The Secular Fundamentalist

The Case of the Homosexual Lobby

No group of people has moved in status so dramatically and decisively over the last 50-60 years than homosexuals.  Feminism hasn’t even come close to achieving the extent of this group’s objectives.  Women's’ agenda has been stymied in ways that that of homosexuals has not, and despite enormous effort and money, indigenous communities are still mired in deeply disabling legacy politics.

As the last chapter demonstrated, women wanted basic changes in their status and the politics of their relationships but ended up getting more of what they didn’t want and much less of what they did.  The feminist agenda was hijacked by the economic system and its powerful cultural frameworks have perversely distorted its thrust.
 
On the other hand, homosexual agenda has all the full-on sexuality upsides that appeal to indulgence capitalism, without the difficult, complicated and contradictory elements that genuine reproductive partnering demands in its division of labor and its real labor requirements, to do its job properly.  And while the coming of homosexual parenting may well change the profile of some, they do not call themselves ‘gay’ for nothing.  Gay is about fun and fantasy. ‘Responsibility’ and ‘obligation’ are for straights!  Let’s party!  Consume!  Indulge!

The homosexual keys to the system fitted perfectly.  And while the dead weight of a hostile history and tradition was heavy, the economic system suppressed them by creating a ‘liberated’ template that homosexuals could tailor for themselves.  All that was needed was a well-organized and supported marketing and lobby group to represent their interests coherently, a core of sympathizers in the public media and the rest would be 'history'.

The right of homosexuals to marry and adopt children is the apotheosis of an increasingly systematic campaign, commencing as the consumer society started to unpack itself, to ultimately get recognition of the legitimacy of their sexuality as an equal alternative to heterosexual one. Marriage and adoption are the last pieces in the puzzle of full ‘normalization’ within the culture.

“What could be more reasonable than that?” you might ask.  The conventional answer would frame itself by referring to sexual ‘equality’, ‘non-discrimination’ and ‘justice’ as an assumed given, around what is now widely regarded among those not in league with dark forces, as a settled question.
 
My response is that the homosexual lobby has been just another sectional interest group that has made use of leverages arising from the assembly of a consumer society, that were available to any public relations firm or aspiring wannabees working to a long term plan.  ‘Justice’ is the positive spin and ideological gloss that any interest group worth its salt ascribes to its agenda and is a PR euphemism for the process of overriding opposition to get its way.  ‘Equality’ for homosexuals cannot mean being exactly the same as the reproductive mainstream, so much as a creative equivalent that gives them the same status, but for that, they need to qualify.

My argument is that this claim is a spurious ideological crib, fudge and bluff, and that ‘discrimination’ is a perfectly proper exercise in critically questioning and rejecting it, in exactly the same way as any right-thinking person would ‘discriminate’ against hydrocarbon industries claiming ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ in a CO2 constrained world.

Every lobby thinks its case is special, exceptional and morally high grounded.  The best of them strategically tap into sensitive social mainstream targets and lock in their agenda through systematic propagandizing, media product placement and strategic ‘mouthpiecing’, to the point of near unassailability, like the international Zionist lobby or the US National Rifle Association. The homosexual lobby is right up there with them.

To make sense of this transformation of a very bleakly marginalized group who could be jailed for sexual ‘crimes’ and made fair game for pillory and harassment, to one of almost unassailable respectability, requires a bit more explanation than ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’.  Sixty years ago, they clearly didn’t qualify for anything but disreputability and the accusation of perversion of ‘normal’ sexual relations.  'Fairness' was getting their unpleasant just deserts and how could anyone who wasn’t ‘normal’ be the equal of anyone who was?  To suggest otherwise would have been considered absurd and given rise to suspicion about the values and possible sexual 'orientation' of the suggester.

So questions remain.  How did they do it and why are they on the cusp of final success, at least in the more affluent parts of the world?  Moreover, what does this signify about us and are these gains safe and sustainable?  Why aren’t they making any headway at all in the not so affluent parts of the world?  And is there a counter-attack against them in the offing?

In affluent consumer economies, in the short term, it is very likely that the homosexual lobby will get its way, for it would seem there is already too much momentum in place to stop it.  In essence its campaign is an intelligent opportunistic move on societies whose existential bearings, social regulatory mechanisms, and institutional settings have almost ceased to exist, as a result of having been deconstructed by libertarian laissez-faireism in both the economic and social realms, exposed to a culture of consumer choice and fantasies, and colonized by market forces.

What is more, in Australia and perhaps in Britain, its main current opposition is an almost defunct old traditional religious and secular middle-of-the-road ‘establishment’ left over from the nineteenth century.  Much of its influence is severely eroded and/or divided from within.  On the one hand its ‘conservative’ wing struggles hopelessly to maintain what it really believes in, despite relentless and steady defeat and marginalization, and on the other, its ‘liberal’ wing, that needs to still seem ‘relevant’ in the overwhelming rush of late modern ideas and practices, even if that means cutting itself off from its own roots.
   
On the other hand, the emergence of the kind of much more aggressive, politically self-confident and ascendant fundamentalist religious movements of all denominations now commonly found around much of the world, are an ominous symptom of just how far and rapidly Western utilitarian liberal ‘progressive’ views are becoming delegitimized.  The hard-line Orthodox Church views on homosexuality that are now being supported by the Russian state, may be a sign of things to come, especially if it spreads west through eastern and south-eastern Europe. And it goes without saying that the once reasonably comfortable relationship between Islam and more ‘relaxed’ western secular norms is disappearing faster than you can say Sharia Law.

The nontraditional, but sustainability-oriented vision being laid out here is not intrinsically hostile to homosexuals and wants to be inclusive of them and defend them from attack, as long as they stay out of the central business of reproductive society and avoid even the perception of proselytizing their sexuality as an alternative of equal standing.  But in the absence of that, how this predisposition plays out will be determined in some measure by how the political struggle unfolds and the alliances it gives rise to coalesce.

Mutually respectful noninterference between homosexuals and a dominant mainstream reproductive commons is a sine qua non for a sustainable and peaceful co-existence in the long term; a long term that will far outlive the consumer society that has sponsored the homosexual move on what is left of that now very battered commons.

In order to get some perspective on a sustainable future sexual politic, we need to get some historical perspective on how we got to the present situation…

In the unfolding of The Age of Reason, philosophical utilitarianism and the onset of industrial revolution, a set of ideas were propelled onto the world stage, of which only some came to fruition at the time.

The declarations of Independence in the US in 1776 and the declarations of the rights of man in France and then the US, in 1789, spelt out the sovereignty, rights and equality of the individual before the law and the institutions of governance, thus profoundly confronting not just the immediate long standing narrow privileges and arbitrary practices of the political power elite in the traditional world, but ultimately the pervasive grip of traditional communal authority and values, right down to the grass roots family structure.
 
But in its initial thrusts, it only effected this for certain men of European origin; not men of color, nor colonial peoples in general, nor slaves, nor those working under long terms of indenture or other restrictive terms of industrial labor, nor any women, and certainly not homosexuals, whose ‘nefarious’ sexuality long remained universally criminalized and morally condemned.

Thomas Jefferson, who was an architect of both declarations (He was the US ambassador in France in 1789) owned slaves and had a black slave mistress by whom he probably fathered one or more children, the first of whom was likely conceived while in revolutionary France.
 
The extraordinary irony and hypocrisy of this seemed to have escaped him.

The revolutions of the later eighteenth century were but a start to a detraditionalizing process that would take over two centuries to tease out and deliver, at least in part.

At every turn in this narrative, the traditionalists fought bitter and protracted rear-guard actions that are still playing out in many conflict theaters throughout the world (although it would seem that the current rise of religious/conservative fundamentalism throughout the world is now resulting in a counter-attack rather than rear guard action, but that is another story).
 
The first shots that would eventually lead to the campaign for homosexual ‘emancipation’ were fired by the early feminists Mary Wollstonecraft in England and Olympe de Gouges in France, during the period of the French Revolution.  Their efforts fell well short of their feminist target, but they did raise fundamental gender issues in the earliest phase of the ideological transformation of the modern world.

As time went on, feminist advocacy broadened political debate out of the larger political struggles of institutionalized public life; its governance, laws and industrial practices, into the gender realms of the private and the intimate, as to how men and women should think of themselves and each other.

Their radical sexual/political ideological trajectory in the ethnically European world moved from notice-of-intention in the 1790s, to acquiring more equitable legal marital/property status for women in the nineteenth century, then political suffrage in the early twentieth, to demanding a more equal career and domestic politics in the mid/late twentieth.  This struggle is still an ongoing, albeit battling to maintain a politically principled momentum for changes in gender behavior, against a radical narrowing of their agenda around sexuality and the overwhelming pleasure streaming that is the mark of a mature consumer society.

The unfolding story of the modern emergence of an altered status for women has provided an ideological template and campaigning style to fight the claims of traditionalists and their authorities in ways that would later inform the homosexual struggle for legitimacy, legal and social protection, and equality before the law in all respects, including the right to marry and adopt children.

What feminists, like the homosexuals who came after them had to tackle, was a set of institutionalized constructions of their nature and role that had been long entrenched by precedent and powerful ideological agreement.  To break that circle meant deflating its claims, disputing them in detail and exposing audiences used to a received wisdom, that the matter was now in question.

As with all traditionalist authority structures, the patriarchy assumed a divinely ordained and sanctioned ‘natural order’ that had always been taken for granted and was not seen as a ‘man’ made political construction; or at least that it was not recognized that ‘nature’ and a very particular narrative of political power had been conflated.

Under this ‘natural’ regime, its anointed male masters had the stewarding responsibility of ‘protecting and guiding’ a ‘vulnerable and infirm’ group caught in the immediate, hazardous and absorbing biological web of child birth and nurturance, a ‘delicate’ constitution and an emotionally unstable ‘irrationality’ which rendered their judgment small and unreliable in important matters requiring ‘objectively’, and thus pre-ordained them to be subservient dependents of men.

Feminists countered that the imagined disabilities of women that would justify their inferior status, marital bondage and lack of political participation, were not only a wild exaggeration and a product of blind male conceit, but insofar as they were true at all, they were a product of active repression and denial of educational, social and economic opportunity.  They were able to show that the rationale for their ‘biological disability’ and political/domestic dependency were merely propaganda tools of political dominance for the male beneficiaries of a conveniently comfortable status quo, for them.

This radical challenge to traditional ideas drove a wedge into the end grain of the patriarchal order that they sustained, and progressively levered it towards its heart, gradually splitting it asunder.  It filled the space created with opportunities for further penetration by other groups, such as the homosexual lobby, that in concert with war, economic and technological change, reconfigured the mind space of successor generations; shortening memory, altering consciousness and reconstructing reality.

Notwithstanding the above, at least initially, the path that homosexuals had to tread was more treacherous still than that of women, for at least they had some kind of legitimate function in society, albeit a limited one.  Thus misogyny, for all its miserable consequences, was never going to be a match for the disgust, revulsion, contempt and revilement that afflicted all homosexuals.

Homosexuals received the full force of a Biblically proportioned opprobrium for their ‘unnatural vices’.  Even discussing it was extremely difficult because sex generally, let alone homosexual sex, was hedged around by viscerally powerful taboos.
 
A writer and sexual practitioner like the Marquis de Sade, whose career spanned and paralleled the early feminists and the rise and fall of the radical Jacobins during the French Revolution, took considerable risks in exposing himself to the common view.  His open discussion of politically revolutionary libertarianism, untrammeled desire and the sexuality of punishment and pain, while briefly and partially entertained during the revolution’s headiest moments, was otherwise uniformly regarded somewhere between ‘obscene’ and criminally insane, and consigned to the realms of pornography, prostitution and the always lengthy shadows on the underside of respectable society.
 
Homosexuals were right at the bottom of the ideological queue, on a par with de Sade and his crew, if for no other reason that large chunks of traditional ideological thinking had to be undone before they could get a sniff at legitimacy.

Without the work of the women’s’ movement in contradicting long established gender assumptions, the homosexual community wouldn’t have had the kinds of leverages to challenge the ones applicable to them.  Feminists helped undermine established gender in ways that could later be ‘spilled’ over into collateral matters of sexuality, to the point that everything about it could be questioned and deregulated.

But that was not nearly enough by itself without the rise of another child of The Enlightenment; the post WW2 civil and human rights movement that gave all traditional outsiders a voice and a constituency from which they could gain political traction and legitimacy, on a mass scale.
 
This movement leveraged an already powerful ideological language and proceeded to energize political mass movements against international and local tyrannies.  As anti-colonial, anti-fascist/racist and civil rights struggles erupted in its wake, they spilled over into a much broader attack on patriarchy and sexism.  This then became a general-purpose fighting vehicle that would reconstruct social revulsion and moral condemnation of homosexuals into non legitimate and unjust ‘oppression’.

It is no coincidence that within just under a decade of the charter of the UN being adopted, the Wolfendon Report on homosexuality and prostitution in Britain came out.  It echoed the utilitarian values of The Enlightenment.  It took the view that private sexual acts between consenting adults and the private morality that they might represent, was outside the realm of public policy, because it did not in its view qualify as a public harm or ‘disease’, in any meaningful sense of the term.

This could not be a clearer statement of the emerging power of the utilitarian ideological order; the ‘privatization’ of moral thinking, the marginalization of the traditional moral commons, the narrowing of notions of ‘public harm’, and in an age of burgeoning psychiatric ‘syndromes’, ‘conditions’ and ‘pathologies’, homosexuality began to be removed from the medical lexicon. The space it left was now reserved for its opponents’ mind set to be added later, as its replacement; the ‘homophobe’.

Within ten years of its publication, homosexual acts between consenting adults in Britain were legalized.  But that was just the beginning.  What was required for acceptance and respectability was a further demolition of traditional views of not just gender status, but sexual conduct, made possible by the consumer and sexual revolutions that came in the following decade after the Wolfendon Report.

The emerging consumer economy required a dominant ideological regime of ‘disinhibited’ and deregulated behavior and values that would ‘free up’ consumer responses to the blandishments of an increasingly sophisticated and pervasive system of commercial mass motivational management.  It is important to note that this move was an analogue of the deregulatory push by transnational capital to remove traditional ‘barriers’ to trade, productivity growth and the intensification of economic activity across all markets.

There were three intimately inter-related prongs to this move.

The first one was to truncate the ideas of the enlightenment by splitting rights away from the regulatory disciplines of personal responsibility and social obligation that underpinned them; then delegitimize traditional moral judgment (judgmentality) and social enforcement (repression/ abuse) that might challenge the removal of this personal/social balancing mechanism; then enshrine rights as a stand-alone unconditional ideological artifact; and finally, substitute the whole structure of personal and social discipline and autonomy with overwhelmingly persuasive marketing drivers that would control consuming behavior and attitudes instead, and residualize ‘unnecessary’ character formation and sensibility into a state of  ‘benign’ neglect.
 
The second was to remold the enlightenment notion of the integrity and primacy of the individual in relation to the state and social authority, into a very vulnerable form of egoism, which put the self and what it wanted at the front and center of consciousness and social thought.  This effectively conflated notions of the citizen and the customer, with the latter colonizing the former. And the social commons was further residualized into a state of ‘benign’ neglect.

In this process, rights, needs, wants and fantasies became virtually indistinguishable.  It gradually stripped away social context, in favor of a consumer one, and facilitated a new version of psychological atomization that broadened out from the traditionally alienated capitalist relations of economic production, into the consuming social milieu.

And what had once been a matter of disciplined critical judgment that would bulwark the individual as a character and citizen, degenerated into libertarian sloganeering, sloppy excuse making and uncritically empathetic sentimentality.

The third was to bypass the rational/critical/consequential ‘superego’ in the cerebral cortex, by getting inside and manipulating the ‘id’ sexual/pleasure/power drives of the most primitive part of human consciousness at the base of the brain that we share with crocodiles.  And it brought in its train a very powerful sexistentialist (I am my sexuality) pseudo-philosophy or ‘principled’ volupturism, that would overwhelm social thought and the politics of intimacy (more of that later).

Together, these strategies provided an unprecedented level of privatized mass consciousness management unmatched in its totalitarian density and invisibility by any previous system of totalitarian control, which until then had depended on a command state and a regime of overt intimidation.

The really stunning result of this system was that ‘change’ appeared to be ‘spontaneous’, ‘commonsensical’, ‘benign’ and a seemingly ‘inevitable’ path towards a confluent ‘progress’ of business, egoistic self-interest, and unlimited and accelerating economic growth, raising the consumption of its pleasures and satisfactions into a quasi-religion, and co-opting laissez-faire libertarian social consciousness as an ‘Enlightenment’ gloss to consumer ‘freedom’.
 
Pre-capitalist systems of social management and consciousness didn’t stand a chance.  They collapsed with hardly a whimper, for they just didn’t understand or get a real grip on why or how the carpet kept being pulled out from under them.

By the middle 1960s, the transitioning of traditional morality and discipline into ‘repression’ and ‘abuse’ was well underway.  Personal restraint and delayed gratification became ‘anally retentive’ and stodgily ‘straight’.  ‘Decency’ and ‘obscenity’ became standing jokes.  If it felt good, then it was good. Anyone who questioned that was seen to have the problem of being ‘old fashioned’ and ‘out of touch’.  Sexual experimentation was considered ‘adventurous’ and ‘liberated’.  Porn shops became respectable places to walk into.

Had de Sade lived to see this emerging world of sexual and ideological consciousness, he would have felt right at home, and that his political philosophy had found its cradle.

The traditional language of moral discourse simply dissolved.  As we saw in the last chapter, the traditional inhibitors of casual sex were increasingly taken care of by anti-biotics, the pill and abortion-on-demand.  Nothing need spoil the fun of being ‘liberated’.

These were all important milestones in the casualization and sterilization of inter-gendered sex, so that it became just another pleasurable pastime, making it indistinguishable from any other sexually inconsequential union.  And naturally, as pleasure became the main ‘product’ of sexuality, fetishistic garnish, experimentation and boundary testing adventurism made so much more sense.

As the mortality of children plummeted, education extended and they became more aggressive consumers, and thus more protractedly expensive to bring up, affluent societies trended to small nuclear families.  Sexual reproduction became a much smaller function of family life.  And the development of demographic time bombs in poor third world countries gave further traction to the notion that reproductivity was some kind of threat to the future of the species.

Reproductive sterility lost its bad name.

Even better, the progressive normalization of extended libidinous boundaries took on industrial dimensions, as the entertainment, advertising and marketing industries absorbed, glamorized and sanitized these agendas into their attempts to get into the most powerful iconic leverages within the human mind.  Human sexuality ceased to be a ‘private’ matter as explicit sexual imagery in the public domain became ubiquitous.  Traditional notions of sexual taboo, fear, guilt and disgust at the human ‘dirty bits’, faded away.

The fact is, as that old smutty joke relates, sex is a beautiful park with a sewer running through the middle of it.  Aside from the obvious physiological delicacy of that infrastructure and how easily its defenses can be disrupted by say the risks of multiple partner sex or poor hygiene, there is the metaphoric conundrum that it raises, of the ‘nice’ and ‘nasty’ bits of sexuality.
 
The semi-domesticable sexual beast that lives in the medulla at the base of our brains are things of great beauty, but without somewhere secure to lock them up and a firm willingness to muzzle and put them there when they threaten to get aggressive and out of hand, they can do a lot of damage to their hosts and those around them.  The sexual revolution taught us to forget the nasty and difficult bits, and only remember its pleasures, to our sometimes very great detriment, both individually and socially.

Women aren’t just pleasure vessels.  Saddled with almost a hundred percent of the reproductive suite, it imposes itself on them in every way.  For them, everything about their reproductivity is brimming with routine and episodically challenging consequences, most of them disruptive, uncomfortable, sometimes painful and always potentially health threatening.
 
Unlike men, they have much more powerful and complex interconnects between their sexuality and their emotionality.  They can only be casual in their sexual relations for a while.  In the end it costs in terms of emotional patience and physiological risk, as they journey towards the ever-approaching specter of menopause.  On balance, for them, sexual casualization has never been as ‘liberating’ as it was cracked up to be.

The messages emanating from the sexual revolution, like any propaganda campaign, conflated ‘liberating’ ideas with underlying control agendas for manipulating consciousness and behavior not necessarily in the interests of the ‘beneficiaries’.

Spontaneity in the face of desire is a form of freedom, but it is also its opposite by way of loss of autonomous control and discipline, making it much easier for background market forces to hack into social and personal agenda, legitimize second- and third-rate behavior and construct fantasies that would in any society in real possession of itself be the subject of not just a real concern and fear, but mockery and derision.

Conflating the honest truths of The Enlightenment with a culture of convenience, the easy, immediate gratification, compulsive pleasure seeking and unrestrained egoism, corrupted the discourse between men and women into an interpersonal free fire zone.  It undermined the sexual politics of life giving, and destabilized social relations in ways very analogous to the contemporaneous economic aggression against the life of the planet.  It was a milieu that any opportunist could use to leverage previously extraneous and marginal agendas, with a spurious ideological authority they could never have otherwise enjoyed.

Thus it came about that the reproductively inconsequential relations that govern homosexual relationships were gradually bestowed an equivalent value of credibility, legitimacy and identity in the competitive jostle with their inherently fertile, but increasingly lost and bamboozled heterosexual neighbors.

Within a decade of the sexual revolution’s beginnings, the naming of homosexuals shifted to the much more attractive and user friendly ‘camp’ and then ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ nomenclatures, which became associated with ‘uninhibited’ fun times, and ‘interesting’, ‘theatrical’ and ‘creative’ lifestyles.
 
Popular soap TV series started to run gay and lesbian community ‘issues’ portraying this population as ‘just like us’, only perhaps heart warmingly funnier or quirkier, and needing the same acceptance and love as everyone else.  Their humanity was just like ours. Deniers of this now obvious ‘new fact’ became official ‘bigots’, who as a result of ‘stereotyping’, ‘discriminated’ against designated ‘victims/poor things’ (the oppressed) who had ‘rights’ that needed to be defended by legislation against ‘vilification’.
 
The language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which had emerged out of a terrible period of mass murder and totalitarian state tyranny, cascaded down the hierarchy of repressive severity into the warm and open arms of a consumer culture that loves self-indulgence, a good story and a well-crafted punch line.

Homosexual ‘differences’ seemed so absurdly unimportant when appropriately repackaged through the mass media, as we either forgot their criminal (sorry ‘criminalized’) past, or were now made to feel guilty for it, which was not difficult to do in the light of a whole academic industry of ex post facto historical revisionism, armed with appropriate ideological keywords, analysis and a very selective memory, dedicated to exposing the perfidies and injustices of the Old World Order, and not just as it pertained to homosexuals.
 
In any other context, these exercises in ideological colonization of a social culture would have been instantly recognized as a propaganda campaign on a scale we could easily identify if it were repackaged in the context of state rather than privately sponsored ‘public re-education’.

The processes of regime change and the ebb and flow of rehabilitation and purging within traditional totalitarianisms has been long well understood.  However, those that occur under the aegis of consumer capitalism are not.
 
The Brave New World of indulgence capitalism works off much more powerful pleasure motivators mediated by apparently apolitical and benign persuaders, and the symbols of freedom to ‘buy’ any heart’s desire, whim or idea.  There is no centralized apparatus or chain of command that might alert conventional critical understanding to just how enormously powerful it is.  Instead, there is a virtual organism that ‘backgrounds’ consciousness and behavior orchestration in ways that traditional command economies and social compacts could never possibly match.

The relationship of ‘progressive’ libertarianism with ‘progressive’ consumer capitalism has never had that direct quality where there was an obvious ideological chain-of-command coming down from say a Communist Party through its party apparatchiks to the masses.

Unlike its totalitarian predecessors, Consumer Indulgence Capitalism became so powerful and secure that it didn’t require ideological consonance from its intellectual apparatchiks.  The freedom to critically and aggressively confront ‘the system’ gave the lie to the consumer notion of ‘free’ choice for all products, services and ideas.  The market organism could indulge ‘radicalism’ because the intellectual artifacts in question overwhelmingly belonged to it, as it owned and controlled the system of cultural mediation.
 
Very much like its Soviet counterpart, the system gave these ideological officials sinecures in the legal, social welfare, media and education system to keep them busy administering and ideologically justifying the system of disinhibition, the myth of freedom and the impression of criticism within the totalitarian whole.  But the clincher was that these ‘Libertarchs’ were extremely efficient at getting rid of traditionalist pre-capitalist values that got in the way of ‘progress’, i.e., the axis of business power and market freedom.  The axis of democratic power and civil liberty that this group promoted became its social proxy.

If it didn’t do so much social and ecological damage, this system would be a thing of great beauty and elegance, as it assembled a world order in which anyone could become a customer or producer of anything within the absolutely minimalist boundaries set by the need to maintain uninterrupted flows of every fantasy and whim that could potentially be turned into a product, service or income producing idea.

Anything that did not serve that end or got in its way was interrupted, marginalized and/or discredited.  Consumer capitalism became a ‘benignly’ multi-national, multi-cultural and multi-sexual all-inclusive absorber of grist to its mighty mill.  But what was not apparent was the enormous price extracted for participation within its machinery, the extent of its totalitarian character and the falsifications of reality that its propaganda machinery necessarily embodied.

This has started to become more overt and obvious as consumer capitalism has reached the tolerable ecological limits of global expansion and the capacity of communities to withstand the chaos left behind by long term laissez-faire social libertarianism and consumer ‘choiceism’.

Moreover, the mantras of freedom and the language of libertarianism have started to wear thin as their own history and the ideological leverages they made available have so very often led to Orwellian reversals in meaning.

Regrettable and much nastier third world tyranny, disorder and violence all too often replaced perfidious first world imperialism.

The tyranny of ‘racist’ paternalism and population wide traditional ‘repression’ was replaced by an even worse tyranny of life without borders, as worlds ‘freed up’ from moral constraint dis-empowered actors to the point of excuse riddled incoherence, behavioral incompetence, mega-egoism, character under-development and existential/spiritual software impoverishment.
 
Society’s bottom feeders were no more vulnerable to this corrupting influence than the top ones. Welfare abuses paralleled those in board rooms.  The ultimate consumer ‘trip’, the drug culture, hit the affluent even harder than the poor, for the former have far more money to abuse themselves with.

Thus attempts to ‘help’ the unfortunate and infirm with a welfare state have had the unfortunate ‘side effect’ of all too often disabling its recipients and turning them and their families into uncomfortably comfortable inter-generational dependents and social parasites, with all the dysfunctional and unproductive values we have come to expect from a permanent underclass, notwithstanding that they have a level of opportunity, security and standard of living the average third world peasant would kill, or risk dying for in an overcrowded and leaky boat.

At the other end of the social system, the misbehavior and dysfunctional thinking that pervades our social system was most spectacularly exemplified in the recent GFC, when obscenely over-rewarded bankers allowed delusionalism, dishonesty and d’greed to all but destroy the global banking system.

Mass education combined with a human rights culture has delivered whole generations of undisciplined children, too many of whom can barely read or write after ten years of schooling, or whose more senior skills are so inferior that they can barely write a university tutorial essay and are being rapidly overtaken by people from non-English speaking cultures that still insist on and enforce standards and a committed work ethic.

And over a 50–60-year period, as consumer economies transformed themselves into despotisms of the 'free', homosexual minorities moved from being a criminal underclass to being able to vulture the carcass of the heterosexual commons in the name of ‘equality’ and their ‘human rights’, in ways reminiscent of the behavior of the court Eunuchs in the dying moments of the Confucian empire in China, when they started to steal from what was left of the Imperial treasury.

As the momentum of the consumer and sexual revolutions gathered pace, what was once considered ‘normal’ started to ‘spontaneously’ disintegrate.  The sacrifice of marital reproductive security and stability in the 1960s was simply unfortunate collateral damage in the shift to relationships built around consumer satisfaction, sexual ‘fulfillment’ and shared lifestyle values.
 
Straights could be funsters too if they adopted the naughty-but-nice, reproductively inconsequential, socially truncated and casual sexual values that had once been the near monopoly of the world of prostitutes (sorry, ‘sex workers’) and homosexuals (sorry, ‘Gays’ & ‘Lesbians’), now relentlessly pedaled by popular culture, and made respectable by ersatz notions of romantic ‘love’.

And once a party falls out of ‘love’, well it’s all over isn’t it?  ‘Drifted apart’ I think is the cliché-of-choice.  The reality that sex and romance is just nature’s bait to get people into a very tough and demanding long term reproductive working relationship was effectively obscured and replaced by a fantasy of perpetual eroticism and grand passion-on-demand.

Marriage, despite ritualistic early protestations to the contrary, was not for life and single and remelded families started to redefine what families were.  This institution to cement permanent reproductive relationships that would secure the upbringing of children, became socially discretionary, as notions of reproductive illegitimacy ‘disappeared’ and social conduct was increasingly ‘deregulated’.
 
People who once enforced the family legitimacy norms of their day by ‘taking’ children from what were then regarded as grossly irresponsible out-of-wedlock mothers, came to be retrospectively vilified as ‘child thieves’ instead of irresponsible mother removers.

Increasingly, a family could be anything at all, including gay and lesbian ‘families’.  And why not?  The barriers were coming down faster than people could pull them down.
 
‘Family’ came to include non-genetically related progeny, an increase in gender imbalanced parenting and the emergence of excluded/marginalized but genetically related third-party losers; grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Such ad hoc patched together arrangements are not A1 social infrastructure.  On top of all the ordinary problems that beset conventional family life are added weaker intra familial relationships, overhanging emotional baggage, divided and reduced loyalties and mentoring capacity, and more problematic and complicated relationships. Like so many inconvenient truths within consumer society, these negative shifts have been glossed over in the rebranding exercise that was ‘progress’.

As the old domestic world of adults crumbled; as its authority and coherence disintegrated, the world of children was imperceptibly colonized by the electronic child minders and they turned them into the capitalist equivalent of Mao’s little Red Guards: The Consumerbabelets.

From an industrial perspective, the most vulnerable and easily manipulated part of society, its children, were integrated into the system as key definers of the consuming culture.  Prematurely sexualized little Consumerbablet princes and princesses were glamorized and pandered to by markets, empowered with rights, lavished with appropriate hero models and decoupled from the authority and control of parents and elders, thus encouraging them (and increasingly younger babelets) to sexually experiment as freely as they liked.
 
So if they had gay or lesbian tendencies, how cool would that be?  Who is going to be a fuddy duddy about the prospective loss of either a whole generation grandchildren, or having to make do with ones who are third party surrogacy or sperm cribs, or even having to watch silently while one’s child grows up to rip off scarce adoption opportunities from reproductively malfunctioning heterosexual couples who are genuinely in the real business of natural reproduction?
 
And you blame yourself because you failed to stop it happening when you had the chance; well sort of.  For who was being a naughty boy or girl by having the outrageous temerity to suggest something grossly ‘inappropriate’, like you think it might be ‘wrong’ for one’s child to homosexually experiment, and ought to desist?  What a cheek!  What an unforgivably ‘judgmental’ and ‘repressive’ breach of human rights to be any sexuality you want!  Call in the welfare officers!

The more unstable and shifting family life became and the more consumption intensive its tastes, the better it was for business.  Homosexual ‘family’ couples have been especially good for business, for they have tended to take more indulgently glamorous discretionary consumption decisions that were not so available to the reproductively encumbered straights in suburbanland. In some ways, the gay and lesbian community started to become consumer icons, making sexual ambiguity fashionable and well, sexy.

‘Coming out’ became no longer quite so ‘courageous’.  Naturally, people who in the bad old days would not have considered exploring that side of themselves, now felt free to do so, even if it was just a bit of bi-on-the-side, thus swelling the constituency increasingly into the mainstream.
 
The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras become a leading event in the national and international calendar.  Good family ‘fun’, sexually explicit display for the kiddies, out there fashion statements, color and movement, and the look of mass appeal has brought sexual marketing, lifestyle and the consumer system into ever sharper shopper friendly focus.

Along with that, the legal system went into high gear with ‘anti-discrimination’ and ‘anti-vilification’ legislation which turned the situation of half a century before right on its head.
 
Now it was the ‘backward’ straights that were still in league with ‘reactionary dark forces’ who were in danger of being morally pilloried, ridiculed and punished if they are foolish enough to dare to ‘discriminate’ against homosexuals in any way, shape or form.
 
Homosexuality had metamorphosed from a nocturnal, furtive and subterranean phenomenon into not just respectability, not just a sexual iconography within the consumer culture, not just equality, but eventually a secular version of an untouchable sacred site subject to ‘blasphemy’, ‘heresy’ and political deviationist laws second only to the ones pertaining to ethnicity (‘race’).

Political opposition to the advancement of homosexual agenda became constructed as ‘homophobic’ ‘hatespeak’ that took on a remarkable similarity to the way the late period soviet regime tried to destroy its political opponents, as morally degenerate and emotionally and sexually unstable and ‘insecure’ characters suffering from a ‘phobic’ (pretentious use of ancient Greek to confer academic authority) ‘psychiatric’ (pseudo-scientific medicalization of a political condition) disorder.

Anyone who is foolish or brave enough to challenge homosexual agenda is tarred with the same brush, whether they actually have a compulsive fear of homosexuality or not.  And of course, no one questions whether such a condition, where it does exist, might be at least in part a psychological software routine, that is there as an ‘evolutionary’ defense against sterile sexual relationships.  But that would be a pseudo-scientific rip off of Darwinism, wouldn’t it?  Or would it?
 
We can, up to a point, be as open in our sexual as our food tastes.  A quick survey of porn sites would attest to this.  The ease with which a concerted campaign against ‘homophobia’ can at least partially disarm it, might re-enforce that perception.  But maybe a culture of indulgence/toleration only masks ‘built in’ adverse reaction for a while, as long as the living is easy and our biggest problem is having too much of everything.  Maybe it is always there, just waiting for a more favorable environment to give it back its persuasiveness.

When a society starts losing a lot of people to famine, pestilence, war etc., Darwin or no Darwin, maybe sterility gets back its bad odor and focuses the collective mind on the world of reproductive necessity and the basics for dealing with it.

As with all discussions of human behavior, cause and effect frequently become interchangeable or circular.

The internet has colonized everything we do, and as a substantial component of its content, the sexual revolution goes on in cyberspace.  Every possible sexual taste you have ever heard of, and then the ones you haven’t, are now available in excruciatingly intimate detail at the push of a key.  Plain homosexual sex is now so tame it’s almost suburban straight.

It is a measure of how far things have moved that elements of the now respectable ‘Gay’ and ‘Lesbian’ community want the suburban dream with a couple of kids in tow and a sedan plus SUV in the garage.  They want their sterile sexual cake and eat its reproductive fruits as well, even if it’s partially or wholly other peoples’ fruit.  And why not, when so much of what male, female and parenting roles were imagined to be has so profoundly ‘changed’?

Perhaps unpicked is the more appropriate word.  ‘Change’ seems such a neutral and values free word, as if it were just one of the little inevitabilities of ‘The Historical Process’, or ‘Progress’, rather than a deliberate design of a consuming society and the politics of indulgence of customers, who by definition, are always right, or within their rights, as long as they spend every possible dollar on its pleasures and subsume their lives to it.

The only difference between this kind of indulgence and the ‘indulgences’ (the sale by The late medieval Mother Church of heavenly salvation and reduced purgatory time for a ‘small’ fee) that helped trigger The Reformation, is that they are now aimed at the living rather than the dead. Now consumers are ‘saved’ from low self-esteem and ennui by goods and services satisfactions and pleasures for the here and now, not tomorrow and the hereafter.  But, whatever the service timeline might be, here or ‘heaven above’, it is the same old ideological crock that it was five hundred years ago.

Like their late medieval predecessors, consumers can buy product and services ‘salvation’ even as these hopeless ‘sinners’ consciously and unconsciously participate in tearing down the disciplined and other regarding social software wealth built into sociophile (as opposed to ‘egophile) behavior that in reality grounds them and gives meaning and coherence to their lives. The more the devotees consume, indulge their whims and egos and become creatures of consumer propaganda, the ‘poorer’ they get and the more pulverized their social infrastructure becomes, as everything caves in to the marketing free-for-all.

As Martin Luther said, at some risk of being toasted for his trouble, you cannot buy salvation. You must do the hard yards to live it.  If the system of the time colludes in pretending this is not the case, then the value of a virtuous life is debased and made a mockery of.  Virtue is the currency of a sociophilic infrastructure, and if you run it down for long enough, it’ll collapse.

In the end, all you have left to cling to is a blind faith that somehow, one day, history will make amends and restore what in reality is a large piece of our personal and collective net worth.

The sociopathic substitution racket of replacing social obligation and discipline by market propaganda control drivers leaves the victims hopelessly at the mercy of their ‘needs’, whims and the sexual fantasies that have been pedaled to them by the marketers.

Thus, having your cake and eating it is what the consumer society is all about.  If you can afford it, you can have it; any lifestyle you want.  And who is going to say there is anything wrong with that?  The Catholic Church?  You know, the one that gave us Divine ‘Indulgences’ that sold just that; that enabled people to buy heavenly forgiveness for wrongdoing; that still (as it always has) turns a blind eye to the sexual shenanigans of its wretched celibate priests and monks.  What the homosexual community is now demanding is just par for the course, albeit a corrupted one.

But what is so really ironically amusing is that marriage was once regarded as a form of disgusting petty-bourgeois respectability and the subject of contempt by ‘progressives’.  And now, perversely, when the institution is at such low ebb that it is almost bankrupt, it has become a respectable object of conformist desire for ‘straight’ emulation.  Weird.

Even though the institution is only shadow of what it once was, the straightest thing of all is still to get married.  One might suppose that even gays and lesbians get tired of ‘alternative’ lifestyles and want the ‘Full Monty family product’ with the same marital legal framework and fuss made of them, as if they were going to reproduce and genetically join the creation partners’ families into the tree of life, the same way as the other lot.  Lots (well some) of inter-gendered marriages are childless by choice, so who is to say that there are any right or wrong answers here, even if one uncharitably suggested that the homosexual ones seem a little bit over-leveraged?
 
What could be more charming than seeing the homosexual Misters and Ms’s having rice or confetti thrown over them in the traditional way?  Perhaps it would only be the parents who had actually married and reproduced, who would get the awful joke that this was a leering caricature of the real thing, like going to watch their progeny collect a degree that had been conferred by political pressure rather than a genuine intellectual outcome.

The reality is that the confetti and rice are symbols of fertility and reproduction and throwing it over the bride and groom is a symbol of the heartfelt wish of all in attendance that the marriage will be fruitful.  This represents the profoundest and deepest instinct of all life and the fact that homosexuals can con their way into this precinct is a measure of just how much we have become disconnected from the life force.

And why stop at just couples?  What’s wrong with polygamy or polyandry?  You know, mum and two dads, both of whom are bisexual, could be all the go.  The kids won’t mind, as a generation later they go off to explore their sexuality in exciting multiple, multi role relationships.

I particularly like cathartic marriages where, cheered on by the ‘congregation’, one or both the parties mercilessly beat the other while tied over the altar, until he or she is ‘forced’ to say ‘I do’, as a symbol of commitment not just to their partner(s), but the ‘lifestyle’ they are going to share with each other.  And the rest of the wedding party and guests, all in fancy leather underwear, throw increasingly generous wedding money gifts at the foot of the altar, the longer the show goes on.
 
The possibilities are endless.

Human sexuality can go absolutely anywhere.  If the boundaries aren’t there anymore, it frequently does.  For a society that doesn’t encourage boundaries because the economic system thrives on minimally restrained and maximally encouraged consumer behavior, nothing much is off the menu.

It is not that social prohibition prevents ‘out there’ sexual experimentation and habits, but it does drive it to the margins and provides some sort of prophylactic against mainstreaming.  Just ask the Marquis de Sade.  He wasn’t merely regarded as disreputable and sexually violence prone, but a madman.  He spent nearly half his life in mental asylums, both before and after the revolution.

Today, de Sade would be a leading light in a BDSM ‘community’ growing faster than the GNP of an Asian Tiger.  He would no longer have to harass and victimize servant girls when appropriately masochistic women are available at the touch of an ‘enter’ key or a visit to the local hellfire club.  And he and his friends would know that they could still test the boundaries a bit under the currently very liberal dispensation, because they would understand that even where attempts at enforcing such legal and social boundaries are still being tried, they are increasingly ineffectual.
 
De Sade didn’t mind a bit of the young stuff to torture.  He wouldn’t have much trouble in that department because a culture lacking a normal sense of inhibition or restraint of self-indulgence, that boasts a pervasive tendency to sexualize children, legitimizes willful ‘experimentation’, over-values pleasure and egoistic ‘fulfillment’, deconstructs responsible adult values, social authority and the infrastructure of personal accountability, and drowns moral prohibition and what little is left of socially effective disapproval.
 
What, you don’t like pedophilia?  You think that’s going too far?  Feeling a bit paranoid about the older guy who hangs around the street outside the school, or teachers being alone with opposite sex students for too long, even though you have no idea what they are watching or who they are dealing with on the internet, or what they are doing at those adolescent parties they go to, where you really aren’t that sure about the supervision?

And can you really trust the younger live-in boyfriend with your oldest girl by someone else? Can he resist the temptation to have a mother and daughter double act?  Yes?  No?  Are you sure? Will she run away with him if you make a fuss?  Wondering where the adult clout and your mentor standing went, that might protect and guide your children?
 
Where is it going?  What have we done?  Should it be any surprise that the homosexual community is making the moves?  What fabric of resistance is left that can’t be brushed aside with minimal effort and rhetorical slops?

When we speak of sexual orientation, we are not for the most part talking of ‘gender’, unless there has been an in-utero gender misassignment that makes individuals seem ‘different’ as they start to socialize and they begin to realize that they don’t feel like their own gender.
 
Sexuality on the other hand is likely a complex and probabilistically determined feedback loop interaction of varying degrees and nature of predisposition, and personal history, which is to some extent socially constructed by either direct or indirect contact with sexual influences during formative moments of life.

From what I can see of the research on same sex predisposition, very little has been definitively established, even to the extent of determining what is cause and what is effect, despite quite a lot of research effort.

Part of this is the elusive variability and multifactoriality of the nature of learning and susceptibility to it, the difficulty in separating heritable and acquired construction in brain architecture and software development, the arbitrary nature of significant life event timing and influence, and the untidily difficult to quantify environment in which all these factors and relationships take effect.
 
Another part of why research hasn’t been that forthcoming with definitive breakthroughs is possibly that this subject is saturated with ‘politics’.  This pushes ‘scientific’ enquiry into the standard hazards of social ‘science’, which front loads unstated assumptions and prejudices into a political agenda clothed as disinterested ‘objective’ research, replete with all the decorative tabulations, footnotes and bibliographies you would expect in a real science paper, using scientific method, that could be replicated either by modeling or conventional experiment.

Does doing research on the ‘caring’ attributes of homosexual couples, to compare them against those of heterosexuals, simply investigate the obvious probability that they are exactly the same, to establish their competitive ‘parenting’ credentials and claims to the right to adopt?

Isn’t that rather presuming that there are no other critical attributes to parenting that are tied up in the heterosexual act of creation and its deep connecting qualities with its progeny, and its capacity to model this very particular and temperamentally difficult relationship to the next generation?  The assumptions of this research discount/avoids the unique contribution each gender brings to the inter-generational reproductive effort and the mentoring politics of their collaborative conflict.  And it discounts what each gender party brings by way of blood relative family roots, and what they uniquely bring to the mentoring process and sense of identity at its profoundest level.

‘Caring attributes’ are the sort of things one might look for when wanting to hire a nanny or an infant teacher!

And if the sexual politics of laissez-faire family life wasn’t so smashed up and dysfunctional, newbie players like homosexuals would be hardly likely to get even a sniff at trying their luck in the reproductive game at all, whether they were good, bad or indifferent.

Another part of the reason that the science relating to sexuality is a bit vague is that it suffers from the effects of the whole subject becoming fantastically overblown.  If sex is really just powerful biological sugar to get us to reproduce, then all the rest is just color and movement that is as often as not, opportunistic and arbitrary.  My first pre-adolescent sexual experiences/experiments were same sex, but most of us did not end up in becoming its devotees. But perhaps if an older boy with a more mature sexual awareness, who I rather looked up to, had taken ‘an interest’ in me and showed me affection, I might have ended up being that way inclined, or not.
 
And I would suggest (and it has happened to me in relation to my career) that the difference between remaining a hetero and not could be as simple and almost impossible to spot, as an iconic gesture; a single moment that galvanizes sensibility into another direction.  It is one of the qualities of our intelligence that we are capable of being extremely flexible and opportunistic, particularly when the exigencies of necessity and the power of direct social management are removed for any length of time.

Homosexual lobbyists like to emphasize the biologically deterministic possibilities of their sexuality as it constructs a kind of ‘identity’ fait accompli.  But then they have to gloss this as some kind of ‘constructive evolutionary mechanism’.  This is patently a pseudo-scientific rip off of Darwinism to avoid the conclusion that homosexuality is a biological off message ‘mistake’ or psycho-pathology.

This appeal to behavioral or psycho-Darwinism is as scientifically bogus as traditional Social Darwinism or Marxist dialectical and historical materialism.  It is just another over-dressed ideological polemic to hide or minimize personal responsibility for one’s sexuality and fluff up its political credentials.

On the other hand, they don’t like to entertain the social influence on sexuality because that would open homosexual society to the charge of ‘corrupting’ people who might otherwise be ordinary heterosexuals.

The relationship between the homosexual lobby and ‘scientific’ rationalization of the status and capacity of its sexually oriented community is about as valid as that of the anthropogenic climate change skeptic/denialist lobby, because its main purpose isn’t scientific, but to reinforce political claims, deny or reduce personal choice and responsibility for sexuality and obfuscate the role of that community in grooming the next generation of ‘freshies’.

From a heterosexual reproductive ‘family’ point of view, homosexuals plainly are not equals and represent an off-message error.  If they were equals, they wouldn’t need to biologically crib from others to get a reproductive outcome.  And if partnership sterility, which they share with necrophiliacs and bestials weren’t enough of a hint on this, that is on top of the ordinary hetero error messaging of sexuality they share with Sado-Masochists, pedophiles, golden showerers, foot and enema fetishists, nappy wearers...

However, if we (not just the homosexual lobby) and powerful background social forces redefine the point of view from family as reproductive partnership to family as sexual ‘lifestyle’, then any lifestyle qualifies as well as any other.  And of course, they become equals in this shifting game and the message can be anything one wants.  All the homosexual lobby has to do then is mobilize the public relations, marketing, academic think tank and institutional mouthpieces available to them, leverage the weaknesses that social deconstruction offers, package a really plausible sounding ideological narrative littered with pseudo-scientific rationalization, and sad sob stories and they’re in like Flynn.

When Jeff Kennett, an ex-premier of the state of Victoria, in his capacity as chair of ‘Beyond Blue’ (a depression support and mental health lobby group) opined that he didn’t think marriage should be open to homosexuals, heavy hitters from the academic and mental health industry came at him from all directions, in an assault that purported to be an ‘intellectual’ attack based on professional ‘scientific’ expertise. 

What it really was, was an ideological attack based on propaganda messaging, leveraging academic credentials and jawboning institutionally placed mouthpieces.  Their tactics were indistinguishable from that of the free market ‘science’ politicizers working out of the Hartlands, Cato and George C Marshall Institutes/foundations, or our very own Australian Institute of Public Affairs.

They accused Kennett of compromising the mental health of homosexuals needing the services of 'Beyond Blue, as if they were vulnerable two year olds who would suffer from an emotional meltdown if any adult 'denied' them 'existentially necessary' sweeties without which they would likely fall face down on the floor and scream the house down. It was a terrible testament to the puerile thinking of reified postmodernist trained humanologians that Kennett was ganged up on using such intellectual trash, to the extent that he was forced to back down and 'change his attitude, in the same way the Red Guard forced senior party officials into humiliating confessions of error. The disgusting nature of this assault on reason escaped the commentators of the time.

We on the currently retreating side don’t have to make an unnecessarily large and paranoid deal about homosexuality in the way that old style traditionalists have done.  The reproductive urgency issues just aren’t as pressing as they used to be, at least for the moment.  And besides, homosexuality is an inevitable fact of life that should be treated with compassion and tolerance, for its acolytes are still our kith and kin, who deserve our love and support to live their lives in peace and without harassment or unconscionable treatment in their economic and social lives.

But that does not mean we have to like it, or encourage it, or indulge it as some kind of pretentious fantasy existential lifestyle ‘alternative’ on a par with the real business of life giving and raising.  It plainly isn’t.

Nor does it mean that we won’t expect them not to promote that sexuality beyond the reasonable requirements of self-defense and ensuring mutually respectful and circumspect co-existence with the dominant heterosexual majority.  It is a sexual off message mistake and it needs to be minimized.  The homosexual community needs to respect that as a trade off against the security and peace they get in return.

Conventional reproductivity is the authentic real deal.  The rest is just part of the color and movement of a temporary ideological superstructure for an economic system that is neither safe nor secure.  That so much of the popular constituency now at least passively ‘buys’ the lifestyle primacy line over the reproductive one is a testament to how thoroughly ‘off message’ we have all become.

We have failed to properly model sustainable values and behaviors that can be mentored forward into the next generation.  We have provided opportunists with both the temptation of political weakness, and then powerful ideological cover, to hack into our reproductive infrastructure where they have absolutely no business.

Sexual toleration does mean that we suspend critical judgment of off message errors. We have a responsibility to be honest with ourselves in acknowledging and managing them.  More, we are stewards and exemplars to our children and have an obligation to them to make honest representations to them as to the nature of their reproductive identity, empower them to be decent, robust and successful operators within that identity and try not to pass on to them our mistakes, including our sexual ones.

Much of the leverage for homosexual propaganda comes from the meshing into the larger sexistential corruption of moral discourse and its radical narrowing of notions of identity into sexual categories, such that we ‘are’ our sexuality.  This bogus conflation of sexuality and personhood has been raised to mystical quasi-religious heights, replete with sexologians, porno priestesses, retail temples, ideological 'analysis', sexological ‘research’, medicalized advice and endless streams of romantic propaganda, that as a whole will likely sink without much trace once the consumer stream starts to dry up.  And with that, a large lever for homosexual lobbyists will disappear.

The bottom line is that whether or not one has had a ‘good’ heterosexual relationship is really beside the point.  While sexual compatibility is a plus for any heterosexual relationship, if that is what it rests on, it isn’t much of a relationship.  I hesitate to use the word ‘’love’ because it has become such a hideous cliché it is almost beyond redemption as a concept, but some of its elements; equity, compromise, tolerance, respect, trust, loyalty, commitment and genuine liking, are what in the end really hold couples together in the long term. And that, in the absence of all the propaganda machinery of the consumer society, is going to be blindingly obvious to everyone. Much of the concern about sexuality is ‘cooked’ for the consumption of the masses, to keep them under control by manipulating its numerous iconic leverages.
 
Sexistentialism is a pseudo philosophy that fudges broad 'character' under the aegis of 'sex'/'gender'/'sexuality', ignores or downgrades the bulk of what makes us a complete human being and turns the rest to do with sex into an undifferentiated blanc-mange that enables its subscribers to obfuscate and 'blobulate' the whole subject into an untouchable sacred site. 

‘Character’ normally takes in the broad sweep and bulk of selfhood that accounts for maturity, self-discipline, reliability, generosity of spirit, forgivingness, patience and forbearance, courage and sacrifice, stability and security, depth of moral values and commitment to them, and capacity for leadership and /or legitimate willing obedience to it for the common good, as well as capacity for thoughtful, critical and autonomous judgement. These are by far the most important categories of our nature and capacity for good or evil, which is what ought to fundamentally define us.

Relatively minor sub-categories around our sexual reproductive function and biological characteristics as men or women, is but one, albeit an important one.  Gender is the sexual political construction of sex. Sexuality is a subset of gender and indicates our preferences, fantasies and sexual values, which can end up anywhere and seemingly overwhelmingly important if we let them, which of course we are strongly encouraged to do.

By conflating them we confuse the superficial with the profound and fudge the extent to which we can intervene to determine our responses, both personally and collectively.  We, all of us, not just homosexuals, shelter under an ideological umbrella of sexual determinism that gives whims and fantasies almost divine authority, grossly inflates them into a ‘pilgrimage’ to ‘find oneself’, and when consummated, a bogus version of ‘salvation’.

Sexistential conflation takes this subset of a subset of character and inflates it into the whole, so that a personal idiosyncrasy becomes personhood. ‘I am my sexual fantasies’ is pure bollocks.

Sexistentialism is a largely propaganda tool of the consumer/sexual ‘revolution’ which entrenches the thinking and discourse of voluptuaries, for whom the politics of desire means forcing sexual conduct and feeling to the absolute center of what it means to be human and a social agent, which is also grossly inflated bollocks.

Sexistentialism legitimizes the constant message sent out by the marketing system that self-indulgent behavior is good, that values sitting outside that paradigm are repressive and any attempt to resist its blandishments is at best ‘oppression’ and at worst ‘abusive’.

‘Sexistentialism’ is part of a push to ideologically overburden notions of sexuality and gender, to an extent that renders them into absurdity, as its protagonists go around the planet preaching the message that we are not only helpless before our desires, but that we have an obligation to explore them, even if this means reproductive sterility and/or disruption of the axis of natural life giving and parenting.  We have created an imperative to spontaneously experiment whenever the opportunity arises because opportunism is now considered socially benign.  This justifies dumping previous obligations and responsibilities as ‘needs’ and the opportunistic means to satisfy them arise.

Homosexual communities have been large beneficiaries and end users of ‘sexistential’ indulgence.  In the Australian film, ‘Priscilla Queen of the Desert’, the lead character deserts his wife and son to go on the road in a bus called ‘Priscilla’, to explore his transvestite and homosexual fantasies with a ‘tranny’ lip-sync-‘n-dance troupe playing in outback clubs and pubs. They and everyone on the bus lavishly support his quest as if it weren’t a gross denial of a fundamental long-term commitment to his family, and an egregious example of personal irresponsibility and betrayal.

And all those Australian rural outback characters who don’t like him or the things his troupe stand for are just monstrous redneck grotesques conjured out of a racist/sexist caricature that comes with the spinifex (spiky outback turf).  And the only portrayal of a heterosexual relationship is an equally ludicrous caricature involving a monstrous exhibitionistic Filipino vaginal ping pong shooter and a loser third world bride scrounger. It is all very amusingly and well crafted, but essentially it is little better than a blatant piece of propaganda on a similar level to the enormous box office success and acclaimed (Golden Lion prize at the Venice film festival 1940) Nazi German film ‘Jud Süss’.

It was about an ‘Aryan’ German leader and the society he ruled, that was almost destroyed and then colonized by the greedy and mendacious hook-nosed Jew Süss and his associates. ‘Priscilla’ is that crude and similarly engaging.

The lead character’s need to sexually indulge himself is justified as a kind of ‘quest’ for a Monty Pythonesque holy grail of ‘sexual identity’.  It doesn’t tolerate social trailing edges that do not wholeheartedly ‘understand’ the overwhelming importance of this and his sacred right to do whatever he likes to ‘find himself’.

‘Sexistentialism’ puts a much-exaggerated profundity into sexuality as if that is the be all and end all of human identity.  Homosexual lobbyists have not only keyed into this alternative-way-of-being claptrap, but then piled on extra baggage by trying to suggest that their sexuality is an ‘enlightened’, ‘creative’ and ‘liberated’ and then puffs the demographic into not only a substantial minority, but one that has more to offer the rest of us than the other way round.

‘Sexistential’ thinking of this nature makes no attempt to differentiate this claimed ‘community’ of sexual identity, because to do so would undermine its rationale, the advancement of its agenda, the cohesiveness of this constituency and the effective weight of its influence and size.
 
To blandly suggest that there is say a ten percent homosexual demographic in the general population is pure propaganda aimed at audiences who have no idea about how specific demography has to be to validly measure anything.  Ten percent might start to sound plausible if one included everyone who had ever had a same sex fantasy or sexual contact at least once in their lives.

Looking at the Wikipedia survey of studies, if one is observing a hard core of people who are only into same sex partnerships, we are probably only talking two to three percent.  Of that group, there is probably a small fraction of genuinely gender misaligned, who from very early in life have been psychologically stuck in the body of the wrong sex, or are hermaphroditic.
 
As to the rest, at some point in their sexual development they have been to some extent ‘turned’ by contact with homosexual peer group experimentation, and/or with an older person at a critical point of sexual imprinting that crystallized their lifelong sexual obsession and fantasies.

We can argue till the cows come home as to the balance between how much the individual gravitated to certain sexual tendencies or were more influenced by them than others similarly exposed.  But I think it is a fair bet that much of it is blind chance and circumstantial combinations.  My own Sado-masochism came out of an English boarding school environment where caning was a pervasive disciplinary measure, the peer group culture adopted it into its sexual play culture and I was bullied a lot, because I am a mild Asperger (high functioning autist) syndromer.  Very likely, none of this had anything to do with some imagined ‘pre-disposition’.
 
Like homosexuality, it is just another socially acquired fetishistic taste and sexual mistake, which resulted from the social milieu of British boarding schools in the 1950s.

Then there are the bisexuals who are either half turned sexual ambigués or are just indiscriminate voluptuaries and opportunists who don’t care where the hole is or whose it is, as long as they can get it off.  It is probably a bit of a stretch to call these ‘visitors’ part of the homosexual ‘community’.
                                                                                   
I am suggesting that this diverse smorgasbord of sexual behaviors and motivations is driven for the most part not by deep biological alternative drivers as just psychologically de-tracked non reproductive behavior inside a society that is quickly forgetting its primate roots and the real reasons it exists, which is to reproduce itself reliably, maintain this reproductive ‘industry’s’ standards and promote the integrity of its main product; its children.
 
And finally, I am suggesting that most people who say they are completely defined by their same sex sexuality are either an extremely narrow characters, or being very selective and exaggerating of bits of themselves, or deliberately propaganda puffing, or worse, are frightened of, dislike or feel contemptuous of the other sex.

You know, can’t tolerate the sight and smells of female genitalia; hate the mood swings and sometimes irrational behavior when they are having their disgusting periods; can’t abide the way they expect commitment just because they’ve had sex and make nesting noises when it’s more than once; can’t stand their sexual tardiness once they take one for granted; can’t handle their emotional neediness and their overweening desire to be told that they are beautiful, even when they are not, or require flowers and silly little gestures to make themselves feel appreciated, and get so upset if it isn’t forthcoming, immediately and in the measure they expect; and get bored silly by the way they fill the ear with domestic trivia, babies and children and nag remorselessly when they want something….

What? Heterophobia?  Never heard of it.  Misogyny?  Not really, but if they were more like men, they might be of more interest. Whatever the name, the psychological and moral sources of those attitudes are not flattering.

Spartan women used to shave their heads and dress like males to look more like boys, so that their soldier husbands would feel more comfortable about leaving their adolescent barrack-room orderly bum boys for long enough meet their obligations to father children.
 
Now that’s more like it.

At least female homosexuals have legitimate gripes to feed their disgust with men, many of whom still seem to still think that liberation is freebie on tap sex and a free ride on someone who on top of looking after the children and valet servicing the marriage and most of the chores, also has to bring in income as well.  The sexual revolution was never really about liberating women so much as bringing them into the production economy.  Plugging the gaps in the domestic economy left by this shift was never really on the collective male agenda, or anyone else’s.
 
In some ways it is a testament to women’s reproductive focus that they haven’t deserted their men folk in greater numbers. Within the massive divorce rate we now suffer (43% as of 2010 in Australia, but as high as 71% in Belgium), on the male side it is probably a matter of boredom, too many complaints and a wandering attention, but on the female side, it just seems more to be accumulated frustration at the sheer inequity of their relationships.  The lousiness of this deal makes taking up with other women who actually pull their weight and understand the emotional infrastructure of relationships seem attractive, even if the sex isn’t.

No society can work anywhere near its potential with its sexual politics running that dysfunctionally.  Men are at dire risk of losing their legitimacy as bona fides players in the reproductive stakes, and that has to be fixed by a lot of social resources being commandeered to properly train and discipline young males to get their act together.  No more laissez-faire libertarianism for them until they start delivering on the bottom line; and no more of it even then, to make sure they stay that way.

The whole business of gender politics is a real mess and the homosexual community has been able to work it a treat.  This is not their fault.  They haven’t caused the problems.  They are just a symptom of them.

We are not helpless before our sexuality.  Mine is a very powerful part of my sexual imagination, but I have abjured it for most of my adult life and have been in a very ‘vanilla’ relationship with my wife of nearly 30 years.  It hasn’t been great for our sex life, but we both understand that sex is an important, but nonetheless the least important part of human love and what makes a really good marriage.  And we have still managed to produce a lovely daughter together and magically manage to avoid divorce at least once a week.

And it goes without saying that it is a relationship of which I am intensely proud, with a woman for whom I don’t just have an enormous respect, but love very dearly, who I would never dream of letting down, even though she is not and never has been the fantasy woman of my dreams.  In marrying her, I made an adult choice to abjure a quite important piece of myself, as she also did, because I certainly wasn’t the man of hers.

My being an ‘Asperger syndromer’ (high functioning autism) has at times been very taxing on her.  It is a mistake in my character development and I have sincerely tried, with very moderate success, to modify my behavior.  She has had to wear it and I don’t make grand ideological excuses for myself as a substitute for doing my utmost to minimize its impact.  I don’t try to spin yarns about what a wonderful boon it is for creative thought and meditative struggle.  It is at times a pain in the butt for others to deal with someone who spends so much time in his own head, lacks empathy and is as incompetent at reading social subtext, as I am.

My sexuality is a mistake that I have learned to live with.  It is a potentially disruptive perversion that puts already challenging ordinary reproductive relationships more at hazard than they already are.  It brings with it violence and power asymmetries that can corrode and corrupt a relationship, even if it doesn’t do so immediately.

If there are children from such a relationship, there is always the risk that during the inevitable periods of tension and conflict that challenge every couple, the direct and indirect effect effects of that sexual predilection can ‘leak’, no matter how ‘walled off’ from the rest of the relationship it is, or discreetly screened from the children.  And no responsible adult would ever want to spread those kinds of sexual politics to their children.

I suggest that the great majority of homosexuals are in the same boat as me, and could, if they chose to stop subscribing to sexual identity puffery and make a reproductive choice in their intimate partnerships.  My sexuality is every bit as all encompassing in terms of my sexual imagination as theirs is.  It never leaves me alone and my sexual relationship with my wife has paid a cost for that, particularly as we have got older.  But that is the price one pays to live the life of a responsible and virtuous (yes virtuous; sounds unfamiliar and ‘silly’ doesn’t it) adult.

The question that anyone wanting to fix the willful damage consumerist ideology has done to social governance has to ask, is why would one countenance marginal homosexual behavior becoming mainstreamed, encouraged and open children to characters who think that it is alright to expose them to homosexuality in the context of an intimate and powerful parenting mentoring setting of legitimate family life that would inevitably draw into itself homosexual associates and peers.  And this is especially critical if one thinks that it is mostly direct or indirect exposure that likely spreads much of this realm of sexual practice and gender conflation in the first place! Why would any reasonable person ever take that kind of risk with their children, even if it were not a demonstrably high one

One doesn’t have to actually sexually interfere with a child to give it the wrong message about sex, sexuality and gender.  Don’t just tell them that homosexuality is ‘normal’ and ‘OK’.  Do a parent mentoring model of it over an entire reproductive cycle.  Introduce them to homosexual society while you are doing it so that they can have a ‘balanced’ view to ‘make up their own minds’.  What could be ‘fairer’ than that?

At the end of ‘Priscilla Queen of the Desert’, the main character’s early adolescent son is sent off on the road with his father by his ever-mega-indulgent ex-wife, to have ‘tranny’ adventures with his dad and no doubt ‘find his sexuality’, with perhaps a little help from the spunky young group bus driver who can ‘show him the ropes’; no pressure; above board; strictly social mentoring.
 
And I am sure if they did the sequel to ‘Priscilla’, this boy’s ‘sexual odyssey’ would be a very moving story and we would all ‘understand’ if he joined the gang.  And if he didn’t, well there you go.  Sexuality vigorously tested in the heterosexual affirmative.  No harm done and a heartwarming story of adolescent rite of passage, with no doubt a couple of close shaves where he was almost tempted...  Sweet.

This is why, if I were a homosexual, I would never take on that parental mentoring role for fear of inappropriately influencing them.  It isn’t ‘normal’ and isn’t a desirable family outcome.  It is a tragic loss on which we put the most compassionate and understanding face, because the victims are still our children and grandchildren.

That is the honest truth and to pretend that it is some kind of existential triumph of alternativism is just a pretentious and inflated fantasy which no responsible adult in full possession of their consequential moral faculties would ever dream of accepting.

It is the model of Aesop’s fable about the fox who lost his tail and tried to persuade his peers that not only was not having a tail very cool, but a fashion statement for the sillier and more gullible ones to follow, especially at events like tailless Mardi Gras’ and tailless film festivals and such like.  More, organized amputation is made out to be a desirable and inevitable fact of life about which the tail loser cannot possibly do without or even attempt to evade, because taillessness is the basis of their identity without which they would be lost.  More still, tail losing tendencies involve a substantial minority that has had tail losing fantasies at least once in a lifetime, which makes it mainstream, not offstream.  Taillessness is next to wagginess and if you call one a ‘stumpytail’ that’s not just ‘vilification’, but blasphemy against the tailless lifestyle of ‘the unencumbered’.....whose streamlining makes them at least the equals of their ‘tailburdened’ peers.

The bottom line is that families and children are not just a ‘lifestyle choice’.  And having a bunch of ideological cuckoos trying to muscle into their reproductive function using the weakness of present institutions and the ideological confusion that surrounds them, is a recipe for later disaster, once a not very forgiving social commons gets its resolve and dentures back.

There will come a day when people will see pictures of families with a couple of smiling Daddies or Mummies in them, and they will ask themselves, as much in puzzlement as horror, “What on earth were they thinking of?