The Same-Sex Marriage Bait-and-Switch

From Jonathan Last, at the Weekly Standard, "You Will Be Assimilated":

You may recall Brendan Eich. The cofounder and CEO of Mozilla was dismissed from his company in 2014 when it was discovered that, six years earlier, he had donated $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8 campaign. That ballot initiative, limiting marriage to one man and one woman, passed with a larger percentage of the vote in California than Barack Obama received nationally in 2012. No one who knew Eich accused him of treating his gay coworkers badly—by all accounts he was kind and generous to his colleagues. Nonetheless, having provided modest financial support to a lawful ballot initiative that passed with a majority vote was deemed horrible enough to deprive Eich of his livelihood. Which is one thing.

What is quite another is the manner in which Eich has been treated since. A year after Eich’s firing, for instance, Hampton Catlin, a Silicon Valley programmer who was one of the first to demand Eich’s resignation, took to Twitter to bait Eich:

Hampton ‏@hcatlin Apr 2

It had been a couple weeks since I’d gotten some sort of @BrendanEich related hate mail. How things going over there on your side, Brendan?

BrendanEich ‏@BrendanEich

@hcatlin You demanded I be “completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla” & got your wish. I’m still unemployed. How’re you?

Hampton ‏@hcatlin Apr 2

@BrendanEich married and able to live in the USA! .  .  . and working together on open source stuff! In like, a loving, happy gay married way!

It’s a small thing, to be sure. But telling. Because it shows that the same-sex marriage movement is interested in a great deal more than just the freedom to form marital unions. It is also interested, quite keenly, in punishing dissenters. But the ambitions of the movement go further than that, even. It’s about revisiting legal notions of freedom of speech and association, constitutional protections for religious freedom, and cultural norms concerning the family. And most Americans are only just realizing that these are the societal compacts that have been pried open for negotiation.

Same-sex marriage supporters see this cascade of changes as necessary for safeguarding progress against retrograde elements in society. People less deeply invested in same-sex marriage might see it as a bait-and-switch. And they would be correct. But this is hardly new. Bait-and-switch has been the modus operandi of the gay rights movement not, perhaps, from the start, but for a good long while.

It began at the most elementary factual level: How many Americans are gay? For decades, gay-rights activists pushed the line that 1 out of every 10 people is homosexual. This statistic belied all evidence but was necessary in order to imbue the cause with a sense of ubiquity and urgency. The public fell so hard for this propaganda that in 2012 Gallup did a poll asking people what percentage of the country they thought was gay. The responses were amazing. Women and young adults were the most gullible, saying, on average, that they thought 30 percent of the population was gay. The average American thought that 24 percent of the population—one quarter—was gay. Only 4 percent of respondents said they thought homosexuals made up less than 5 percent of the population.

But even 5 percent turns out to be an exaggeration. The best research to date on American sexual preference is a 2014 study from the Centers for Disease Control with a monster sample of 34,557 adults. It found that 96.6 percent of Americans identified as heterosexual, 1.6 percent identified as gay or lesbian, and 0.7 percent as bisexual. The percentage of gays and lesbians isn’t much higher than the percentage of folks who refused to answer the question (1.1 percent).

Then there’s the matter of the roots of homosexuality. Important to the narrative behind the same-sex marriage movement has been the insistence that sexual orientation is genetically determined and not a choice. But now that same-sex marriage is a reality, some activists are admitting that this view might not, strictly speaking, be true. For instance, in the avant-garde webzine n+1, Alexander Borinsky argued that sexuality is a characteristic to be actively constructed by the self. He was making a philosophical argument from the safety of gay marriage’s now-dominant position. Others were less philosophical and more practical. Here, for instance, is how the dancer and writer Brandon Ambrosino tackled the subject in the New Republic in January 2014:

[I]t’s time for the LGBT community to start moving beyond genetic predisposition as a tool for gaining mainstream acceptance of gay rights. .  .  .

For decades now, it’s been the most powerful argument in the LGBT arsenal: that we were “born this way.” .  .  .Still, as compelling as these arguments are, they may have outgrown their usefulness. With most Americans now in favor of gay marriage, it’s time for the argument to shift to one where genetics don’t matter. The genetic argument has boxed us into a corner.

It’s always a little unsettling when a movement that claims the mantle of truth, liberty, and equality starts openly admitting its arguments are mere “tools” to be wielded for their “usefulness.” But that’s where the movement is these days. Remember when proponents of same-sex marriage mocked people who suggested that creating a right to same-sex “marriage” might weaken the institution of marriage itself: How could my gay marriage possibly affect your straight marriage? Those arguments have outlived their usefulness, too. Here’s gay activist Jay Michaelson last year in the Daily Beast:

Moderates and liberals have argued that same-sex marriage is No Big Deal—it’s the Same Love, after all, and gays just want the same lives as everyone else. But further right and further left, things get a lot more interesting. What if gay marriage really will change the institution of marriage, shifting conceptions around monogamy and intimacy? . . .

[T]here is some truth to the conservative claim that gay marriage is changing, not just expanding, marriage. According to a 2013 study, about half of gay marriages surveyed (admittedly, the study was conducted in San Francisco) were not strictly monogamous.

This fact is well-known in the gay community—indeed, we assume it’s more like three-quarters. But it’s been fascinating to see how my straight friends react to it. Some feel they’ve been duped: They were fighting for marriage equality, not marriage redefinition. Others feel downright envious, as if gays are getting a better deal, one that wouldn’t work for straight couples. . . .

What would happen if gay non-monogamy—and I’ll include writer Dan Savage’s “monogamish” model, which involves extramarital sex once a year or so—actually starts to spread to straight people? Would open marriages, ’70s swinger parties, and perhaps even another era’s “arrangements” and “understandings” become more prevalent? Is non-monogamy one of the things same-sex marriage can teach straight ones, along with egalitarian chores and matching towel sets?

And what about those post-racial and post-gender millennials? What happens when a queer-identified, mostly-heterosexual woman with plenty of LGBT friends gets married? Do we really think that because she is “from Venus,” she will be interested in a heteronormative, sex-negative, patriarchal system of partnership? . . .

Radicals point out that gay liberation in the 1970s was, as the name implies, a liberation movement. It was about being free, questioning authority, rebellion. “2-4-6-8, smash the church and smash the state,” people shouted.

Slate’s Hanna Rosin agrees, suggesting that gay marriage won’t just change “normal” marriage, but will do so for the good:

The dirty little secret about gay marriage: Most gay couples are not monogamous. We have come to accept lately, partly thanks to Liza Mundy’s excellent recent cover story in the Atlantic and partly because we desperately need something to make the drooping institution of heterosexual marriage seem vibrant again, that gay marriage has something to teach us, that gay couples provide a model for marriages that are more egalitarian and less burdened by the old gender roles that are weighing marriage down these days.

Of course, not everyone in the same-sex marriage movement wants to help traditional marriage evolve into something better. Some want to burn it to the ground. Again in the New Republic, for instance, one member of a married lesbian couple wrote about her quest to use her own brother’s sperm to impregnate her wife. Why would she seek to do such a thing? Because “The queer parts of me relished the way it unsettled people. Uprooting convention, collapsing categories, reframing and reassigning blood relations was a subversive wet dream.” This is quite intentionally not, as Andrew Sullivan once promised, a “virtually normal” view of marriage.

Other changes are coming...

I'm sure they are.

No surprise to me, of course. I warned about many of these developments over the years since Prop. 8. The hate campaign against dissenters is the least surprising of all. It's been a constant in the news for years now. What's next is the continued marginalization of religion from the public square, and the further evisceration of robust public morality.

Keep reading, in any case.

Again, more specific expectations going forward depend on what happens at the Supreme Court in the coming days. Once we find out how the Court rules, we'll have a better sense of the coming arc of the homosexual agenda. That, and the virtually inevitable majority backlash against same-sex licentiousness and immorality. As I always say, social issues are not settled. Support for homosexual marriage in public opinion has probably peaked. Aggressive hate campaign by the left will drive public opinion back down. This is the worst outcome for the radical left's homosexual activists and SJWs, and they'll do anything to prevent the emergence of a traditional marriage movement rivaling the pro-life movement (and all its successes). This includes destroying lives with complete impunity and even using political violence against dissenters.

America's in for a long cultural war, with thanks to the left's ideological demons of hate and perversity.