Aren't We All Just So Gay?

May 21, 2012 -- Sitting down on a rainy Monday morning trying to collect one’s thoughts about the weekend’s media fest can be a challenging task. There is so much in the newspapers, and yet so little. One hardly knows where to start. But I'll start with a brief offhand observation about sex.

Just about everybody enjoys sex––thinking about it or remembering it, if not actually doing it. This has been true for a really long time, probably since before newspapers even existed.  Starting maybe a century or so ago––I'm being vague on purpose here––it became fashionable to talk and write and read about sex, as well. Lately, however, in America's prestige press––and most particularly in the New York Times––the sexual obsession d‘jour is homosexuality--thinking about it, remembering it, talking about it, writing about it, reading about it, and, one gathers, given half a chance, doing it.

The New York Times Magazine, in particular, has been beating on this theme for years. But so has the newspaper itself. Saturday's front page featured an article about a contrite psychiatrist who had the temerity about a decade ago to suggest that therapy might be available for those who did not wish to be or to remain homosexuals. Apparently, for one reason or another, this octogenarian doctor recently decided to apologize for his supposed offense.  I don't know why; there are all sorts of oddball therapies available for all sorts of maladies, real and imagined, and no one uses a political correctness sledgehammer to pound on them.  The way the New York Times reports the story––and it does so at great length––reminds one of a medieval passion play in that there is only one possible correct way to tell the story, and no hint of any other way is present. It is a way that makes clear that any suggestion, ever, that homosexuality is deviant or in any way undesirable is not only inadmissible, but qualifies as unalloyed evil.

Thanks to the unceasing and highly single-minded effort over the past several decades of those I call homonoids, homosexuality in its various aspects is now virtually the only subject about which one cannot have a normal critical discussion in the United States. Maybe there are a few others––like whether the genetic characteristics of groups might influence aspects of behavior. But those who are paranoid about the implications of truly open discussion—hence the term homonoids--and who for psychological reasons sometimes believe that homosexuals are actually superior to heterosexuals (I doubt most homonoids would object to a proposed therapy that would enable heterosexuals to become homosexuals) have made ordinary critical discussion, at least in public forums, completely impossible--and that in turn tends to encourage extreme views on both poles.  Not good.  

We are used to this from the New York Times. One learns to ignore it. But then yesterday's Washington Post featured on its front page a story about a transgendered child, reported, as in the Times, at great length. Is the Post trying to compete for the “alternative” neo-prurience market? I hope not.

Let me clarify one issue here and complete the thought with one general observation. First, I am not “homophobic.“ I am not afraid of homosexuality anymore than I am afraid of encountering someone's vomit. Mild disgust is not the same as fear. Some of my best friends..... you get the point.

Moreover, I could not care less what consenting adults do with their genitals in private, nor do I think anyone's civil or legal rights should be jeopardized or limited just because some people reveal their atypical sexual proclivities in public. But the obsessing of the press about this is just unseemly, just as promiscuous behavior and sexual obsession of all kinds is unseemly.

And now, for the promised general observation: The United States is in a mess. Our political system is dysfunctional, our political economy is febrile, and our leadership class seems not to have the first idea what to do about it. We must invest vastly more in education, science and technology, and infrastructure, and we must do it wisely and urgently.  We must address energy and environmental issues as the highest of priorities. We’ve got to get serious about the real sources of escalating medical care costs, about reforming our unaffordable entitlements programs, and more besides. At the same time, we must find a way to keep our books in order, and to fine-tune the federal government so that it stops doing too many things badly and start doing fewer critical things well. We’ll never get a handle on the clientalist and rentier behaviors that are sapping our politics unless we reduce the size of the public trough from which lobbyists and special pleaders come to feed.

And amid these urgent exigencies, what do some of our prestige newspapers choose to perseverate about? So-called culture war issues that have not a thing to do with the crisis we are in. This is sort of troubling. After all, what we should expect of benefit to the common weal from at least a significant shard of an intellectual and literary elite that seems to enjoy nothing better than talking publicly about their private parts? This is embarrassing. Large numbers of intelligent people around the world (I exclude Western Europe here) think we’ve lost our minds. Do you have any idea now President Obama’s statement on “gay marriage” went over in Muslim-majority societies, and what it did for the image of the United States in those places? (But that’s a story for another time.)

I know many people feel very strongly about abortion rights and gay marriage and surrogate parenthood and so on down the list, and they have every right to. But everybody else has to understand that these issues are completely peripheral to the challenges our country now faces. We really don't have time for this stuff, which is why in my presidential platform––which I will reveal once more in a few weeks, as I do every four years––I propose that all culture war issues be demoted by mutual agreement from the national/federal level, and that states and local communities manage these sensitive matters in the context of community standards, just as they used to do a few decades ago.

No, this is hardly a perfect solution. (Nor is it even remotely likely to happen, I am well aware.) Everyone understands that local politics can be as mean-spirited and as imbued with know-nothing proclivities as any other kind of politics. But if we don't get these extremely emotional, polarizing and insoluble-on-principle issues out of our national politics, it will make doing the things we need to do that much harder. Alas, we won't, and they will.