ALMOST 15 YEARS LATER, RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS, EAT CROW
History has a way of dealing up broadsides to those who don't understand the march of freedom through time.
Six months ago, the L.A. Times reported on a local tragedy, one that has been replayed in many local communities for years now. Except this time the local hero, who died in a tragic accident, was an openly gay All American. Five to six hundred - six hundred! - people in his smallish and decidedly "non-progressive" town turned out for his memorial service.
In today's America, it is the youth who show the way. Andrew's taken notice of this story about athletes. There are groups who have stood for integrating Greek Life on campus are at the point where there is now more than one, even if they are still smallish in number.
Important in all this is that the kids are doing it on their own, largely.
I just saw Lane Hudson for the first time on National Television - sharp, articulate, un-unselfconscious and ready to rumble as much as any of his non-gay peers. I don't know his personal history (nor do I care to, in general - young people have enough pressure on them, without becoming political piñatas), but he didn't seem like someone who needed a gay umbrella organization to reach down and give him a helping hand in the form of copious self-validation, which is what I mean by doing it on their own. (To put icing on the cake, Hudson's own moral compass in the Foley affair proved greater than the self-referential manse that would reject his own sexual morality! see quote below, for details.)
These are small pieces of a mosaic, of a wider truth, but they are almost undeniably nouveau.
"SAVE THE CHILDREN", BUT MUM ON GAY YOUTH
In any case, if 'gay community' has had a role in kids life (and it does - and it should), it's certainly not as it was imagined fifteen years ago, by those who wrote the most vile stuff about homosexual recruitment of children. Some of these people continue to write today.
I did a quick search of Family Scholars website. They report nothing on 'gay youth' or 'gay kids' or 'homosexual kids'. One would assume that no kids are ever gay or lesbian in their discussions of parenthood, etc., they just maleficently arrive, fully formed and ready for same-sex marriage. Ditto for First Things, except, quite unlike FS, you can find much in their long history of reasoned-raged against homosexuals.
One has to encourage young folks, like Jamie Kirchick, who may not recall those who would not give a damn about his balanced view and, instead, willfully brand him as a damaged, helpless, recruit to the cause.
So, by the witness of History, by the vibrancy of an unaided gay youth, and in the shade of an All American hero's tragic death, we can summarily reject the disgusting Richard John Neuhaus, who wrote:
The gay movement is the Be Nice to Negroes issue of 1993. It requires little. Americans will offer homosexuals, especially those dying of AIDS, sympathy galore, and will unreservedly condemn vulgar or violent displays of hostility toward them. But very few will willingly offer their children to the cause.
Because of its size, its behavior patterns, its pathologies, and, increasingly, because of its ideology, overt homosexuality will likely remain a subculture, a world within a world. It is a world that has been contained in many cultures and, until recently, was contained in this one. In the last several years, it has indeed "come out" in every respect. But what it has come out with has not met with general approval beyond the incorrigible disposition of most Americans to try to be tolerant toward the distasteful. It is quite possible that today’s excitements about "the gay nineties" will, in ten years or so, seem as puzzling as the enthusiasm for "open marriage" two decades ago. Meanwhile, the homosexual movement will have done a good deal of damage, especially to young people who were persuaded to embrace publicly a "sexual identity" that may not be theirs, and a way of life that could be morally and physically lethal. - RJN, First Things, 1993, Recruiting for the Revolution
RAISING THE BAR
And for those who continue, we're still taking names - and it's not me: the stones themselves will cry out.
