FALWELL’S FOLLOWER

Maggie Gallagher sympathizes with Islam over contemporary American culture for the following reasons: “Islam remains a successful civilization because it fulfills the two minimum functions any culture must: It channels intense social energy of individuals into the two great sacrifices of self: war and babies. The children in Islamic societies suffer, and the women even more. But though individuals suffer, the family system itself works. The society perpetuates itself. It even finds new adherents in our country, primarily among those who have suffered most deeply from our current sexual disorder, African-Americans.” Thus the far right’s loathing of recreational, non-procreative sex (a major achievement of a free society in my book) leads her into a qualified defense of Muslim abuse of women and of children (girls are ignored, boys are routinely sodomized by adult males), and of a militarism which is truly primitive. Once again, the Fundamentalist American right seems as conflicted about this war as the postmodern left. How clarifying this conflict is becoming.