The struggle for the conscience of the nation

What if someone stole your engagement photos?

The culture war in America is in large part a clash of two competing political and social alliances for control of America’s conscience.

The sexual revolution has gone a long way toward freeing up American law from domination by the churches and the clericalist politicians who, on their behalf, had imposed the traditional Christian morality on America through the power of government.

It has done so in the name of a liberal though not entirely secular alternative morality that in many ways praises or at any rate allows what the Christian morality blames and blames much of what the Christian morality praises or allows.

For the clericalists, for example, homosexuality, though tolerated in the form of priestly pedophilia, is severely condemned as immoral whenever encountered among lay adults or adolescents.

It is something they have always sought to cause society to hate, suppress, outlaw, and persecute.

For the liberals, in contrast, homosexuality – though not pedophilia – is morally allowable and condemnation of it is itself morally wrong.

That is to say, moral condemnation of homosexuality, labeled “homophobia,” is itself something the liberals want to cause society to hate, suppress, and perhaps ultimately outlaw and persecute.

As an amoralist, I do not deplore either homosexuality or those who so condemn it for moral reasons, convinced as I am that there are no such things.

But what of the arguments so commonly advanced on the one side or the other?

For example, what of the argument that in homosexuality nature’s evident purpose is frustrated?

We need not take the idea of natural purposes literally in order to see the point.

As with the eye it is nature’s intention that we see with the male and female sexual organs it is nature’s intention that we reproduce, moved to do so by that other gift of nature, the blind lust that the clericalists also condemn.

All the same, nature fluffs it from time to time, and if this is no reason to punish people with astigmatism or subject them to social opprobrium it is no reason to do either to homosexuals.

As for the arguments that legalized and tolerated homosexual conduct, or anyway homosexual marriage, pose a threat to society, the nation, the institution of marriage, or civilization itself, these claims are too transparently false, vacuous, or both to be worth a moment's attention.

Last we have the religious argument that God, Allah, or the gods hate fags.

And to that I say there are no gods.

And the arguments on the other side aimed at showing homophobia is wrong and to be resisted and suppressed?

Well, here as well there is a religious argument.

It is alleged, sometimes, that God loves homosexuals as he loves us all. And so we should, too.

But, again, there are no gods.

On the other hand, the non-religious reasons aimed at showing homophobia to be wrong all come to the claim that it is nothing but gratuitous cruelty cloaked in stupid or transparently false, and often egregiously fraudulent, justifications.

And that seems to be true, doesn’t it?

And that fact – the fact that, like racism, it is a form of gratuitous cruelty – leads me to prefer to see it suppressed – though not cruelly – and wither away.