Ask not for whom the bell tolls
Gay men and lesbians in the nation’s capital in the 1930s and 1940s enjoyed a comfortable working environment in the federal government and a vibrant social life in a fast-growing city. The networks of friends and acquaintances that formed around Lafayette Park, the YMCA, and Washington’s gay bars engendered a strong sense of community. “To assume for those of us in the Thirties a dreary and repressed social life hardly fits the facts,” wrote gay Washingtonian and poet Haviland Ferris. “The problem of personal acceptance of oneself as gay seems a greater problem now than it used to be.”
–The Lavender Scare (emphasis added).
We live in a time where homosexuality is broadly accepted; polls show roughly half of Californians support legalized gay marriage, the Congress just repealed legislation whose effect was to keep gay men and women out of the military; polls generally show that most people think that it’s wrong to discriminate against gay people in employment, etc.
But that’s not how it was in the 1950s and 1960s, despite the existence of a relatively open gay subculture in the 1930s and 1940s. To be sure, that subculture was isolated; those in the know knew about it, while the people back home in the heartland didn’t – and that fact represents a huge difference between the 1930s and today. But the fact remains that acceptance of homosexuality has, within living memory, turned to rejection and disdain, and those who had been out of the closet were shoved into it … and that means, on some level, that it could happen again.
To a certain extent, then, one of the reasons why legalized gay marriage is important is that it reduces the likelihood of future intolerance; openly recognizing and celebrating marriages makes it that much harder for the America of tomorrow to shove us all back in the closet.
Whittaker Chambers’s homosexual experience while in the Communist underground was merely one piece of evidence forging what many people in postwar America saw as an intrinsic link between homosexuals and Communists. Both groups seemed to comprise hidden subcultures, with their own meeting places, literature, cultural codes, and bonds of loyalty. As people feared Communist “cells” within the federal government, they feared “nests” of homosexuals. McCarthy’s first mention of homosexuals referred not to individuals but to a collective, variously termed “these gentlemen”, these “types”, and “this group. …. As one congressional report warned, “The homosexual tends to surround himself with other homosexuals, but only in his social, not his business life.” A postwar commentator on American sexual attitudes noted, “Part of our folkore about inversion is that all inverts belong to a sort of large, loosely-associated, secret organization.”
–The Lavender Scare, David K. Johnson
Chinese law
Today’s IHT reports “Under a proposal submitted last Monday by the Civil Affairs Ministry to the State Council, adult children would be required by law to regularly visit their elderly parents. If they did not, the parents could sue them.”
I somewhat doubt that could work here. Nor is it really consistent with freedom – I mean, yeah, family is an important value, but doesn’t it sorta lose it’s value when it’s forced?
Hypocrisy and environmentalism
“Shortly after we first met, Griffith told me, ‘I know very few environmentalists whose heads aren’t firmly up their ass. They are bold-facedly hypocritical, and I don’t think the environmentalism movement as we’ve known it is tenable or will survive. Al Gore has done a huge amoun to help this cause, but he is the No. 1 environmental hypocrite. His house alone uses more energy than an average person uses in all aspects of life, and he flies prodigiously. I don’t think we can buy the argument anymore that you get special dispensation just because what you’re doing is worthwhile.’ Griffith includes himself in this condemnation. He said ‘Right now, the main thing I’m working on is trying to invent my way out of my own hypocrisy.’”
–David Owen, in a May 17 New Yorker piece about the inventor Saul Griffith.
One of the recurrent problems facing reform movements spearheaded by the privileged is that, in order to effectively reform, the privileged have to be willing to acknowledge their privilege – and, where applicable, give it up. But “environmentalists” – aside, perhaps, from the hard-core revolutionaries at Earth First! and their less committe brethren at Greenpeace – have generally been unwilling to do that. Western “environmentalists” still fly from place to place, use electronic devices that suck down power on a massive scale, and use air conditioning, while bemoaning global warming.
That hypocrisy is a bad enough sin – a sin so common that in most cases it escapes notice.
The greater sin is the unwillingness to allow the source of that energy to be located in our own communities. Locating power sources in our communities would reduce transmission loss, and it would force us in some sense to pay the costs of our consumption ourselves, either through toxic chemical risk, nuclear meltdown risk, or simple air pollution. But major urban areas in the United States don’t approve new refineries or nuclear power plants; the power generation is, instead, pushed far away. In the name of keeping our communities healthy and clean, we inflict the cost on others.
There’s a nasty classism at the heart of the way environmentalism plays out in the United States: it’s fine to inflict environmental costs on the poor and the weak, while preserving the beauty and sanctity of the land occuppied by the upper middle class.
It’s a sad example of liberal-minded people not living up to our own ideals.
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