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New Jersey and
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| August 19, 2004 |
Though
one of the original 13 states, New Jersey
hasn’t acquired venerability with
time. 
Just
the opposite. It’s the butt of more jokes than any
other state.
The latest New Jersey scandal
won’t help. Governor James McGreevey has resigned his office with
an eccentric statement combining boast with confession. His boast is that
he is a homosexual; his confession is that he has had an adulterous fling
with a man. In addition, a second man accuses him of “sexual
harassment.” Oh, brother.
Even McGreevey’s
formulation is flaky: “My truth is that I am a gay American.”
His truth? Gay American? Slow down, man!
What is “my truth”
supposed to mean? Do we all have our own truths these days?
And why “gay
American”? Is that a nationality now, as distinct from, say,
“gay Canadian”? Or does McGreevey just think it sounds a
little classier than “queer New Jerseyan”? Should we also
speak of “pedo-Americans,” “bestio-Americans,”
and “necro-Americans”?
Standing beside him during his
announcement was his wife (his second), a blonde knockout who looks like
Helen of Troy and then some. She must have been wondering how
she’d gotten into this weird scene.
McGreevey is trying to be a
sinner and a victim at the same time. But even the liberal media
aren’t buying this one. They see hypocrisy, betrayal, and corruption
in his double life.
Meanwhile, California’s
supreme court says San Francisco’s mayor exceeded his authority
by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. So the wedded bliss of
thousands has been interrupted by the first mass annulment in recorded
history. We do live in interesting times.
Times that make our heads swim,
in fact. The homosexual victimhood racket follows a self-contradictory
pattern with which we are by now all too familiar.
![[Breaker quote: A solution from National Public Radio]](2004breakers/040819.gif)
First
we are sternly told that a person’s “sexual
orientation” shouldn’t matter at all. We should treat
one’s homosexuality as a matter of indifference, none of our
business, and so on. To attach importance and especially negative value to
it is “bigotry” and “discrimination.”
Next we are told that to a
homosexual, that same “orientation” is the most important
thing in the world — a source of “pride” and even
“identity” itself.
Well, which is it?
Both, of course. Official victim
status means having it both ways. The state must enforce strict
neutrality toward its designated victims, forbidding us to act as if their
differences count; but it must also offer them special treatment, favor,
affirmative action, and government jobs.
This duality is confusing enough
when applied to women and ethnic groups, who are relatively easy to
define and identify; but how is it applied to “orientations,”
for which we have only the subject’s say-so that “I am
gay”? And what about bisexuals?
Once the state assumes the job
of fighting every conceivable form of “discrimination,” all
sorts of hard cases and gray areas emerge. A recent commentator on, yes,
National Public Radio has found a new problem: the pronoun. Her father got
a sex-change operation, and the family has been left bitterly divided over
whether to refer to the altered paterfamilias as “he” or
“she.” The woman suggested that we could avoid such
acrimony in the future by adopting a new gender-neutral pronoun for
everyone.
A sensible, practical compromise
if ever there was one. Thanks, NPR. You’re always there for us.
Before the issue reaches the U.S.
Supreme Court for resolution, we can all work for pronoun reform. If we
can simply agree on a new, universal, transsexual-friendly pronoun, we
won’t have to wait for the government to act. All we have to do is
start using it. Parents can pitch in by gently correcting their children
when they say “he” or “she.” Publishers can purge
new editions of Shakespeare and Hemingway of the outmoded pronouns as
ruthlessly as some of them now cleanse Huckleberry Finn of racial
epithets. And of course the government could assist by using the
omnipronoun in all official documents. (It goes without saying that
government contracts would be withheld from businesses that persisted
in using the old pronouns.)
No doubt it would be quite an
undertaking, even more laborious than the revolutionary attempts to teach
people to address each other as citoyen or tovarishch. After
all, it took centuries to rid everyday English (not to mention biblical
translations) of thee and thou. Conservatives may prefer a
less radical, more pluralistic approach: allowing everyone to have his (or
her) own pronoun preference.
Thus, on the McGreevey model, a
man (or a woman, or a transsexual) would be free to say, “My
pronoun is he.” But would it catch on in New Jersey?
Joseph Sobran
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Mailarticle © 2001 by Gavin Spomer
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