A new planet of liberalism swims into our ken

You know how for the last ten or fifteen years TV sitcoms and movies have not only normalized homosexuals, but presented them as the sane, mature characters, while the heterosexual characters were hopelessly neurotic and messed up?

Now the inverted message has gone beyond culturally left Hollywood and entered the culturally left social sciences. The New York Times reports today:

For insights into healthy marriages, social scientists are looking in an unexpected place. A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships.

But that’s just the start. Be sure to sit down (metaphorically) before reading this:

After Vermont legalized same-sex civil unions in 2000, researchers surveyed nearly 1,000 couples, including same-sex couples and their heterosexual married siblings. The focus was on how the relationships were affected by common causes of marital strife like housework, sex and money.

Notably, same-sex relationships, whether between men or women, were far more egalitarian than heterosexual ones. In heterosexual couples, women did far more of the housework; men were more likely to have the financial responsibility; and men were more likely to initiate sex, while women were more likely to refuse it or to start a conversation about problems in the relationship. With same-sex couples, of course, none of these dichotomies were possible, and the partners tended to share the burdens far more equally.

While the gay and lesbian couples had about the same rate of conflict as the heterosexual ones, they appeared to have more relationship satisfaction, suggesting that the inequality of opposite-sex relationships can take a toll.

Even though the above is right up VFR’s alley, I could never have imagined it. As I’ve always said, liberalism aims ultimately at eliminating all distinct entities, because as long as there are distinct entities, there is difference and thus inequality between the things that exist. The goal of liberalism is to produce a world without difference, without hierarchy, without inequality. Same-sex relationships eliminate the troubling physical differentiation of the sexes (in which one sex is bigger and stronger than the other); the troubling natural differentiation of functions between the sexes, too numerous to mention; and the troublingly different feelings and desires and emotional needs of the sexes. Homosexual relationships are thus the ideal.

So there we are. The liberals are no longer merely claiming procedural equality of rights for homosexual marriage. They are claiming substantive superiority for homosexual marriage, because it fulfills the liberal ideal of equality in a way that normal marriage can never do.

Like Cortez in Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” we have climbed a peak and stare out in amazement on a previously unknown ocean of liberalism, a west we had not imagined, where we see, shimmering on the horizon, the ultimate goal of liberalism : the elimination of marriage between men and women.

—end of initial entry—

Sebastian writes:

That NY Times article—why do you do this to us!—hits every egalitarian talking point. Because marriage is based on the coming together of two distinct consciousnesses, male and female, the left will see it as less egalitarian, more hierarchical, too differentiated and thus dangerously undemocratic. Even the most intimate relationships must bow before equality, and what’s more equal, and narcissistic, than the same-sex? I love another me!

Allow me to quote Roger Scruton’s A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism:

Heterosexual union is imbued with the sense that your partner’s sexual nature is strange to you, territory into which you intrude without prior knowledge and in which the other and not the self is the only reliable guide. This experience has profound repercussions for our senses of the danger and the mystery of sexual union, and these repercussions are surely part of what people have had in mind in clothing marriage as a sacrament, and the ceremony of marriage as a rite of passage from one form of safety to another….To regard gay marriage as simply another option within the institution is to ignore the fact that an institution shapes the motive for joining it. Marriage has grown around the idea of sexual difference and all that sexual difference means. To make this feature accidental rather than essential is to change marriage beyond recognition…

Gay marriage further the hidden tendency of the postmodern State, which is to rewrite all commitments as contracts between the living

Mark Jaws writes:

As honest men of the world who allow ourselves to go where the truth takes us, no doubt we can offer possible explanations about the stable same sex relationships. Take lesbians, for example—many of whom are not the best looking broads on the planet. It is not exactly as if the world of dating is their oyster. The pickings are likely to be pretty slim. What you have then, you keep.

LA replies:

I don’t know, but I don’t think that argument is as applicable as it once might have seemed. I’ve heard there are more and more young pretty lesbians. Also, your argument would not explain stability the supposed stability in male homosexual relationships.

Charles T. writes:

Initially, we were told that homosexual marriage was necessary due to the basic rules of fairness. If heterosexuals could marry, then it is only fair that homosexuals should be able to do so. Of course, the homosexual community denied any attempt to undermine the traditional concept of marriage—fairness is all that is desired.

And now we have the experts telling us that we have much to learn from same sex couples. It may even be superior to traditional marriage. Slick stuff.

Of course, this was the agenda all along. The plea for fairness was an effective smoke screen to hide the real agenda of undermining traditional marriage. To my sadness, I have noticed—and even argued with—some Christians who are otherwise orthodox believers, agreeing with homosexual marriage and the adoption of children by homosexual couples.

Our nation is being fed a lie one small piece at a time. And many of our fellow citizens are buying it.

Complete sexual freedom coupled with the destruction of the traditional family, will do more to destroy our civilization than any other threat we currently face. People who have no objective moral standard for behavior will not be able to maintain a stable society, thus making it easier for outside forces to gain strongholds within our borders.

Mark B. writes:

With all due respect, the goal of liberalism is nothing as intellectual as “ultimately at eliminating all distinct entities”. The goal of liberalism is simply to create enough cognitive dissonance in individuals that they will end up worshipping which ever human has the greatest power at the moment. Liberalism is simply about getting humans to acquiesce to the greater human power.—Mark B.

LA replies

That’s good. What you speak of may be the actual practical result of liberalism. I was describing the ideological logic of liberalism. Your analysis and mind do not contradict each other, but work together.

Obviously, actual total equality can never exist. But liberalism moves toward it to the extent it can, destroying more and more of the substance of society, leaving human beings in a void where they will desire control. We see the dynamic right now. Liberalism keeps hollowing out the culture, peoplehood, national sovereignty, morality, legal traditions, and liberties of Europe, turning the Europeans more and more into nonentities. These nothing-people will then willingly yield to the rule of Islam.

Steve D. writes:

If the goal of liberalism is to eliminate all distinctions in society, then the ultimate meaning of liberalism is the death of society—because distinctions are all that holds it together.

There is a distinction between the inside of a ship and the ocean outside: it’s called the “hull.” There are distinctions between the peace inside a house and the storm outside it: they have various names, such as “roof,” “walls,” “doors.” Eliminate these distinctions, and you eliminate the possibility of a house. Social distinctions—the differences between men and women, between adults and children, between employer and employee, landlord and tenant, felon and citizen—are the structure that makes social interaction possible. They ARE society.

Remember that hippie saying: You do your thing and I do mine, and if by chance we meet it’s beautiful”? They were more serious, more prescient than they knew. If liberalism triumphs, and is taken to its logical conclusion, then pure random chance will be the only possible arbiter of social relations.

(As an aside: I don’t notice any large-scale, organized assault (on the order of the assault on marriage) on the idea of courtesy in society, yet manners are eroding like a sand castle at high tide. They’re not being deliberately attacked, so much as corroded incidentally by the applied logic of liberalism. They are a sort of “collateral damage”—but their disappearance makes it that much more problematical to have a functioning society.)

LA replies:

It couldn’t be said better. An entity, any entity, whether a cell, or a simple biological organism, or a human being, or a household, or a school, or a business corporation, or a nation, or the solar system, or the entire cosmos, is a whole consisting of distinct parts fitted together and working together. The entity consists of its parts and the distinctions between its parts. To eliminate those disctinctions is to destroy it as an entity. And such destruction is the logical end-result of liberalism, with regard to any entity to which liberalism is consistently applied.

Laura W. writes:

It is a first principle of contemporary lesbian culture that same sex-relationships are morally superior to male/female bonds. Just as divorce is not just regrettably acceptable, but often positively virtuous, so same-sex love is free of all that clumsy baggage.

When I was in college, I took a room in an apartment leased by a lesbian artist. She and her beautifully voluptuous lover would sit at the kitchen table, one on the other’s lap, and regale me with the stories of their lives. They were a wonderful couple and through them I met many lesbians. I discovered that few women were lesbians simply because of some deep-seated physical attraction to the same sex. They were reacting to profound changes in our world. They were searching for meaning and had found the wrong answer. And, yes, many were quite beautiful physically.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 11, 2008 07:14 PM | Send