism of Sullivan. Indeed I have gay and lesbian relatives, and for this reason alone I have never demonized homosexuals of either gender. I do not believe there is any such thing as “the homosexual agenda” save live and let live. Nor have I ever regarded “gay marriage” as the mockery of matrimony too many people proclaim it to be. In fact I have a very difficult time understanding the entire “gay marriage” controversy: if two adults seek to pledge their troth, it is their business, not the state’s. Unless, of course, the state (which in our nation, after all, is the whole of the people) is so insecure in its selfhood – whether spiritual, sexual or socioeconomic – it now must needs regulate love itself.
But I do not believe this election portends any such thing. I believe what it portends is just the opposite: that America is at last awakening to the threat of Islamic tyranny, no small part of which is Islam’s murderous hatred of America’s resurrection of a definitively Classical notion – that since adult human love comes in many forms, none of them (save incest) should ever be forbidden.
Posted by Loren at November 8, 2004 01:23 AM