The Brendan Eich firing controversy at Mozilla has prompted a flurry of commentary. I would like to bring your attention to two excellent opinion pieces that place Eich’s firing in a larger context. The first article is a brilliant essay written by Mollie Hemingway (The Federalist) entitled “The Rise of the Same-Sex Marriage Dissidents.” The second is Daniel Greenfield’s piece, “The Left Isn’t Pro-Gay – It’s Pro-Power,” in Frontpage Magazine (online).
Hemingway understands something so few analysts grasp these days: the struggle over the definition of marriage is more deeply about how we are going to define reality and whether truth can exist in our society about anything having to do with “gender” and sex. First, Hemingway broadens the discussion about Eich’s firing to note that we should be defending him because his support for Prop 8 was correct – not just that Eich has the right to speak freely while being wrong. Second, she reminds us of one of the most impactful political essays of the 20th Century – Vaclev Havel’s “The Power of Powerlessness.” Havel argued in 1978 that “post-totalitarian” systems rest on a bed of ideological dishonesty and falsehood. The “powerless” can resist by defending the truth – the true description of reality – and by not acquiescing in the propagation of the regime’s falsehoods. Orwell recognized this too when he said: “During times of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” And, Solzhenitsyn suggested this in the title of his book, Live Not By Lies.
So, what is the Big Lie upon which the growing pan-sexual tyranny rests? It is the rejection of the reality that the male-female sexual act is the only one in which two individual humans are literally coordinated to a single bodily end. True marriage is “about the sexual union of men and women and the refusal to lie about what that union and that union alone produces: the propagation of humanity.” I would add that the sexual complementarity of male and female is physical, emotional, and psychological, and the male- female relationship cannot be duplicated by other forms of sexual relationships or behavior.
The sexual Big Lie demands that all recognition of sex differences be eradicated from public discourse. It is this foundational truth of male-female complementarity that modern feminism and all sexual revolutionary movements must reject. Unless the sexes are basically interchangeable, same-sex unions can never be considered comparable. As Hemingway notes, it was this fundamental truth that Eich refused to renounce and that refusal made Eich a dissident inHavel’s sense.
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Greenfielduses the Eich firing to point out that moderate and liberal Republicans who propose a “truce” on social issues while desiring to focus on fiscal issues ignore the fact that “there is no such thing as a truce on any issue with the left.” Unlike Greenfield, I think that, on the whole, the modern Left in the West is deeply committed to sexual nihilism and the “Culture of Death.” If for no other reason, the Sexual Revolution provides a direct line of attack on the authority of orthodox religious institutions in our incredibly sexualized society. That said,Greenfieldcorrectly observes that “[t]he idea that any part of the left’s agenda can be delinked and ignored is wishful thinking.”
He continues this analysis as follows:
The left doesn’t do truces. If the right cedes gay marriage, all it will have won is the right to be called homophobes for the next hundred years. And the culture war will move on to the next issue and the one after that. The purges will continue and more criminals guilty of thought crimes will be paraded for the virtual cameras. Yesterday’s commonplace idea will be tomorrow’s act of unspeakable bigotry that prevents you from being employed, opening a business or even staying out of prison.
You may be in the clear today, but you won’t be tomorrow.
Wars aren’t won by constantly retreating. They’re won by taking a stand for what you believe in.
Greenfieldis absolutely correct. There is no political benefit in allowing ourselves to be confined to intellectual and political ghettos created by the Left. Over time they will just be eliminated or reduced to irrelevance.
Surrender comes by accepting the Left’s premises, and this we cannot do. Hemingway reminds us that tyranny is overthrown by not accepting the web of falsehoods that the Left has advanced regarding sex. Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, and Pope John Paul II knew that the Truth is the greatest weapon we possess in fighting totalitarian thought control. And, the fundamental truths supporting natural marriage, including those related to sex differences, cannot be suppressed forever. Being on the wrong side of the natural law is never being on the right side of history.