Wanted: A Juvenal

July 13, 2000

Early July saw “World Pride 2000,” a huge homosexual rally in Rome timed to affront the Catholic Church during this Jubilee year marking the end of the second millennium of Christianity. The Pope frankly expressed his “bitterness” at the timing and his disapproval of the celebration of what Christianity and Judaism have always recognized as a loathsome sin.

But of course even moral disapproval thereof is now called homophobia — one of those synthetic agitprop words that buzz about us like hornets. It’s a word Shakespeare, Dickens, and Orwell managed to do without; in fact, you can’t even imagine them using it, or any other absurd ideological coinage of the sort.

If you disapprove of pedophilia, are you a pedophobe? If you recoil from necrophilia, are you a necrophobe? If you oppose bestiality, are you a zoophobe?

The “gays” (if they’re gay, why are they always complaining?) called on the Church to end its “hostility” to homosexuals. But to warn people against their sins for the sake of their immortal souls isn’t hostility; it’s charity. And sometimes charity has to be stern, as witness Christ and St. Paul.

Everyone has known spoiled children who, when scolded for anything, wail, “You don’t love me!” We see the same childish reflex in those homosexuals who insist that they are the victims of “hate” whenever others choose not to associate with them.

Reducing our freedom of association is, in fact, the “gay agenda.” The militants want new laws forcing others to accept them on their own terms. Such compulsory association is what is now meant by civil rights. Our political language is being perverted along with our morals. Orwell would understand.

Homosexual claims are always made in the name of “tolerance” and “pluralism.” Not that the gay movement itself is long on tolerance; but that’s okay. Under the new rules, gays promote tolerance by demanding it for themselves, not by extending it to others. By contrast, “pluralism” requires Catholicism and the Boy Scouts, for example, to give up their core convictions.

The underlying principle of the “pluralistic” society is that designated “reactionaries” must always yield — or be forced to yield — to designated “progressives.” Institutions must be overhauled, creeds revised, traditions abandoned, “offensive” words weeded out. And the centralized state is to lead the process, in the manner of the “revolutionary vanguard” of the old Soviet system.

Far from offering critical opposition to the New Order, the media are its enthusiastic agents, providing constant propaganda support. “Gays” receive only positive coverage; the participation of pedophiles in the gay movement is airbrushed out, lest it embarrass the holy cause of Sexual Freedom. Have you ever seen a report on a “gay pride march” that even mentioned, let alone highlighted, the marchers under the banner of the North American Man-Boy Love Association?

Of course not. Homosexual gatherings are always portrayed as happy, innocuous events, as wholesome as state fairs. Who could possibly object? Only a “homophobe.” After all, these oppressed people are victims of “discrimination” (that is, free choices the New Order frowns on). They’re only asking for the same rights everyone else has!

These rights include the right to marry (that is, to “marry” a member of your own sex), the right to compel others to accept you (and pay the medical bills your unsanitary “lifestyle” incurs), and of course the right to an apology from the Catholic Church — the same rights we all enjoy.

How do you satirize a movement like this, which is so far beyond anything Jonathan Swift could have imagined? Maybe the Roman satirist Juvenal could have done it; but his Second Satire, which describes the homosexuals of his own day in uproariously gross terms, would probably have been rejected by any respectable publisher in our time. As so often happens, we have to go to the classics to read things the New Order wouldn’t permit.

Most great satirists, from Aristophanes to Tom Wolfe, have been conservatives, or reactionaries, who managed to keep their heads amid contemporary fads. They generally seem “behind the times” because they stubbornly hold to permanent moral standards, even when they write obscenely.

But it’s often the biting reactionary who has the last word on his own time. Juvenal, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

Joseph Sobran

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