Book
Review
Rainbow Over
the World
Darel E.
Paul, From Tolerance to Equality: How
Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press 2018), 256 pp., $39.95, Hardcover.
Reviewed by Theo Howard
French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu said that to point out the social conditions and material
interests underlying cultural values and modes is to “transgress… one of the
fundamental taboos of the intellectual world.”[1] To make such a transgression one is
likely to be condemned as sacrilegious in the “attempt to treat culture, that
present incarnation of the sacred, as an object of science.”[2]
Diversity
is the sovereign social and political ideal of our age. It is the public
ideology of the country’s most powerful institutions. As Ellen Berrey said, “the word wears a halo”.[3] Within this dominion the gay-rights
rainbow is to be conceived of as perfectly representative of the diversity of
mankind’s nations, races, languages and sects. Indeed, it was first popularised
politically by American Methodist minister J. W. van Kirk following the First
World War when he incorporated it into his flag for a future world federation.[4] How fitting that the rainbow flag is
found fluttering above the public squares of our polis now, as the dawn of a Brave New World stirs.
Your
reviewer approached recent sociological study From Tolerance to Equality by Darel E.
Paul with the hope that it would afford authoritative scientific evidence for
the economic incentive behind the corporate and oligarchic promotion of ‘gay
rights’ in our times. The regnant ideology of our age ensures Paul’s
examination of the kulturkampf must be approached obliquely, and from an
ostensibly neutral position. As an empirical study the book is data heavy and
replete with sociological jargon. A superfluity of pages on sociological
constructions like ‘multiple correspondence analysis’ nevertheless convincingly
attest to the correlation between wealth, ‘social and cultural capital’ and
support for ‘gay marriage’. Sadly, there is less material addressing the
relation between the promotion of homosexuality and the suppression of wages,
but the careful reader can draw genuinely insightful conclusions from the
exhaustive evidence Paul examines.
Paul argues
that American elites use opinion on homosexuality as a mark of social
distinction and thus as a tool for accumulating cultural authority and
political power. To infer they also expand their economic power can also be
evidenced in the book. Notre Dame
Professor Patrick Deneen writes how Paul’s study
‘raises unavoidable and even uncomfortable connections between the entrenchment
of class inequality and elite-drive advances of sexual equality in today’s
America.’ Deneen writes:
[Powerful
adherents of the New Age are] committed to displacing traditional arrangements
of family, marriage, and child-rearing in favor of
individual autonomy, self-creation, and lifestyle choice shorn of long-standing
commitment. World-straddling corporations have a strong interest in fostering
atomized, de-normed subjects. Because their “identities” arise primarily from
appetites that can be altered through both marketing and technology, they are
the ideal consumers. The ideological justification for this economic project
has been long-prepared by the intellectual class, which over the last four
decades has devoted itself to the project of displacing traditional norms in favor of theories of self-creation in a world governed not
by tradition or natural law, but solely in accordance with the human will.[5]
This
magazine is interested in connections. Connections that no other publication
sees or allows to be seen. Paul comes close to exposing the ever more clear
connection between economic subjugation and sexual liberation but ultimately
draws back from openly accusing the American oligarchy. To remain neutral, as
Paul does, and yet send coded signals about the damage wrought to the common
good by sexual liberation is a skill that one must begrudgingly acknowledge.
For example, Paul writes that gay marriage is strongly an attack on fatherhood:
“The most
common gay family is a lesbian couple. Thanks to same-sex marriage and the
state’s presumption of paternity being extended to the wives of lesbian birth
mothers, today the children of such couples lack not only social fathers but
even biological fathers. Adoption, single motherhood, and sperm donors all
predate same-sex marriage… Yet each of these in its own way disguised, replaced
or anonymized the father. None presumed his nonexistence… Now that two women
are listed on a birth certificate as a child’s two parents, the complete
separation of biological from both legal and social fatherhood is not only
possible but necessary.[6]
Let us
dispense with platitudes, when the state ‘includes’ same-sex couples in the
institution of marriage it confers public approval on same-sex activity. The
state valorises sodomy. A clear majority of Americans and federal judges
understand as such.[7] The book asks: why is it then, that
universities, the highly educated, judges, Hollywood and the media have been
the vanguard in the advance of homosexual normalization? Why has a framing of
normalization as a matter of civil rights and equality been so successful? Why
has a ‘conservative’ view of homosexually-active persons as ‘normal’ triumphed
where a liberationist ‘queer’ image did not?[8]
The early
endorsement by big businesses of gay rights seems especially puzzling.
Corporate marketing that interacts with a wide general public is supposedly
sensitive to public opinion. Paul says they tend to follow, not lead, the crowd
when it comes to ‘red-button’ social issues. Yet in this case corporate support
came a long time before public support. Famously, the French counterrevolutionary
theorist Joseph de Maistre, wrote “the Revolution
leads men more than men lead it.”[9] But here, something else seems to
have occurred in the early days. In this case, a very small revolutionary
vanguard of people got the ball rolling. How did a supposedly left-wing
movement then, become the religion of the bien pensant wealthy and powerful?
Today San Francisco Pride is sponsored by
Fortune 500 giants like Coca-Cola, Google, Nike, Bank of America and Apple. Nearly
half of all Fortune 500 businesses espouse a “public commitment to the LGBT
community” through marketing and sponsorship.[10] The narcissistic fantasies of millennials in
taking part in the “civil rights movement of our time”[11] helps account for the crowds
of indebted youngsters that now gather every summer for the Pride celebrations
of sodomy in every public space in the United States and most of the Western
World. Trumpeting homosexuality for this generation now carries a peculiarly
potent mixture of prestige, authenticity and altruism.
Throughout
history, the elites in almost any culture have desired unfettered liberty and
wealth. It is not difficult to see the connection between this essential
selfishness with support for whatever maximizes their political control. And no
member of the upper-class spends more on luxuries or identifies more strongly
with the global monoculture than childless couples or, better yet, homosexuals
who don’t waste any time and money reproducing. Once that most persistent of
restrictions on appetite and profit, the natural law, disintegrates, the road
to ever greater class power is clear. Thus elites encourage the stimulation of
the human appetite, material and otherwise, because it fuels the accumulation
of wealth and power in pagan societies, like our own. Bread and circuses.
Paul guides
the reader through the now familiar and depressing chronology of the relentless
march of gay rights in the US. The rapidity is still shocking. The Democratic
Party’s volte face on the Defence of
Marriage Act (DOMA) was characteristically swift. 64% of the party’s House
caucus supported the traditional definition of marriage in 1996 which collapsed
to 13% in 2004.[12] In the 1990s even the most liberal
Democrats carefully avoided explicit endorsements of gay marriage and couched
their opposition to DOMA as opposition to discrimination.[13]
Corporate
America was notable for embracing the normalization of homosexuality in this
early phase of the revolution. When DOMA was passed in 1996 just over 500 US
firms offered domestic health benefits to same-sex partnered employees. By 2004
this number had increased to over 8,200.[14] The control mechanisms for
corporate compliance with the revolution are now comprehensive. The Human
Rights Campaign tracks the progress of the country’s largest firms on its
“Corporate Equality Index”. Scores are measured by provision of same-sex couple
benefits, diversity training coverage and attendance and suitable fervour at
Gay Pride marches.
But we have
to travel back further to find the roots of the revolution. The psychiatric
profession was pioneering in its support of homosexuality. From their beginning
in the nineteenth century, psychiatric doctors have medicalized social
deviancy.[15] Behaviours that were previously
considered sinful deviations of passion became diseases. The American
Psychiatric Association had defined homosexuality as a deviation from “normal
sexual behaviour.” Gay rights activists cleverly focussed much early effort
picketing and disrupting APA conferences beginning in 1970.[16] They successfully pressured the
APA’s Board of Trustees to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973.[17]
Other
mental health organisations took up the crusade hereon. In 1977 the National
Association of Social Workers published a forceful document calling for “the
eradication of prejudice and discrimination against Lesbians and Gay men”.[18] A 1982 study of San Diego area
physicians found psychiatrists were easily the most positive in their views of
homosexuality, with 62% demonstrating “homophilic”
attitudes. Physicians in surgery, general and family medicine lagged behind
with homophilia rates between 20%-33%.[19] Unsurprisingly psychiatrists and psychologists
are among the least religious of all American professions. A 2006 survey found
61% of psychology professors hold atheist or agnostic views compared to 23% of
all professors and 4% of the general public at the time.[20]
The legal
profession was next to closely follow the psychiatric cadre in advancing the
revolutionary praxis. In 2000 lesbian legal scholars, Nancy Polikoff,
Martha Fineman and Martha Ertman authored a new model
legal code for The American Law Institute which posited the primary goal of
family law was the promotion of family diversity and therefore rejected
biological parenthood in place of “functional parenthood” based on household
status.[21] This meant that for the ALI
same-sex parenting is now the norm against which all other families are
measured.[22]
The New York Times’ conversion on the issue
bespeaks the media’s involvement as mouthpieces of the powerful. In just two
years the paper went from refusing to publish same-sex union announcements to
cheerleading same-sex marriage on a near-daily basis.[23] A Pew Research Center
conducted after the Windsor Supreme Court Hearings in 2013 found that
supportive media coverage outweighed opposing opinion by a 5-to-1 margin. Even
Fox News, which permitted the largest number of dissenting or neutral segments,
had 3.5 times more supportive than opposing stories across its coverage.[24]
Readers of
this magazine will be familiar with the modus
operandi of cultural revolutionaries: work strenuously to corrupt the
morals of a cadre of people through sexual liberation, enforce a narrative of
underdog heroism, and then capitalise on these gains legally through judicial
fiat. Sure enough, by 2014 federal judges were overturning state DOMAs with
direct appeals to “society’s evolution.”[25]
The end of
the US military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy has left America’s religious
organisations as the last bastions of institutional opposition to homosexual
normalization. However there has been revolutionary change here in the last two
decades too. Reform Judaism was well ahead of the dominant Christian churches in
fully normalizing homosexuality in 1990.[26] The seven large denominations that
have normalized by the end of 2016 are among the eight most ‘highly educated’
in America.[27]
Sexual
behaviour in Christianity and Judaism has always been hallowed within the
marriage union. Although there was variation in doctrine as regards practice
all agreed on the normative standard. As sects have normalized homosexuality
they have quietly abandoned their belief that sexual relationships belong
within marriage. “While the explicit intent of normalizing homosexuality has
been to bring same-sex couples into marriage, the implicit effect has been to denormalize marriage for everyone.”[28]
Acclaimed
as the leading LGBT activist in Russia, Masha Gessen
acknowledged this inevitable cross-degeneration at the Sydney Writers’ Festival
in 2012:
“It’s a no
brainer we should have the right to marry. I also think equally, that it’s a no
brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. So… that causes my
brain some trouble. And part of why it causes me trouble is that fighting for
gay marriage generally involves lying about what we're going to do with
marriage when we get there. Because we lie that the institution of marriage is
not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to
change and it should change, and again, I don't think it should exist… I have
three kids, and they have five parents… more or less. And I don’t see why they
shouldn’t have five parents legally. I don’t see why we should choose two of those
parents and make them into a sanctioned couple.”[29]
***
Joseph Sciambra is a former gay prostitute and now Catholic who
preaches to gay men in San Francisco. Interestingly he sees gay marriage as
symptomatic of the failure of the gay rights movement. Sciambra
states the obvious: before the 90s the last thing anyone in that world wanted
to talk about was marriage. The name of the game was sexual freedom and casting
aside the constraining monogamous norms of ‘heterosexual bourgeois culture’.
For Sciambra the embrace of normalization and
‘stability’ represented by an Ellen DeGeneres say, signals that the ‘gay
experiment’ has failed. Gay activists have ‘retreated’ to taking a position
where they have taken up the banner of everything they fought against and hated
but unlocked the means to command widespread public support. AIDS was the
turning point. The ravages of sexually transmitted diseases in the gay world
wrecked such havoc and trauma that the old liberationist line could no longer
me maintained.
One of today’s
tragedies is that the majority of HIV infections of gay men now occur within
‘committed relationships’. Of course these relationships are anything but
monogamous in the sense most people would believe. They are ‘open’, they are
ambiguous and they are subject to ‘experimentation’. If homosexuals themselves
are not the victors of the triumph of gay rights then to whom will go the
spoils?
The next
phase of the Revolution, already well underway, is the idealization and
glorification of homosexuality as of higher value than heterosexuality.
Tolerance became equality and is now becoming idolization. In 2013 General Mills ran its “#LuckyToBe”
campaign via its Lucky Charms
breakfast cereal as a celebration of those “lucky enough to be different”.[30] As early as 2008, who else but the New York Times summarised a “growing
body of evidence [that] shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach
everyone else about marriage and relationships.”[31] The Times reported in 2013 social science findings that same-sex
couples report “higher levels of happiness”, “far less conflict” and “higher
levels of intimacy” than heterosexual couples.[32]
We are now
told that children raised by gay ‘parents’ now not only “do just fine” but
actually have the best outcomes and that gay fathers can teach straight dads
how to be more “emotionally accessible” and “logistically capable”.[33] It is only now that the chains of
the revolution become apparent to us and the road to the gulag forms more
clearly.
Global
businesses have become very interested in promoting low fertility amongst their
workers. Dystopian egg-freezing schemes are all the rage in Silicon Valley now.
Clearly, the expansion of the LGBT agenda fits within this milieu in providing suitable cover for the driving down of wages and
the ongoing enslavement of people to the desk in their office and the blinking
smartphone in their home.
Elite
reception of a 2014 Australian paper on LGBT parenting that was portrayed as
the “the largest study of its kind internationally”, was indicative.[34] The website Vox summarised the findings:
“Largest-ever study of same-sex couples’ kids finds they’re better off than
other children.”[35] The extent of this oligarchic
consensus was exposed in 2012 when University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus published an academic study that suggested the
opposite. Examining a sample of 15,000 young Americans aged between 18 and 39, Regnerus found that compared with children who grew up in
intact, biological parent households “the children of women who reported a same-sex
relationship look markedly different on numerous outcomes, including many that
are obviously suboptimal.”[36] The media went to work on Regnerus and his study immediately. Abnormal press coverage
was given to criticism of the study. Opportunities were taken to smear Regnerus’ faith and motives.[37]
Oligarchic
pressure resulted in the journal editor that published Regnerus’
study acquiescing to an internal special audit of the study’s methodology. The
auditor declared Regnerus’ paper a “non-scientific
study” four months later in the journal and as “bullshit” to the media.[38] Clearly it is not permitted for the
question “what are the effects of gay and lesbian parenting?” to be answered as
a strictly scientific question. These are now cultural questions, and culture uber alles.
There have
been other clear glimpses of the mask slipping. In their 2015 Obergefell brief, the “379 Employers and
Organizations” supporting a constitutional right to same-sex marriage cited
“the business value of investments in
diversity,” (emphasis my own) including “significant returns for our
shareholders and owners.”[39] This should be seen alongside the
Fortune 100 corporations brief in the Fisher
v. University of Texas case, which stated, “to succeed in their
businesses,” American higher education must “develop employees [who] had the
opportunity to share ideas… with a broadly diverse student body… This is a
business and economic imperative.”[40] Here the oligarchy’s programme for
what John Milbank called “bio-political control” was exposed for all those who
care to see.[41] State religious liberty bills are
now condemned as “bad for business” and that is enough for their repeal and
evisceration.[42]
Municipal
politicians have been at the very forefront of homosexual normalization. Urban
‘development advisors’ like Richard Florida have spent many decades now
encouraging city mayors and politicians to nurture ‘gayborhoods’. Gays are
presented as the pioneers of gentrification and successful urban regeneration.
Advisors are quick to point out that neighbourhoods with larger concentrations
of gays enjoy greater income growth, higher numbers of ‘creative start-ups’,
and even, especially in the Northeast, greater population growth as well. Paul
points out that the business elite, while anxious about living in
ethnically-diverse neighbourhoods enjoy living amongst gay people. Gayborhoods
are associated with attracting ‘talent’ and millennials willing to embrace
sexually barren lives of childlessness and low wages.
John
Milbank called gay marriage “a strategic move in the modern state's drive to
assume direct control over the reproduction of the population, bypassing our
interpersonal encounters. This is not about natural justice, but the desire on
the part of biopolitical tyranny to destroy marriage
and the family as the most fundamental mediating social institution.”
As Sister
Lucia told Cardinal Caffarra, the final battle
between the Lord and Satan will be over marriage.[43] The battle over gay marriage and
its consequences is the clash that is extending into every facet of public and
private life. Marriage has become the social and legal touchstone for the
normalization of homosexuality in the United States.[44]
This change
did not occur in a vacuum. Paul points out that Pew research found that 60% of
respondents to a survey in 1982 thought children were “very important” to a
successful marriage. By 2007 this had plunged to 41%.[45] The recent last phase of the
homosexual revolution involved a shift from ‘toleration’ to ‘equality’.
Critically, this change involves a transformation in public moral judgement,[46] what Nietzsche called a ‘transvaluation of values’.[47] Equality demands public affirmation
backed by the state and restricts negative value judgement to the narrowest
range possible.[48] It is the final conquest of the
public square.
Corporate
America and homosexual activists have formed a symbiotic alliance.[49] The extent of this alliance has
been crystallised in recent state RFRA battles. The synergy between sodomy and
usury is effervescent. In no other social issue in our time have capitalism and
socialism been exposed as so clearly operative different sides of the same
wicked dialectic.
Paul’s
conclusion is astute. He writes: “The Sexual Revolution is not the least bit
metaphorical. It as much a revolution as were the American or French
Revolutions in their own times”. He then quotes the liberal legal scholar
Douglas Laycock who draws a strong parallel between
the French Catholic royalists of the nineteenth century and American religious
conservatives of the twenty-first. “If you stand in the way of revolution and
lose, there will be consequences.”[50]
The
parasitic nature of the Sexual Revolution prevents any lasting armistice from
forming, the parasite simply must devour more of its host in order to sustain
itself. The current revolutionary frontier is transgenderism. Victory for the
revolutionaries here will constitute the end of biological sex as we know it.
Transgenderism is the most radical form of individual subjectivity yet produced
by the Sexual Revolution. Interestingly, it is also proving the moment the
revolution eats its own children. The fissures between transgender activists
and feminists are ever-growing. Can the rainbow hold together? For Paul this
radical challenge to all external forms of authority is also symptomatic of a
larger crisis of elite authority. Confidence in all institutions – the state,
universities and big businesses is at record lows.[51] The oligarchs appear to be losing
control of the various revolutionary movements they have set in motion. What
the full consequences are for promoting mass sterility for the oligarchy themselves, remains to be seen.
This is
what happens when a culture lives by lies and punishes truth. Penumbras and
emanations eat away at social bonds until all that is left is the rule of the
jungle. Morality and justice are the opinion of the powerful. During debates in
the British Parliament over gay marriage in 2013 legislators tacitly recognised
that it is impossible to talk about “consummation” or “adultery” in the context
of same-sex unions.[52] They therefore decided to ignore
the issue altogether, thus importing the norms of homosexual relationships into
heterosexual marriage via ‘equalization’.
Darel
Paul’s otherwise careful and detailed exploration of America’s transformation
into the ‘gay disco’ is compelling but incomplete. He eludes the economic
elephant in the room while making glib suggestions. A future analysis of the
correlation and causation between gay marriage and low wage corporatocracy
is needed while there is still time.
This
review appeared in the December 2018 issue of Culture Wars.
Footnotes
[1] (Paul, 2018) pp.x-xi
[2] (Paul, 2018) p.xi
[3] (Paul, 2018) p.117
[4] (Paul, 2018) p.124
[5] (Deneen, 2018)
[6] (Paul, 2018) p.112
[7] (Paul, 2018) p.76
[8] (Paul, 2018) p.11
[9] (de Maistre, 1971)
[10] (Paul, 2018) p.31
[11] (Paul, 2018) p.11
[12] (Paul, 2018) p.3
[13] (Paul, 2018) p.3
[14] (Paul, 2018) p.3
[15] (Paul, 2018) p.23
[16] (Paul, 2018) p.23
[17] (Paul, 2018) p.23
[18] (Paul, 2018) p.23
[19] (Paul, 2018) p.24
[20] (Paul, 2018) p.145
[21] (Paul, 2018) p.34
[22] (Paul, 2018) p.34
[23] (Paul, 2018) p.39
[24] (Paul, 2018) p.40
[25] (Paul, 2018) p.45
[26] (Paul, 2018) p.26
[27] (Paul, 2018) p.27
[28] (Paul, 2018) p.36
[29] (Bolt, 2017)
[30] (Paul, 2018) p.32
[31] (Paul, 2018) p.91
[32] (Paul, 2018) p.91
[33] (Paul, 2018) p.91
[34] (Paul, 2018) p.91
[35] (Paul, 2018) p.92
[36] (Paul, 2018) p.92
[37] (Paul, 2018) p.93
[38] (Paul, 2018) p.93
[39] (Paul, 2018) p.121
[40] (Paul, 2018) p.121
[41] (Milbank, 2013)
[42] (Paul, 2018) p.136
[43] (CNA/EWTN News, 2016)
[44] (Paul, 2018) p.4
[45] (Paul, 2018) p.83
[46] (Paul, 2018) p.8
[47] (Nietzsche, 2005)
[48] (Paul, 2018) p.8
[49] (Paul, 2018) p.136
[50] (Paul, 2018) p.152
[51] (Paul, 2018) pp.156-157
[52] (Milbank, 2013)
Bibliography
Bolt, A. (2017, September 26). 'FIGHTING FOR
GAY MARRIAGE GENERALLY INVOLVES LYING ABOUT WHAT WE'RE GOING TO DO'.
Retrieved from Herald Sun: https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/fighting-for-gay-marriage-generally-involves-lying-about-what-were-going-to-do/news-story/4bdea433fad7051069b4157806c2f996
CNA/EWTN News. (2016, December 31). Fatima
visionary predicted 'final battle' would be over marriage, family.
Retrieved from Catholic News Agency:
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/fatima-visionary-predicted-final-battle-would-be-over-marriage-family-17760
de Maistre, J. t.
(1971). The Works of Joseph de Maistre. New
York: Schocken.
Deneen, P. (2018, November). Corporate
Progressivism. Retrieved from First Things:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/11/corporate-progressivism
Milbank, J. (2013, April 23). The
impossibility of gay marriage and the threat of biopolitical
control. Retrieved from ABC Religion & Ethics:
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-impossibility-of-gay-marriage-and-the-threat-of-biopolitical/10099888
Nietzsche, F. (2005). The Antichrist. Cosimo.
Paul, D. E. (2018). From Tolerance to
Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage. Waco: Baylor
University Press.
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