The Last Crusade 05: Rip van Con meets Ganymede
Much of what is said these days, either on politics or on any deep matter, is misunderstood. An unhealthy portion of this misunderstanding is willful, or due to sloth, or haste, or some other form of negligence.
On my part, I wrote a column reporting the observation that Conservatism, being a political stance, could not meet with equal weapons Leftism, being a religious stance, on the grounds that religion is more fundamental than politics and determines it.
Nothing I have written has been misinterpreted so freely.
One reader thought I meant that conservatism was dead or inadequate for political arguments. In fact, I had said the opposite: as we please note slavery is dead in America, Fascism is dead in Europe, and Communism dead in Russia.
One reader thought I was suggesting teaching Leftists how to reason philosophically. In fact, I was suggesting the opposite, that these creatures had placed themselves beyond the reach of reason, and hence were no longer fully human beings properly so called, that is, no longer an animal that reasons.
Many another, reading no more than the first paragraph or so, merely assumed I was saying what their caricature of Rightwingers were wont to say, or Alt-Righters, or Godbotherers, or Cucks. One reader said I was a liberal.
For those whose misinterpretation is unintentional, an example might suffice to clarify.
Now, Leftism is not literally a religion, but it shares one crucial property which makes it act in all things like enough to a religion the word is apt.
That one crucial property is faith.
Leftists are as devout to their false view of the world, of man and the meaning of life, as Christians are devoted to the true one.
In both cases, both have axiomatic and fundamental beliefs taken as statements of faith for their religion. The violation of such statements is not regarded as an intellectual error but as a moral error: not a mistake, but a sin.
These fundamentals are not up for debate, and not open to compromise, because to deviate from them is not merely the act of having another opinion, it is the act of a heretic, and involves expulsion from the communion of the faithful.
A scientist changing his mind about a scientific theory is regarded as virtuous. But if he changes his mind about a dogma of faith, he is regarded as a traitor and despicable. His example is poisonous, and erodes the faith of those around him.
For the Christian, virginity is sacred, but so is matrimony. The sacrament of marriage is sacred precisely because it guards and protects matrimony. Abstinence outside marriage also protects matrimony, and hence likewise is crucial in the esteem of Christians.
For the Leftist fornication is sacred. The sacrament of abortion is sacred precisely because it guards and protects fornication, by acting as a backstop for contraception.
Were abortion illegal, prudence would slow or hinder the eagerness with which heedless fornication takes place among the Left. This is not a point open to debate with them: to speak against fornication offends the great god Eros.
Likewise for the Leftist, homosexuality is sacred because it is the purest expression of fornication, a Platonic Ideal (if I may employ a double entendre), wherein nothing of the sex act exists except the sensation of the stimulation of the sex organs, each by itself, not as a coupled pair.
The deception or self-deception claiming that the offspring of human beings are not biologically human, that living beings in the womb are not alive, is crucial to Leftists.
Likewise the deceit that says first, that sex is merely a social construct hence arbitrary, and, second, that sexual dysfunctions (such as homosex) are the result of birth and not choice.
According to Leftist dogma, one’s willpower and not one’s biology is what decides whether to be male or female, but at the same time one’s biology and not one’s willpower decides whether one shall be sexually attracted to one’s own sex or to the opposite sex.
Rather than admitting that both halves of this dogma cannot be true, on the grounds that they contradict each other, the Leftist prefers to abandon the Law of Identity, and rejects the idea that self contradictory statements contradict themselves. Instead, truth becomes a matter of mere opinion, a matter of taste. For the Left, truth is deceit, and deceit is truth.
Lying is central to their worldview, the very heart of Leftism is self-deceit.
Consequently, the rest of their philosophy must corrupt itself to conform to these compulsions. Leftists are required to say that truth is relative, logic is arbitrary, virtue is a matter of opinion, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, for, otherwise, the mean ugliness of their deceptions, the vice of lying, the unreason of hypocrisy and the untruths shamelessly displayed all condemn the Left in harshest condemnation.
None of these sayings are truly and consistently applied to any aspect of the Leftist’s life. That is not their purpose. These sayings about truth being relative and virtue being opinion are trotted out only to disarm critics. They are never applied to Leftist absolutes, such as the belief in the feminist wage gap, or to Leftist virtues, such as the belief in the virtue of tolerance and diversity.
So much for generalities. Let us regard a specific example.
Sodomy was illegal in all civilized countries in all ages in which written law exists. In America, this was overturned in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003) by a 6-3 decision, where the majority held that a so-called right to privacy (invented during the Griswold case to protect the use of contraceptives, hitherto illegal) now suddenly extended to unnatural sexual acts, provided they were private.
Many a conservative, particularly those of a libertarian frame of mind, welcomed the decision on the political grounds that policing private behavior in the bedroom was unduly intrusive, and gave the state power beyond its due orbit. It was not necessary to police men’s private perversions when maintaining peace and public order.
The Conservatives, unwilling and unable to voice the idea that sodomy is a sin and homosexual attraction is a mental disorder, conceded the disputed ground, thinking that law and order required a compromise where each man could pursue his private vices without imposing on his neighbor.
Those conservatives were immediately betrayed, and realized that they had been played for chumps, because the behavior then become public, and calling it perverse or unnatural was condemned as bigotry, if not hate speech. The public perversion then demanded not mere toleration, but affirmation, applause, and celebration, including celebration by the sacrament of matrimony.
On February 3, 2004, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, in response to a query by the state senate, held as a matter of constitutional law that the so called right of homosexuals to pretend to be married to each other, a right invented in the landmark case of Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, 798 N.E.2d 941 (Mass. 2003), was abridged if all the legal and civil rights otherwise afforded married couples were afforded to sodomites pretending to be married to each other, but the name of marriage was denied their union.
A civil union was not enough, in other words. This was a dishonor, held the court, for it rendered the homosexuals to be second class citizens.
Granting the homosexuals the same right awarded all other citizens, namely, the right to wed any willing partner of the opposite sex in her right mind, above the age of consent, and not within consanguinity, was insufficient.
Equality for them meant a new right, a right to defy nature, or to pretend to, and also the right to compel all legal institutions to consent to the falsehood, and support it, had to be granted. This was a right granted no one and no group is all the history of the world. It was inequality was imposed in the name of equality.
The actual civil rights, matters of survivorship, child custody, and visitation rights were insufficient and insignificant. The honors and dignities awarded by society to wedded couples, that is to say, the imponderables, the spirit, was what was important.
The two persons of objectively disordered sexual desire, being two persons who could not form a couple because they could not couple, but who felt a sexual desire nonetheless toward a non-sexual and infertile non-coupling, that is, a mutual masturbation, they had to be awarded not the physical or legal but the spiritual rewards and recognition of a bride and bridegroom.
It is to be noted that the 4–3 ruling differed by one vote, and only in a forum, the chambers of the judiciary, where the voice of the common man had no hearing, and among judges immune to the ballot box.
How was it possible for Conservatives to lose this one? It is not. All legal precedent back to prehistory sides with the rational, legal and traditional view of marriage. Cold reason can come to no other conclusion that anti-marriage is not marriage, that a thing cannot be itself and its own opposite at the same sense and the same time. And the vast majority of mankind, both living and dead, not to mention the unambiguous voice of God, declares the proposition that the alliance of a sodomite and catamite is holy matrimony is absurd.
All the argument, all fact, all reason, and all history are on the conservative side here. It is an open and shut case. How did the conservatives lose?
The conservatives lost because, as said above, they all treated the matter as a political matter.
The conservatives lost because, as said above, they all held the theological aspects of the case to be mere personal opinion, and for reasons of policy, never to be intruded into public debate over matters of law.
A political matter is a matter concerning the laws and customs needed for men in society to secure to maintain public order against the threats of tyranny, invasion, insurrection, or anarchy. Political matters are matters of law and order.
Matters of law and order are compromises. Matters are law and order are governed by the so called art of the possible. When a commonwealth deals with factions promoting conflicting claims, the sole way to prevent the factionalism from boiling over from peaceful debate to open violence is compromise.
Conservatives by nature are content to live and let live. If one’s neighbor wishes to go to hell in his own way, quietly and in the privacy of his own home, without disturbing the conservative or corrupting his children, conservatives, looking at the matter politically, say that public peace and order can be maintained if some vice is private, and so would allow it. Conservatives on the political level would have accepted Civil Unions for sodomites, since the matter was really not significantly different from a grant of power of attorney.
Civil Unions was a compromise. Had this been a political issue, both side would have acceded, neither been particularly happy, but then again neither would have been provoked into civil war.
Had it been a political matter for the Left, no doubt they would have accepted the compromise. But it was not. It was a theological matter.
Their theology runs thus: equality is the paramount virtue of civil society. Equality means that the government does not grant nor withhold the rewards or demerits earned by individual accomplishment or individual error based solely on birth. Status conferred by birth is called rank: slave, serf, peasant, burgher, tradesmen, yeoman, aristocrat, royalty, are examples of rank. That aristocrats, by dint of birth alone, enjoy rights and privileges it is a crime for peasants to presume to enjoy is inequality. In such societies, the first thing determined by a court of law is the birth rank of the parties involved, to know which set of law books to apply.
In an equal society, status is not conferred by birth, and the same law books apply to all men. While it is true that felons cannot vote, it is not true that a man can be born guilty of a felony.
Equality, for the Left, does not mean equality, it means an inequality called egalitarianism.
Egalitarianism where the government carefully maintains a method of handicapping the virtuous, clever, and productive, and of uplifting the vicious, stupid and unproductive, so that all outward signs of differences of merit all abolished.
Leftists are shallow, and so only outward signs and surface features concern them. Inward and hidden reality never concerns them.
Hence, for the Leftist, marriage is an outward sign of an inequality: for a Romeo and Juliet may wed, and Alcibiades and Socrates may not. The conservative knows that Alcibiades and Socrates may wed not because they can not, that the thing is physically impossible — one needs no mating ritual where no mating can take place — but this looks at an inward reality about the nature of sex, which is too profound a matter for the intellectual capacity of Leftists to encompass.
Hence, again, for the Leftist, to allow for marriages for married couples and civil unions for men paired with men pretending to be a couple would shatter the pretense, because then a distinction is made. Now the idea that two things can be distinct without being unequal in the eyes of the law is anathema to the Left. Any outward sign of differences offends the principle of egalitarianism.
Hence, for the Left, the difference between noticing that the bride is a woman and noticing that the bride is a man and hence not a bride at all is the same as noticing the difference between black skin and white, between Negro and Caucasian.
And since the Left (as is in keeping with its pathological dishonesty) takes credit for the Republican victories for blacks and against Dems during the Civil Rights movement, and, more ironically, takes credit for winning the right to vote for women in the face of Dem opposition, this requires them to side with the idea that failing to pretend homosexuals have the capacity to mate and therefore require a marriage rite to protect the intimacy of their marriage and secure the patrimony of the children one fathers and the other bears, is indeed a civil rights issue.
Once this emotional false-to-facts association is made, the alleged right of sodomites to edit reality to suit themselves is likened to the rights of blacks to vote or mix freely with whites, no compromise is possible. The matter has become a religious absolute, a matter of faith. One could no more ask a Leftist to acknowledge of the differences of the sexes or the purpose of marriage than one could ask a Christian to trample a cross.
So the Left, with religious zeal, pressed the point that same-sex so called marriage was a Constitutional right. The Conservatives, unwilling and unable to voice the idea that sodomy is a sin and homosexual attraction is a mental disorder, conceded the disputed ground, thinking that law and order required a compromise where each man could pursue his private vices without imposing on his neighbor.
The problem is that homosexual attraction is unnatural, and the sodomy is a sin. Those are facts. Treating the right to sodomy as a civil right, that is, your right to have a sodomite bugger you, as a right equal to a black man’s right to vote, is that this is a false to facts association. Two things that have nothing in common are said to be two instances of the same case, or two examples of the same principle. But they are not.
You see, a man deprived of civil rights, once he has restored to him that which nature granted him from creation, has no further demands to make. The blacks, once granted their due voting rights, did not ask for each black to have his votes count for more than a white vote, or to vote on matter barred from white voting, or anything of the sort.
But a sinner does not want restored to him something due him. He wants something he knows he is not due: an easy conscience. The sinner wants to get the same laurels as a saint. He wants to be told he is no worse than a virtuous man.
Once he has that, it is not enough. His conscience still pricks him. He has to be told that the virtuous man is only virtuous out of cowardice and weakness, and that he, because he indulges in his sin, must be shameless, proud, and courageous. He says he is brave and more honest than the virtuous man, because he is true to his inner sins.
He takes those sins to be the seat of his identity. Any criticism of the sins, he takes as an affront to himself.
And his jealous enmity toward the straight, decent, and happy man of virtue cannot cease. Men are not blank slates on which any pencil can write and erase any mark. The conscience can be smothered and suppressed for a season, even for years, but the truth will out.
So a sinner cannot compromise because he cannot quit his eternal attempts to smother the still, small voice of virtue in his conscience. This is why the sinner is exasperated and offended at even innocent signs of normal and decent things, things as innocent as using pronouns, or mother’s day, or apple pie, or children at play. All these things have to be perverted, or else the pervert feels the pangs of conscience, and his false joys flee.
That is why compromise is impossible on these points. Perhaps in the past when the Left was trying to protect workingmen or poor farmers from exploitation at the hands of bankers or industrial combines, compromise was possible and necessary. Those were political matters, not religious.
These days? What are the issues? Feminism is no longer about women voting or entering professions. We have had a black president, so the idea that blacks are barred by open law or secret conspiracy from achievement is absurd on it fact. Sodomy is not only legal, sodomy marriage is legal, Marvel and DC comics have homosex superheroes and heroines whose sole point is to preach and promote the doctrine of homosex among the impressionable young.
The issues are all religious. The question of whether sufficient Mohammedan terrorists have smuggled themselves into Europe and America with the migrants in order to overcome and destroy Christianity is a hotly debated question. The Left is against Christ here.
The question of whether the government has done enough to protect feminists from the scourge of femininity, and enough to destroy Christian concepts of the female role, of virginity, matrimony, motherhood and sainthood is a hotly debated question. The Left is against Christ on this issue as well.
The Left seeks to abolish the difference between male and female established by God.
The question of whether all men are created equal, and each man carries the stamp, image and likeness of God, or whether white man is uniquely evil, not a brother to the other races, and must be humiliated, scorned, and discriminated against at every turn is a hotly debated question. In the same light, the question of whether man is an animal like any other, some breeds being faster and smarter and stronger than others, and some breeds bred for burden, is a hotly debated question. The Left is against Christ here also.
The Left seeks to abolish the dignity of man established by our being made in the likeness of God, while also abolishing the brotherhood of man.
The question of whether life is sacred is hotly debated. The Left kills children and harvests their organs for resale, while claiming to be motivated by compassion for women’s health issues. The Left kills the elderly, the retarded, and the inconvenient, but not with clean, quick murders done by executioners. The Left gets doctors and physicians to torture victims slowly to death by starvation and dehydration.
The Left is against Christ here too, as well as against all human decency.
The question of whether children are sufficiently exposed to pornography and vulgarity to demean their view of mankind from a lofty ideal to a low and Leftist misanthropy has ceased to be debated. The Left is against Christ here as well, since they are against innocence, and the conservatives have once again conceded the field.
And so on. None of these are political matters, even though all public debate on them is expressed solely in political terms, that is, in terms of whose rights trump whose.
In fact, all of this is a theological debate between two great camps: the Leftists whose theological dogma demands that they deny that their dogmas are dogmas, and the Conservatives, who are unwilling to defend any dogmas or debate them, on the grounds that it is uncouth to debate or defend dogmatic matters.
And it is simply a rule of public discourse that ideals trump pragmatics, and uncompromising dogma trump political compromise.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
