The Arc Of Identity Politics: God Is Dead. Long Live Libido.
With trans-sexual outrage now losing its sizzle for scandal, inquiring minds want to know what the frontier holds in the form of progressive media scolding. What is the next grievance group that will be cleansed by the sunlight of liberal advocacy? And how will the majority in society be made to suffer for their (alleged) treatment?
Granted, the field has narrowed somewhat from blacks (12% of the population) to LGBT (5 %) to transsexuals (.01%). The subsets now require some creativity.
Dwarfism?
Siamese twins?
Left-handedness?
Perhaps. For our money the next civil-rights crusade will be plural marriage. I know, I know. Proponents of gay marriage swore that liberalizing marriage would end with them. It was a Wall of epic proportions. No farther. Like Trump’s wall, however, it’s endlessly breached.
But desperate media times call for desperate media measures. And with Wolf Blitzer talked out about trans outrage, plural marriage has all the markers of a good bout of liberal media insanity. The talking points come trippingly off the tongue.
Why are you standing in the way of true love?
Three people or more can raise children as well as any couple. I mean, just look at Big Love.
Polygamy has been persecuted savagely through the centuries
If we are to blitz traditional culture this outrage against plural love triangles must be exploited. Sexual identity is now the new normal, especially if it’s not normal. In a culture where sex is suddenly the overarching raison d’être for urban society, three in a canoe or a bed will soon be seen as normalized.
Society did not delineate itself based on sexual preference in the past. For centuries people identified themselves by their relationship to God, not their favourite partner for spooning. As recently as the 1960s, you were a Catholic or a Jew or a Muslim, and those was the guardrails of your life.
The great American writer Raymond Carver reflected that in his wonderful short story “Cathedral”. A blind man asks why they built cathedrals so high. “In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God. In those olden days God was an important part of everyone’s life.”
No longer. The inexorable Marxist pressures of secularism effectively destroyed this proximity to God in much of the industrialized world. The Deity was out, and a new rationalist identity was required to take his place. The beneficiary was sexual orientation. In the progressive zeal to re-wire society academics and social planners wanted you to be known by who you slept with.
Anyone who objected to this radical re-think was reminded of the failings of organized religion, its propensity for war and its fondness for stale sandwiches after mass.
If that didn’t work heretics were publicly flayed with the stories of persecutions of gays and cross dressers and demands for reparations. The straight religious oppressors had brought this on themselves, and the only way to rectify it was for prime ministers and premiers to walk in a parade with half-dressed libertines.
Having gotten their proverbial foot in the door, leftist intellectuals then decided to divide sexual identity into as many subgroups as their minds could conjure. Before long, professor Jordan B. Peterson was being pilloried in academic circles at U of Toronto for his lonely fight against the concept of 32 different pronouns when addressing his woke students.
Culture mavens quickly gave this this novel slant on community their approval. Documentaries about bath house raids were rolled out. This acceptance was backed up with myriad new laws about hate speech against those who weren’t as enthralled by the LGBTQ alphabet soup of sexual identity ranging from queer to two-spirited. Say the wrong thing about lesbians and you go to jail.
To cement the gains made by identity shifters, the school curriculum was adapted to reinforce the all-encompassing importance of sex. So the birds-and-bees lectures to giggling high schoolers morphed into clinical descriptions for six-year-olds of the sexual options they might face when… you know, they actually start to think sexually six to ten years later.
Forget the innocence of childhood. The little nippers were going to hear about fist fucking, blow jobs and gerbil games— and like it! Because nothing’s more important in our society than a Grade three student acknowledging the sexual proclivities of libidinous adults. And, if they’re lucky, marching in a parade with those half-dressed libertines.
(No one thought to wonder how this played with the new citizens of a conservative religious bent in Canada— the people the Left assures us have so much to teach us?)
Despite the fact that one of the major architects of this policy in Ontario was a convicted pedophile, no one in official circles felt the need to question, “Why so much detail so young?” It was one thing to preach tolerance of people who are different. Why is sexualizing children so young a priority in the public schools.
The Left-in-a-hurry isn’t great at pausing for reflection. So don’t expect explanations soon. You’re more likely to be accused of a thought crime before they tell you why it must be so. Plus, they’ll be so busy guilting you out about plural marriage they won’t have the time.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher of his website Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports And Why The Free Market Could Save Them is now available.