The bitterness of so many Kerry supporters over President Bush’s
election victory begins to look as if it is giving birth to a new
politics of paranoid fantasy. The old politics of paranoid fantasy,
as you may remember, was popularized by Michael Moore in
Fahrenheit 9/11 and concentrated on the themes of the
“stolen” election of 2000, the Bush family’s interests in the
Carlyle group and its ties to the Saudi royal family, and the dark
hints about the President’s corrupt motives for waging the war in
Iraq. These fantasies have not gone away — and the stolen election
one shows some signs of being revived in a new and improved, 2004
model, most notably by Keith Olbermann of “Countdown” on MSNBC.
But another one now seems to be dominant. This is the fantasy of
a nightmarish world of theocratic rule from Washington by fanatical
Christian fundamentalists who, at least according to Garry Wills in the New York Times, are all but
indistinguishable from the fanatical Islamic fundamentalists who
blew up the twin towers and killed 3,000 Americans on September 11,
2001.
Anyone who believes anything so absurd is unlikely to care very
much about any dispassionate reasoning around the subject, but the
evidence adduced by these true believers for their pet theory seems
to depend rather heavily on the fact that 22 percent of those who
responded to exit polls taken at the time of the election said that
the single issue which had mattered most to them in deciding how to
cast their vote had been “Moral Values.”
Charles Krauthammer did an excellent demolition job on this theory
in the Washington Post, but he might have gone on to make
the point that the real moralists in this election and even more so
after it were the more extreme Kerry supporters whose influence on
the candidate himself and those around him was perceptible and who
tried so hard to make the case that their opponent was not just a
bad president but a bad man. Certainly it can only be a form of
moral judgment that has made so many of them suggest, in their
bitterness since the election, that Bush and his supporters are
tainted with the stigma of bigotry, hatred, and dishonesty.
Their morality also, however, and paradoxically takes the form
of anti-morality. Or “morality.” For what they understand by the
term is not really morality itself, if by that we understand a
whole system of rights and duties and proscriptions that have been
worked out over centuries and is constantly evolving but rather a
sort of fabulous monster, a symbol of the oppression of certain
traditional and mainly sexual moral constraints that have come to
seem intolerable. This feeling has now extended outward from the
sexually libertine metropolitan centers to the up-scale suburbs and
a significant proportion of American voters elsewhere, and the
moral fervor of these children of the sexual revolution in
denouncing traditional morality really was a factor in the
election. Gay marriage was their symbolic issue, voted down
wherever it appeared on the ballot, and it seems to me that the
otherwise puzzling charge of “bigotry” against Bush voters must
have had its origins in the disappointment felt by its proponents
and champions.
This is because, to them, their sexuality isn’t a matter of what
they do but of who they are. As they see it, their sexual
“orientation” is as much a part of them as the color of their skin.
Therefore, any sort of discrimination in the way the law treats
them is as much a violation of their civil rights as racial
discrimination is of the civil rights of black people and others
against whom it is practiced. I think the analogy a false one for
all sorts of reasons, but it is a subject, like that of abortion,
on which reasoned discussion has become almost impossible. For once
you accept the equation sexuality = identity, then any attempt by
anybody anywhere to cling to such shreds and patches as remain
today of the moralized view of sexuality that was universal up
until 40 years ago becomes a threat to your very existence. It
becomes easy to believe that those who would vote against your
right to marry must also hate you, which in turn means that they
are disposed to hurt or even kill you, or to look with indulgence
on those who do.
For those who harbor such fears, “Moral Values” are likely to be
far more important than they are for the majority who just don’t
like the idea of a radical re-definition of an institution that’s
been around for as long as marriage has. It’s true that the passive
traditionalism of the latter has a moral coloring, and many if not
most of those who feel it are likely also to believe that
homosexual acts are wrong. But it would be foolish to ignore the
extent to which this moral conviction has been weakened by 40 years
of sexual “liberation.” Real gay-bashers today are rarely moralists
and are much more likely to have psychological problems. Belief in
sexual rights and wrongs of any kind has been so degraded by the
culture that it is much more likely than the libertarian position
to be held apologetically and even — wonderful irony! —
solipsistically. I don’t approve of sex outside marriage, but then
that’s just me. Such people may not even think homosexual behavior
wrong, yet they have a predisposition against the self-definition
by sexuality that has become the first article of the gay credo —
and that has created the remarkable moral fervor of the
anti-moralists.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie
critic.
