Debased Presumptions

You'll be pleased to know that Maggie Gallagher has survived her latest confrontation with elemental evil, which took place while she was trying to foment anti-gay outrage in Maine.

Most of the people in Maine were enthusiastic, but one clergyman asked me, "Shouldn't we live with our neighbors in peace?"

His question haunts me for its debased presumptions: Is using democracy to fight for shared values somehow an act of war against our neighbors?

Is opposing equal rights for your gay neighbors an "act of war" against them? Good question. I suppose we could ask them how they feel about it, but they might be biased. It's better to leave the judgment to normal people like Gallagher, who are capable of being perfectly objective, as thus:

"Agree with me or you're a hater" is not the authentic voice of peace and tolerance.

Actually, it is, as the following fact-based vignette will demonstrate.

Maggie Gallagher: I don't want gay people to have the same legal rights I do, because I think they're abnormal and dangerous!

The Authentic Voice of Peace and Tolerance: You are clearly a bigot.

Maggie Gallagher: Nonsense! I don't hate gay people. I just want to deny them certain legal rights, because they're perverts. You want to prevent me from denying them those rights, which makes you the bigot.

The Authentic Voice of Peace and Tolerance: In addition to being a bigot, you are utterly fucking incoherent and deranged. Get some professional help, for fuck's sake, and stop taking your emotional problems out on innocent people.

The thing that really distresses Gallagher is that people persist in calling her a bigot even when she's being perfectly polite.

She's not screaming, she's not swearing, and she's not brandishing a 2x4 studded with rusty nails. She's simply arguing, quite calmly, that gay people must remain second-class citizens forever, or else. But gosh, the way some people react, you'd think she was arguing against interracial marriage, or in favor of segregated drinking fountains!

And you know what's even worse?

So far, the bullies pay no price for their meanness and their rage.

Well, the gay ones do suffer discrimination (and worse). But as Gallagher notes, it serves them right. I mean, if you don't want to suffer discrimination, you shouldn't make people feel bad by calling them names when they try to discriminate against you. Especially when they're civil about it.

It no longer matters how respectfully and civilly one makes the case for humanity's marriage tradition.

Never has the plight of the untermenschen been expressed so powerfully. Why do the heavens not darken?

Seriously, if you homos could stop being such drama queens for a moment, you'd notice that the foot on your neck is shod not in vintage SS jackboots from the local militaria dealer, but in sensible loafers from Macy's. And that the arguments against granting you the same rights as other citizens do not quote The Turner Diaries or The Protocols, but Aquinas and Edmund Burke and G.K. Chesterton. At which point, you'd realize that you owe Gallagher an apology, at the very least. She's no fanatic: she's merely trying to defend Authentic Humanity against the deadly moral contagion that each of you carries like some rainbow-flagged plague ship. Why do you have to take it so goddamn personally?

Remember way up at the top of this post, when Gallagher objected to the "debased presumption" that we ought to live in peace with our neighbors? It turns out that there's something to this idea, after all. It's just that the clergyman garbled things a bit.

This is not an issue of free speech but of neighborliness. Fundamental decency requires that we treat each other with respect, especially when we disagree deeply on hot moral issues.

That's fair enough, isn't it? If gays will respect Gallagher's view of same-sex love as an existential threat to Our Way of Life, which must be controlled at all costs, she will allow them to offer very, very, very, very polite objections...even if she suspects that these objections have more to do with incipient AIDS dementia, or hatred of God Himself, than with actual moral principles.

In this way, we will all work together to create a more equitably inequitable society, in which everyone will either respect the belief that queers must be stopped before they destroy civilization, or stand revealed as a bigot.