Sobrans - The Real News of the Month


Observations on the Hive

Beehive Compassion is a key Hive term. Most people take it to mean charity; but to the Hive it means state-mediated charity (wherefore conservatives are accused of “lacking compassion”). The Hive wants to relieve us of our traditional obligations to our own families, while increasing our political obligations to strangers. You can abort, divorce, and fornicate, so long as you pay your taxes. Some duties are absolute. (“The Moving Picture,” SOBRAN’S, July 1999, page 2)

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My pet metaphor of the Hive finds interesting support in a new book by Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (Basic Books). Jacoby laments that liberals have abandoned the leftist utopian vision of an ideal (i.e., socialist) society: “A Left constituted the liberal backbone; as the Left vaporized, the backbone went soft.” He implies that American liberalism derived its energy from socialist models abroad, especially the old Queen Bee: the Soviet Union. (“The Moving Picture,” SOBRAN’S, July 1999, page 2)

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I agree to some extent, but I’d put it differently. Yes, socialism has been an undeniable bust on its own terms. But the Hive hasn’t died out; it has rechanneled its energies and changed its priorities from socialist utopianism to sexual utopianism. While still supporting the piecemeal centralization of power at the expense of property, liberty, and constitutional law, it passionately favors “sexual freedom,” including abortion, sodomy, and the feminist agenda, while deriding “family values” as nostalgia for Ozzie and Harriet. (“The Moving Picture,” SOBRAN’S, July 1999, page 2)

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The real purpose of the Hive’s demand for “gay marriage,” absurd on its face, is to change marriage from the sacrament of procreative love to a mere contract — which is in keeping with the easy divorce and the contraceptive mentality modern society already accepts as normal. (“The Moving Picture,” SOBRAN’S, July 1999, page 2)

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BeehiveHollywood, a Hive stronghold, glamorizes fornication the way Marlboro ads used to glamorize smoking, showing none of the degrading effects uncontrolled sex produces in the real world. When was the last time a movie showed unwanted pregnancy, disease, and the many other complications (natural and foreseeable, as other generations have always realized) of the decline of chastity? The movies are the Potemkin village of the sexual revolution. (“The Moving Picture,” SOBRAN’S, July 1999, page 2)

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Heresy! The liberal Hive is buzzing furiously about the Kansas Board of Education, which has made the teaching of Darwinism optional in the state’s public schools. Evolution is the prime article of faith in the progressives’ materialist creed, the linchpin of secular humanism. Its “truth” isn’t confined to biology. (SOBRAN’S, September 1999, page 5)