Dissecting Nihilism and Gay Marriage

Robert Stacy McCain has written on Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, "Nihilism and Gay Marriage," where the latter attacks oponents of gay marriage as bigots and homophobes. Ta-Nehisi is responding the Andrew Sullivan's long essay excoriating Rod Dreher's social conservatism, "Be Not Afraid, Rod." I saw Sullivan's piece earlier, but I've covered this ground so much in the last six months that I skipped over the piece as nothing really new. Not only that. I'm currently reading Sullivan's Virtually Normal, so as to get a sense of this man's thinking prior to his mental deterioration over the last few years (in the Bush era). Plus, the gay marriage debate's picking up steam by the day; so long's as Sullivan's own sexual proclivities don't kill him before society reaches some satisfactory equilibria, we'll certainly be hearing more from the barebacked narcissist.

In any case, McCain has a great takedown, where he notes in particular:

Sully and his friends insult conservatives by supposing us to be cowards. If we disagree on what is, at heart, a question of policy, we are accused of vicious hatefulness. Indeed, we are said to be suffering from a psychological disorder, homophobia. To this insult - and their arrogant supposition that we are too stupid to know when we are being insulted - I quote one of the great heroes of cinema.

"Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining."
- The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

The discourse Sully means to have with us:

Sully: You're stupid.
Us: Excuse me?
Sully: You're mentally ill, too.
Us: What the . . .?
Sully: Hatemonger!
Us: Boy, I'm about to whup you.
Sully: Fascist!

He does not argue in good faith. We have on our side ancient tradition and religious orthodoxy. He has on his side the prestige of the intellectual elite. Ergo, we are ignorant rabble, and he is so infinitely superior to us that he can insult us with impunity, and we dare not even take notice of the insult.

Actually, I don't think Sullivan has "intellectual prestige" anymore. Ross Douthat, maybe so? Sullivan's mostly getting pulled along for the ride at the Atlantic, where's he's now an embarrassment to that previously august publication.

What's interesting here is actually Ta-Nehisi Coates' elaboration of the "bigots" and "homophobes" meme. It's just a dumb attack, first of all, and pure intellectual cowardice on top of that. The slam on conservatives as "bigots" and "homophobes" simply attempts to shut down debate, not encourage dialog or understanding. What's really bad about Ta-Nehisi is how he reverts to the infantile comparison of gay marriage activists today to black Americans during Jim Crow, Americans who faced the enormity of this nation's system of racial apartheid. There's is very little support for the analogy that Ta-Nahisi attempts, for example:

... in the white male paranoid mind, the deepest ambition of all black men lay between the two legs of some white woman--any white woman ....

Bigotry, in all forms, requires a shocking arrogance, a belief that other communities deepest desires revolve around your destruction. It is the ultimate narcissism, a way of thinking that can only see others, through a paranoid fear of what one might lose. The fears are almost always irrational. To go back to Chuck D, perhaps he was too cold when he said, "Man, I don't want your sister." But there was deep truth in it, the idea was, "Fool, this ain't about you and your fucked-up sexual hangups." In much the same vein when I read people complaining that gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage, I think, "Fool, these gay motherfuckers ain't thinking about your marriage. This ain't about you and your hang-ups."

Bigotry is the heaping of one man's insecurity on to another. Sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamism, anti-immigrantism, really all come from the same place--cowardice. In his history of lynching, Phillip Dray notes that mob violence against black men wasn't simply about keeping black men in their place--it was about keeping white women in their place. Lynching peaked as white women went to work outside the home in greater numbers, developing their own financial power base. White men, afraid that they couldn't compete with their women, would cowardly resort to lynching. I am not saying that the anti-gay marriage crowd is a lynch mob. But in tying opposition to the sexual revolution what you see is, beyond a fear of gay marriage, a fear for marriage itself. A fear that their way of life can't compete in these new times. It's ridiculous, of course. But bigotry always is.

Well, yes, Ta-Nehisi, you are alleging traditional Americans to be a lynch mob, because you are conflating the kind of earlier racist bigotry with today's program of moral right that supports the normative conception of the traditional marriage union.

I wrote a post on all of this last November following the violent gay rights protests against Proposition 8, "Gay Marriage is Not a Civil Right." I link there to Eugene Rivers and Kenneth Johnson's, "Same-Sex Marriage: Hijacking the Civil Rights Legacy," where the authors note that:

There is no evidence in the history and literature of the civil rights movement, or in its genesis in the struggle against slavery, to support the claim that the "gay rights" movement is in the tradition of the African-American struggle for civil rights.

And:

It is precisely the indiscriminate promotion of various social groups' desires and preferences as "rights" that has drained the moral authority from the civil rights industry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates descends to the same level of invective found in Sullivan's "Christianist" slur. There's really no underlying argument in support of these claims. Such attacks as "bigots" or "Christianists" are either totally disconnected from historical facts and circumstances, or are just epithets of genuine nihilist hysteria seeking to bully those who hold majoritarian views on the appropriate role of tradition in society.

Of course, It's actually pretty disgusting how low this debate has devolved (to demential and demonism). But that's what you're going to get from folks like Andrew Sullivan and his allies, who are determined to force gay marriage on the rest of society, or die trying.

There's more of this debate at Independent Gay Forum, "Dreher's Conversation With No One." And also Memeorandum.