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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 30, 2003
Homophobe bashing
Larry Spencer probably spoke for as many Canadians as elected the last Liberal government in Ottawa when he blotted his copybook this week. Not of course the same people; just I would estimate about the same number of people. During an interview with the Vancouver Sun the Alliance Party's soon-to-be-former family issues critic called his own party's bluff in the debate around "gay marriage". He who was formerly a Baptist pastor gamely attacked the whole project of homosexual activism dating back to the 1960s earning himself the title of "dinosaur". You might not guess it from the media reports but Mr. Spencer is clear in thought and articulate in expression -- rather more so than most Members of Parliament. Certainly intelligent enough to know what he is up against and how comfortable it would be for him to keep his mouth shut. The speed with which he withdrew from his position once the flames shot up suggested a low pain threshhold however. To say that the "gay revolution" was "well-orchestrated" and set in motion over time is to pay a backhand compliment to its organizers. In my own experience the lobbying and propagandizing for what its exponents call "gay rights" has been very impressive. It had to be to succeed -- for when the activists claim that our society was formerly "homophobic" they are telling the truth. It took a tremendous amount of clever manoeuvring to cover the political distance of the last forty years -- to move a huge chunk of society from an unthinking homophobia to an equally unthinking homophilia. To turn a moral objection into moral approval. Needless to say the movement is disinclined to take a bow. Its success as the success of each other of our many overlapping social revolutions is predicated on "victimhood". Even now that the shoe is on the other foot and it is far more dangerous to speak against homosexuality than it once was to speak in favour and homophobe-bashing has become more socially acceptable than gay-bashing ever was the idea of its own victimhood is sustained by the victorious party. And while it may not be politically correct to admit that there ever was such a thing as gay activism or that the "evolution of society" was ever advanced by the conscious efforts of the evolutionists there can be no dispute about the results of the process. For even a self-declared "conservative" newspaper such as the National Post felt obliged to put a front-page commentary under its news article about Mr. Spencer suggesting that the suppression of him would be a test of Stephen Harper's Alliance Party leadership and crucial to its impending merger with the Progressive Conservatives. Mr. Harper then immediately did as instructed. But let me return to my first proposition that in his disapproval not merely of "gay marriage" but of homosexuality itself Mr. Spencer speaks for a substantial number of Canadians. There are wheels within wheels revolutions within revolutions as we advance down the road of our national apostasy. To take one example we have now established as a matter of practical politics that criminal law may be written in this country with the approval of "50 per cent plus one" of whoever is voting (more likely a court than a legislature). This overthrows what was previously believed in our bones about criminal law -- that an act becomes a crime only when an overwhelming majority believe it is a crime. Conversely that special public privileges -- such as those attaching to traditional marriage -- can only be conferred with overwhelming public support. This is why murder is a crime and theft and robbery and the more remunerative forms of fraud and why -- until less than two generations ago -- abortion was a serious crime in this country. It was so because an overwhelming majority of Canadians believed it to be so. And they believed that because through many generations most of them had been Christian. The law was made by the secular state but the secular state reflected the people and the people were not value-free. Likewise sodomy was a crime. The great majority of persons thought it so and the state made it so. That law was not frequently enforced chiefly because the practice was kept invisible. Yet one of the purposes of law in society is the conservative one of discouraging people from committing acts simply because they know them to be crimes -- the criminal law thus tending to uphold the kind of public consensus that makes a civilized order of society possible. When Pierre Trudeau shepherded (or wolved) our old sodomy laws out of existence he brilliantly declared that "the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation". This was also a widely accepted proposition long before the late prime minister uttered the words. It was why sodomy wasn't prosecuted except in the most flagrant instances. Homosexuals were "in the closet" and the laws against sodomy kept them there. Trudeau would have been very foolish to announce in 1969 that he was making sodomy legal because homosexuality is a good thing. Instead he went out of his way to make disapproving homophobic noises -- as cover to get his bill passed without a revolt by the "God squad" on his own backbenches. If he had said And some day, we will have gay marriage, it would have been the end of his career. The trick was done one step at a time and society "was evolved" towards successively more radical propositions until today it "goes without saying" among the self-described emancipated types that homosexual acts are no better nor worse than heterosexual acts -- in a society where chastity is right out of the question. But note -- a large minority and from some angles even a majority (depending on how the poll questions are asked) haven't gone along for the ride. And if the further evolution of public opinion on the abortion issue gives any indication most of them won't be going along. An overwhelming majority is needed to make an "evolutionary development" stick and if you don't have it the thing will eventually come loose again. All trends are reversible. The very de-Christianization of our society is a reversible trend. And while he may now look foolish and exposed Mr. Spencer may prove by his radical rejection of a radical reversal of our moral ideas to have been a man ahead of his time. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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