Mickey Kaus is worried that, inspired by the example of a buzz-cut conservative homo intellectual in Holland, I might jump into politics. Fear not, Mickster. But I have to say that the example of Pim Fortuyn is instructive. It has always seemed to me that the natural politics for homosexuals is conservative-libertarian. Homosexuals have historically never done well under repressive leftist or rightist regimes; they are far more likely to flourish under limited government, low taxes, and a robust foreign policy. What the current war has further done, I think, is reveal how those alleged allies (in leftist fantasies) of gay people in the developing world are nothing of the sort. The “oppressed” of the Islamic world, with whom the gay left identifies, would throw most actual homosexuals off tall buildings or bury them under rubble. Islamo-fascism is one of the most powerful and terrifying homophobic movements since Soviet and Cuban communism and Francoite or Nazi fascism. So how on earth have some gay leftists instinctively sided with the allegedly oppressed other? The first political principle for any gay movement worthy of the name is freedom. That’s what the left doesn’t understand; and that’s why their hold on the gay population is tenuous and eroding fast. Have you noticed how many freedom-loving intellectuals of our time are actually gay? Think Camille Paglia. Think Bjorn Lomborg of “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” Think Jonathan Rauch of “Kindly Inquisitors.” Or Bruce Bawer and Norah Vincent. Think Wally Olson of “Overlawyered.com.” Pim Fortuyn is just another sign of the natural political interests of homosexuals trumping the hijacking of their concerns and culture by the post-modern left. And if you want to examine the depth of the field, and see why it’s not just a few celebrity thinkers, click here.
LEN GARMENT’S SMARTS: You probably read Bill Keller’s attempt to understand Bush today. He writes about conservatives as if they were Martians he had to go talk to in order to find out how they might conceivably think of the president. One word: groan. (And the sole Bush reporter at the Times with real access and insight, Frank Bruni, is taken off the beat, and his book given condescending reviews by his own paper.) But then there’s this column by Len Garment. It takes guts for a Jew to say in public that the deeper problem of the Nixon-Graham tapes is the violation of privacy that they represent. Good for Garment. If we destroy, as we are doing, the ability of people to say things – outrageous, beautiful, bigoted, ugly – in private, without fearing they could easily be made public, we are essentially eroding a very basic pillar of liberal democracy. We’re all human – and much of it isn’t pretty. Liberalism’s genius is to allow a space for such unpretty things to be expressed without pinning them to our public identity. Liberalism at its core means that our political system does not demand that we live an identical life in public and private. It gives us a freedom to invent and reinvent ourselves without the whole world watching our every move. Skeptics will decry such privacy protection as a defense of hypocrisy. Every now and again, that’s true. But more generally, such privacy allows for the living of complex, rich, mature and sophisticated lives, for the necessary venting of feelings and emotions that are better vented than repressed. It allows for friendship, for the trust that discretion requires, for the construction of human character far richer than the two-dimensional cut-outs that totalitarian regimes – which abolish the public-private distinction – allow. That’s the kernel of Garment’s point. And he’s a good man for making it.
The Dish 