Heterophobia
Exclusive commentary by Greg Lewis / WashingtonDispatch.com
September 16, 2003
Liberals are quick to resort to namecalling when they
seek to dismiss an opposing position without actually discussing it rationally
or dealing with legitimate issues raised. At the top of the liberal list
of names is, of course, "homophobic," which leftists are quick
to trot out whenever someone dares suggest that homosexuality should not
be promoted as normative behavior. It turns out, however, that when they
resort to such namecalling, those on the Left are actually desperately
trying to conceal their own phobias.
The fact is that it's not conservatives who are homophobic;
rather, it is liberals who are heterophobic. So deep is their fear of
heterosexuality and the institutions which support it that liberals will
go to any lengths to eliminate normal sexual orientation and behavior
from consideration as a legitimate topic for discussion or as a basis
for policy-making.
The roots of this phobia can be traced, of course, all
the way back to the writings of Karl Marx. Marx saw the institution of
marriage as "bourgeois claptrap," an institution which mirrored
capitalistic social structure in that it allowed men to treat wives and
children as property. Two influential Marxist theorists, Erich Fromm and
Herbert Marcuse, perpetuated his views from the 1920s through the 1960s.
Recently, a book entitled "Against Love: A Polemic," by Laura
Kipnis, has continued the assault on this "capitalist" institution,
which, in the final analysis, has become a "presenting issue"
for the underlying heterophobia of the Left/Liberal agenda.
Marcuse was clear on the point that human potential would
be realized only when people were able to manifest a "polymorphous
sexuality." For Marcuse, such a state of affairs represented the
ultimate liberation of mankind from sexual repression and, coincidentally,
from the need to work for a living (both, presumably, exclusively capitalist
phenomena), an historical outcome in which all citizens would give up
individual freedom to the state and become pleasure-seeking functionaries
whose primary value consisted in pushing the envelope of hedonism.
Kipnis also comes down firmly on the side of unleashing
carnal desires. Indeed, she takes care of the "character" issue
by implying that most people, like Bill Clinton, don't have any: "[S]ometimes
desire just won't take no for an answer." For Kipnis, marriage is
nothing short of drudgery, something to be worked at like a job. And the
problem is that, like jobs in a capitalist society, marriages are carried
out by people who somehow, by her reasoning, don't have a stake in the
outcome. Marriage partners are, like their counterparts in the labor market,
alienated by the fact that marriage, again, like the labor market, is
nothing more than an instrument of state control. The answer, according
to Kipnis, is adultery, that wonderful enterprise which allows married
people to give rein to unbridled sexual desire.
The Marcusian notion — certainly affirmed by Kipnis
in her promotion of adultery — that "polymorphous sexuality"
is somehow an ideal toward which society should aspire has, as Kipnis'
book makes clear, become ingrained in the political consciousness of the
Left. Left/Liberals, almost to a person, have implicitly accepted that
heterosexuality and the institution of marriage somehow represent a limiting
condition that has been imposed on human beings by western democratic-capitalist
societies. Never mind that for hundreds of millions of years the reproductive
advantages of there being two sexes have enabled, among other things,
the emergence through the evolutionary process of the very species of
which we are members. And never mind that such activities as nurturing
and providing for one's offspring have served humans and other species
remarkably well thus far.
Such common-sense reasoning goes contrary to twentieth-century
left/liberal dogma, which has asserted that the ascendancy of Marxism
would usher in an era in which the hassle of working for a living and
the drudgery of having to actually raise one's children would give way
to a state of affairs where, as Hillary Clinton recommends, the state
(aka the "village") would assume responsibility for such heretofore
undeniably personal duties, leading to a condition where adult humans
would be freed up to pursue their primary purpose, pushing the envelope
of hedonism. The Left has so successfully managed to skew the terms of
the debate toward its agenda of promoting the marginal and the unproven,
that those who attempt to put forth heterosexual relationships, including
marriage, as the norm are routinely shouted down as homophobic fascists.
Of course, it's easy to put down marriage. It's easy to
point out all the things marriage isn't. It isn't, the Clintons notwithstanding,
an arrangement which lends itself easily to the unfettered exploration
of one's sexuality through encounters with multiple partners. Nor is it
an arrangement which magically eliminates frustration, sexual or otherwise,
from one's life. Nor is it a contract into which one should enter if an
important goal of one's life remains personal sexual fulfillment, although
personal sexual fulfillment can certainly be a component of marriage,
Kipnis' whiny arguments notwithstanding.
To try to heap on the institution of marriage the added
burden of catering to the whims of people who have not progressed beyond
an adolescent view of human relationships, of people who have managed
to reach adulthood without having been given the gift of experiencing
a deep spiritual love of and appreciation for another person, is to falsify
what marriage is and to devalue what it can be. To try to force on marriage
the burden of being a contract of convenience, an "arrangement"
susceptible to change according to the vagaries of contemporary culture,
is to falsify what it means for a man and a woman to pledge their lives
to each other unconditionally.
Because, as the Christian marriage vows state, marriage
is not to be entered into lightly. If you're capable only of a depth of
understanding that balks at anything more profound than self-centered
sexual satisfaction, well, marriage is probably not for you. And if you're
someone who's not capable of putting the interests of other people —
particularly those of your spouse and your children — ahead of your
own, again, you might want to think twice before you get married. Finally,
if you're a left/liberal who has bought into your cohorts' deep doctrinal
heterophobia, steer clear of marriage.
Indeed, the Left, in its blind adherence to Marxist dogma,
has become frantically heterophobic. So fearful are left/liberals of normal
male-female human sexuality and the institutions which have evolved to
support those relations that they have constructed a veritable edifice
out of aberrant sexual behavior, including homosexuality, bisexuality,
and sexual fetishism, to mention several. When they are not cowering behind
this edifice, they lob propaganda salvos intended to obfuscate the overwhelming
success that continues to be enjoyed by normal Americans happy to marry
and remain faithful to their spouses and raise their children and spoil
their grandchildren.
In the final analysis, this now-crumbling leftist heterophobic
edifice is proving to have been built with the bricks of outmoded and
unworkable Marxist theoretical constructs. And despite apparent statistical
evidence to the contrary, there is taking place a solid, if gradual, return
to the values and institutions, including morality and marriage, that
confute the left's railings against the institution of marriage and demonstrate
the futility of the tactics they employ in defense of their rampant heterophobia.
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