Normality Is Not Hatred | James Kalb | CWR
Today’s politics has no place for legitimate authority based on higher standards, so power must base itself on Choice, otherwise known as the Triumph of the Will
Very recently the view that homosexuality is entirely normal has become not only widespread but compulsory in secular public discussion.
Leaders of thought tell us the change has been part of a general deepening of moral insight and improvement in the art of living. The older outlook oppressed millions out of fear, bigotry, and ignorance. We have learned better now, except for a few haters and dimbulbs who need to be re-educated or else shamed and shut up until death frees the world from their presence.
Many Catholic clergy, theologians, and ordinary believers more or less agree. We have been wrong, and if we don’t get with the program and accept the world’s guidance we’ll become irrelevant and vanish except for a few weirdoes no one sensible would want to associate with.
Such or allied views have led to very high level suggestions that the Church “accept and value” the homosexual orientation and ramp up opposition to “unjust discrimination,” which now seems to include suggestions that there is something wrong with homosexuality. So any statement of the general objection to the orientation, that it is objectively disordered, is now to be out of bounds. Inconsistent doctrine is to be treated as a hangover from the past to be dealt with in such a way as to neutralize it and effectively make it disappear.
To exacerbate the problem, most of those attached to the traditional view have difficulty arguing for it effectively. It seems plainly right to them, but why it is right cannot be stated in the terms on which public discussion is now carried on, which treat equal preference satisfaction as the highest good. The traditional view therefore comes to seem an irrational prejudice.
Still, the issue doesn’t go away. The older view continues to have distinguished proponents, and the vehement reactions to doubters suggests that supporters of the new view are conscious of a certain weakness in their position. Is something being overlooked? Can a sudden and total change of longstanding deeply-rooted understandings be trusted?
The change looks very much like an attempt to invert reality, an effort that once started becomes all-consuming and requires an ever more comprehensive system of lying to maintain. And the demands of correct thought are indeed becoming ever more far-reaching. Insistence that a relationship between two men is a marriage if they say the necessary vows has been followed by insistence that the men immediately become women if they announce they have. And that demand has been accompanied by attempts in the schools and elsewhere to get rid of indications of grammatical gender and other inflammatory expressions when dealing with children.
These supposed advances have been led not by saints and sages but by ideological activists, media propagandists, and other dubious characters. Supporters claim to speak for the “marginalized,” but are preferentially found among the rich, powerful, and well-placed, who evidently speak for themselves and those to whom they feel an affinity.
In that respect the movement is typical of modern politics, which promises liberation but delivers new forms of domination. The problem is basic.
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