Not in fact a pro-gay-marriage protest
A question rarely asked about gay marriage is how it became such a massive flashpoint issue. In America and Britain, gay marriage has become one of the key issues of our time, with everyone from bishops to hacks feeling the need to tell the world where they stand on it. And yet the remarkable thing is that gay marriage has achieved this hot-potato status without the benefit of a mass movement demanding it, far less any public streetfighting or serious civil unrest by homosexuals determined to get hitched.
For all the self-flattering comparisons made by gay activists between their demand for gay marriage and black Americans’ demand for civil rights in the 1950s and 60s, it is the differences between these two things that are most striking. Gay-marriage activists have not had to march for years on end, carry out mass boycotts, face water cannons, get attacked by dogs or run the risk of being thrown in jail for their campaign to achieve almost saintly status, winning the backing of leading politicians and commentators. The speed and ease with which gay marriage has gone from being a tiny minority concern to become the No 1 battle in the modern culture wars has been truly remarkable – and revealing.
What it suggests is that gay marriage is more a tool of the elite than it is a demand of the demos. The thing motoring the gay-marriage campaign, its political engine, is not any longstanding desire among homosexuals to get married or an active, passionate demand from below for the right of men to marry men and women to marry women. No, its driving force, the reason it has been so speedily and heartily embraced by the political and media classes, is because it is so very useful as a litmus test of liberal, cosmopolitan values. Supporting gay marriage has become a kind of shorthand way of indicating one’s superiority over the hordes, particularly those of a religious or redneck persuasion. Keep reading
No comments:
Post a Comment