Gender Issues : Reviews

GENDER ISSUES : REVIEWS

The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds (2001) (Tammy Bruce)

When an "openly gay, pro-choice, gun-owning, pro-death penalty, liberal, voted-for-Reagan feminist" becomes a cause celebre in conservative circles it tends to grab your attention. As it turns out, grabbing attention appears to be something at which the former talk-radio host and former head of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Tammy Bruce excels. Though ostensibly an argument about the value of free speech generally, the book is more of a rousing polemic, in which Ms Bruce, who was fired from a radio gig for making fun of Bill Cosby's extra-marital escapades and denounced by NOW's national governing body for drawing attention to the fact that OJ Simpson was a wife-beater and a murderer, goes after her friends on the Left with a vengeance for the way in which they stifle dissent both within and without. In the process, she makes an irrefutable case that Political Correctness is an exercise in hypocrisy by the Left, but fails to convince us that free speech is an absolute good, particularly undermining her case by reference to her own activism. But even if the book proves unequal to the task Ms Bruce has set herself, it is nonetheless an alternately amusing and troubling look at the close-mindedness of the Left; no wonder conservatives like it.

As Ms Bruce surveys the sad recent history of Political Correctness (PC) in the workplace, academia and elsewhere, she treads ground with which many readers will be familiar. Much fresher and more engaging are her discussions of how PC speech codes, either explicit or implicit, are wielded within liberal activist groups. And the book is at its very best when she deals with her own personal experiences, as when she stood up to the rest of the gay community and defended Dr. Laura Schlessinger against charges of anti-homosexual bigotry. During that dust-up there's one extended passage where Ms Bruce is first invited to appear on a panel discussion about Dr. Laura at USC, as the token "conservative", then disinvited when the other panelists object to appearing with her, and finally she's called and asked to not even attend the discussion. These types of stories, and Ms Bruce has more than her share of them, give the book an immediacy that it might lack if written by a Bill Bennett or a John Leo.

Ms Bruce is intermittently perceptive about the causes and effects of Political Correctness. For instance, assessing her banishment from the USC panel, she writes that :

The Left implements speech and mind control because they know they cannot persuade on the issues; silencing the opposition
becomes their only recourse.

And elsewhere she says that because feminists and civil rights activists portray their constituencies as the "victimized", it is necessary to institutionalize their victimhood. To acknowledge that minorities and women have actually made progress in society might, after all, lead to a realization that these Left-wing activists are not serving a useful purpose. But Political Correctness campaigns perpetuate the cycle of "us vs. them" and continue the illusion of victimization. In arguments like these, Ms Bruce deftly exposes the cynicism of the Left.

Even more devastating is her assessment of the effects this kind of politics has on the very groups it is supposed to be helping :

    The sense of perpetual victimhood precludes even the concept that the members of a victimized minority could actually rise above
    their assigned position in society and meet that society on their own terms. To do that would mean taking personal responsibility
    for the condition of their own lives, instead today's 'progressives' have designed an argument that leads not to the encouragement
    of personal change and growth but to entitlement, group rights, and the eradication of the individual, all in the name of progress.

That's pretty stern stuff; but a much needed dose of reality.

As opposed to this kind of "thought policing", Ms Bruce says that she favors an almost completely "free" society :

    [A]n environment of personal freedom, at all levels, is the only hope the members of any minority have of being able to lead
    their lives without fear. If you are not a straight, white male, your lifestyle depends on a culture that does not impose arbitrary
    limits on thought or speech.

This is inartfully stated and it is here that she comes into conflict with conservatism, which is understandable enough, but eventually she even contradicts much of this herself, which suggests that perhaps she's just not fully thought through some of her ideas.

As a threshold matter, she should have recognized that there is a significant difference between the Left and the Right when it comes to the doctrine of Free Speech. First, let us accept the Left's critique of Western Civilization generally, that it is largely the product of European Christian men, and of the American constitutional system specifically, that it is the product of conservative wealthy white Christian men. It seems obvious then that our culture is premised on certain absolute truths, some revealed by God, others arrived at through human experience or scientific experiment. It is, therefore, natural that in such a system there will not be unlimited personal freedom. If nothing else, we have long required people's behavior to conform to Judeo-Christian morality. As to speech, the West has tended to allow almost all forms of political expression to go unchecked, so long as the speakers do not actually advocate the violent overthrow of the system, and even that is frequently allowed. But there's no inherent reason why other forms of "expression"--pornography, obscenity, and the like--should be protected; and they typically haven't been.

On the other hand, the Left rejects the very concept of absolute truths, believing instead that everything is relative, that all ideas deserve a kind of coequal status, and that we are each free to pick and choose from among them. For our purposes it is not necessary to rehearse the reasons why this is dangerous, it suffices to say that this belief would seem to require exactly the kind of unlimited freedom of which Ms Bruce speaks. It is hypocritical and intellectually dishonest of the Left to attack traditional morality on the basis that we can not know it to be true, but then to turn around and insist that racist, sexist, or homophobic speech should be suppressed. If we truly can not know the final cosmic validity of any idea, then all ideas must be given equal protection. If the Left is right in its advocacy of relativism, then both "2 + 2 = 4" and "2 + 3 = 5" are equally worthwhile statements and we have no means of deciding between them other than through the arbitrary exercise of brute political force, which violates their own philosophy.

All of this matters because minorities--women, Jews, blacks, etc.--have achieved all that they have in the West while working within a system that does in fact impose limits on people and where we, as a culture, make judgments about the truth or untruth of what people say; Ms Bruce appears to be quite wrong about the need for unlimited freedom. But it is important to note that the limits that have been imposed are absolute limits, that have been recognized for hundreds even thousands of years, that apply to all men and women, that have served Man, particularly Western man quite well, producing the freest, wealthiest, most scientifically advanced culture on Earth. What the Left is trying to do, as Ms Bruce ably demonstrates, is to impose purely arbitrary limits to suit their own purposes. The real problem apparently is not limitations as such, but the actual limitations that the Left advocates.

Later in the book, Ms Bruce makes it clear that even she supports some limitations, as she recounts two campaigns that she led as head of LA NOW. In the first instance, she successfully sought to get booksellers to tuck Brett Easton Ellis's by all accounts sadistic novel, American Psycho, away on upper shelves within the store, rather than in displays out front and on shelves where kids could reach the book. interview was eventually abandoned. Now, these are eminently worthwhile projects, but they are hard to square with the notion of unlimited free speech. In fact, they reflect Ms Bruce's own understanding that we should have some moral limits placed on public speech. In theory she may be with the hard Left, but in practice she does appear to have more than a little conservative in her.

This little bit of intellectual disconnect on the author's part is problematic, but it does not mar the rest of what is a really useful and enjoyable book. Ms Bruce's honesty is admirable and if she herself is still groping toward her final political destination and still wrestling with issues like these it merely adds an interesting tension to her story. For a conservative, it is necessary to disagree with much of what she has to say here, but much fun to watch her tear into the Left. Unfortunately, liberals, who stand to benefit from what she has to say, are unlikely to read the book, precisely because they do not readily tolerate dissent in the ranks. That's their loss.

GRADE : B

Buy The New Thought Police at Amazon.com

WEBSITES :
    -BOOK SITE : The New Thought Police (Prima Publishing)
    -ESSAY : Nothing Is Gained in Silencing Dr. Laura (Tammy Bruce, September 18, 2000, LA Times)
    -Tammy Bruce's Sandbox
    -STATEMENT : Statement by Board Members of the National Organization for Women
    -ESSAY : FIGHTING WORDS : CONTROVERSIAL REMARKS ABOUT THE SIMPSON TRIAL SPLIT THE RANKS OF NOW (ELIZABETH GLEICK, January 8, 1996, TIME)
    -ARTICLE : Crusin' for a Bruce'in : Lawsuit Ruffles KFI; Michael Jackson Returns (Tomm Looney, 1998/November/16, Downtown News)
    -ARTICLE : Rumbles in the Jungle : Tremors from Dr. Laura and Tammy Bruce (Tomm Looney, /1998/August/28, Downtown News)
    -ESSAY : Tammy Bruce : KFI Radio, Los Angeles 640 AM...most sexist talk radio? (Tommy Oliver, The Backlash! - July 1997)
    -ARCHIVES : "tammy bruce" (Find Articles)
    -REVIEW : of The New Thought Police (Steven Martinovich, Enter Stage Right)
    -REVIEW : of The New Thought Police (Lowell Ponte, Front Page)
    -REVIEW : of THE NEW THOUGHT POLICE: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds, by Tammy Bruce (Harvey A. Silverglate, Wilson Quarterly)

GENERAL :
    -National Organization for Women (NOW)
    -LETTER : Open Letter To Liberals Favoring Gun Confiscation (Liz Michael, LizMichael.com, www.lizmichael.com , Released August 3, 2001)
    -ARTICLE : Copies of California Patriot Stolen; Publication Staff Allegedly Harassed Break-In May Be Reaction to Article in February Issue (JOHN CISE, February 27, 2002, Daily Californian)

3/06/02

As Nature Made Him : The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (2000) (John Colapinto 1958-)

There's a moment in the film An Officer and a Gentleman which anyone who saw it in a theater can never forget. Richard Gere is kickboxing with Louis Gossett and just when he gets the upper hand, Gossett kicks him in the groin...hard. The reaction from the crowd at the showing I attended was uniform : every guy in the place crossed his legs and groaned, as if they'd been kicked themselves, while the women just oohed. To the females, it looked like it probably hurt, but wasn't life threatening or anything. For the men it was a moment of primordial dread. Similarly, there's an episode of Cheers where Sam wrecks Diane's rare copy of The Sun Also Rises, because he's reading it in the bathtub when he gets to the part explaining the unusual nature of Jake's injury, and he's so shocked he drops the book like a hot potato. Now, it may not be the case that our identity is inextricably bound up with our genitalia, and it may not even be true that the purely physical differences between men and women are what make them men and women. But it is certainly true that healthy, normal, functional genitalia are something that men have a particularly strong attachment to and an almost absurd fear of losing. So be warned, this book is like watching that scene in Officer and a Gentleman or reading that passage from The Sun Also Rises, over and over and over again.

In 1965, a young Canadian couple, Ron and Janet Reimer, gave birth to healthy twin boys. When the babies were eight months old, the Reimers took them in to the hospital for routine circumcisions. Through a series of mishaps, baby Bruce Reimer had his penis practically burned off by an electric cauterizing machine. Bruce was left badly damaged and the Reimers were naturally quite concerned about how this deformity would affect him. Watching television one night in 1967, they received new hope for the boy when they saw Dr. John Money, a Harvard Ph.D. working out of Johns Hopkins, describe the success he had been having with sex change operations, and the ease with which his patients were adjusting to their new genders. Janet Reimer believed that it would be easier for Bruce to grow up in the more gentle world of girldom, while Ron was certain that Bruce would have unimaginable difficulty facing life as a man without a penis, so they contacted Dr. Money and unwittingly set in motion a process that would not only have a horrific impact on their child and their family, but which would put baby Bruce at the very center of the culture wars of the 1970s and 80s.

Unfortunately for all concerned, Dr. Money had been awaiting just such a case. He was a behaviorist, whose theory it was that gender differences were almost entirely a function of culture, rather than of biology. He believed, and argued that his transgendered patients showed, that nature could be overridden and that with the help of a little surgical adjustment and the subsequent adoption of a different gender role, humans could truly change their sex. What he needed now was a set of identical twins, upon whom he could experiment, leaving one it's original sex, but altering the other, in the expectation that as one was raised a boy, the other raised a girl, it would be proven that the eventual behavioral differences between the two were entirely a function of the masculine or feminine environments they grew up in and the relative expectations that family and society imposed upon them. The Reimer twins were exactly the guinea pigs he needed to test out this theory. And so, Bruce was castrated, became Brenda and was raised as a girl.

However, Brenda was an extremely reluctant girl. She didn't like dresses or dolls or any of the other things that a girl should. She wanted to play with trucks, roughhouse with her brother, and shave like her father. Despite these obvious manifestations of continuing masculine tendencies, Dr. Money repeatedly counseled the Reimers that they had to be unwavering in their child rearing, that they had to continue to treat Brenda like a girl, because she now was one. All of this is painful enough to read about, but what is really infuriating is to read about the techniques that Money, a self described "missionary of sex", would use in his own annual sessions with the twins. Part of his program of getting them acclimatized to their sex roles included having them act out sexual play with each other, and things just get stranger from there. Sadly, the twins were too young to inform anyone of what he was doing and the Reimers, overawed by Money and unprepared for this kind of situation by their Mennonite upbringing in rural Canada, continued to go along with Money's suggestions (though they, thankfully, refused to copulate in front of the children, as he wished them to.)

Predictably, Brenda and the rest of the Reimers suffered from all kinds of emotional and behavioral problems, with Brenda's worst trouble coming in school, of course; Ron developing a drinking problem; and Janet battling depression. Finally, at the urging of a therapist whom Brenda began seeing at age 13, the Reimers were convinced to explain to their son just what was going on. They did so in March 1980 and David Reimer--he chose the new name as a way of recasting himself as the diminutive hero facing overwhelming odds--began life for the third time.

The process of rebuilding was predictably slow and pain-filled, with stops and starts along the way. But finally, after having lived through experiences that would have crushed the spirit of a lesser man, David, for the first time in his life, prayed to God :

    You know, I've had such a terrible life. I'm not going to complain to You, because You must have
    some idea of why You're putting me through this. But I could be a good husband if I was given the
    chance: I think I could be a good father, if I was given a chance.

I don't know if you could say his prayers were answered, if anyone ever deserved such a beneficence, it's David Reimer, but he did in fact find a woman, who already had three kids, and they married. That much of the story is sufficient for any one book, a truly amazing and uplifting tale of perseverance. But there's much more, chiefly, the rest of the horrifying story of John Money.

You see, unbeknownst to David, he had become something of an icon in the world of psychiatry, behaviorism, feminism and the like. For John Money had reported that baby Bruce's gender reassignment was a complete success and that Brenda had grown up as a happy, well-adjusted girl. The case was seized on, by people with their various political axes to grind, as proof that the psychological; traits and characteristics that we associate with gender are almost entirely social constructs, that they are not derived from biology. Money held up Brenda as the example, which many doctors unfortunately followed, of how easy and reasonable gender reassignment was and how beneficial it could be to babies born with genital abnormalities.

It was not until Milton Diamond, a sex researcher who had worked on projects as early as the 50s which Money was aware of and which showed that there was indeed a strong biological component to gender differences, finally found him in the late 90s that David realized how his case was being misused. Though justifiably jealous of his privacy, David allowed Diamond to write about the reality of the problems he had faced, which Diamond did, along with Keith Sigmundson in the March 1997 issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

John Colapinto first wrote about David in a prize winning story for Rolling Stone. The relationship they established, and what seems to have been David's truly incredible willingness to share his story, in order that others might learn from it, led to this book length treatment. If it told only the story of David and his courageous struggles, it would be more than worthwhile. But it is the secondary story, of Money and of the political and ideological motives that drove him, and that drove his soulmates in the sexual liberation and women's movements, to deny biology and to try to remake human beings in an image they found more pleasing, that has broader implications for society.

Though Colapinto presents the case against Money in an admirably restrained fashion, it is nonetheless devastating. What David was put through is a human tragedy which can not be minimized. What Money did is not only criminal, it is also a perfect example of what happens when people warp science to try to fit their political ends and what happens when scientists begin to view themselves as gods and the rest of us as little more than clay to be molded into any image they can dream up. From mutilation of babies to a young man punished as harshly as any of the Titans to a charismatic man blinded by hubris, this story nearly has the elements of an Ancient Greek drama. But in this instance, Money lives on, collecting Federal grants, and preaching his gospel of sex. It is we in the audience who are nearly driven mad. Were it not for the triumphs of the story's heroes, David Reimer and Milton Diamond, the whole thing might be unbearable.

GRADE : A+

Buy As Nature Made Him at Amazon.com

JOHN MONEY :
    -The New Zealand Edge : Heroes : John Money : Sensational Sexologist
    -ESSAY : The Science of Sex: (John Money, Heretical.com)
    -CHAT TRANSCRIPT : Prime Time Replay : Dr. John Money   on the Evolution of Sex and Gender (Omni Magazine)
    -Collection Abstracts: John Money Collection (The Kinsey Institute)
    -PROFIILE : DOCTOR OF SEXOLOGY (Constance Holden, Psychology Today ; May 88)
    -John Money, Ph.D. (Transhistory.org)
    -ESSAY : The Unravelling : In 1944, Janet Frame was in her final year at Dunedin Teachers' Training College and a boarder in the spartan house of her aunt, Isy Renwick. She was 19, shy, lonely and racked with self-doubt. Then her lively younger sister, Isabel, also a teachers' college student, arrived in Dunedin. (The Age, 11 September 2000)
    -ARCHIVES : "john money" (Find Articles)

MILTON DIAMOND :
    -Pacific Center for Sex and Society (Milton Diamond, Director)
    -ESSAY : Sex Reassignment at Birth: A Long Term Review and Clinical Implications (Milton Diamond, Ph.D. and H. Keith Sigmundson, M.D., Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, March, 1997)
    -ESSAY : Pediatric Ethics and the Surgical Assignment of Sex (Kenneth Kipnis, Ph.D. & Milton Diamond, Ph.D., Journal of Clinical Ethics)
    -ESSAY : Surgical Treatment of Infants with Ambiguous Genitalia: Deficiencies in the Standard of Care and Informed Consent (Hazel Glenn Beh and Milton Diamond)
    -ARTICLE : Doctor warns about altering sex of infants : `You can't tell sex by looking at genitals,' says Milton Diamond, `You have to look at the brain' (Helen Altonn, Honolulu Star-Bulletin)
    -ARTICLE : Milton Diamond Wins International Award for Sex Research
    -ESSAY : Diamond Gets Rough : The John/Joan Case: Another perspective by Milton Diamond, Ph.D (The Position)

GENERAL :
    -Feminism and Its Effects on Current Family and Social Issues
    -INFO-CIRCUMCISION
    -Intersex Society of North America
    -Gender Psychology
    -The Journal of Sex Research
    -North American Task Force on Intersexuality
    -Sex or Gender Assignment
    -Transhistory.org
    -Psychology Today Online
    -ESSAY : History of Circumcision
    -ESSAY : Intersexual: Not Yin? Or Yang? Fine (Deborah Mitchell, CBS HealthWatch)
    -ESSAY : Gender Self-Reassignment in an XY Adolescent Female Born With Ambiguous Genitalia (Pediatrics, July 01 2000, Philip A. Gruppuso)
    -ESSAY : a question of gender   (Discover, January 01 2000, Emily Nussbaum)
    -ESSAY : THE FIVE SEXES, REVISITED : The emerging recognition that people come in bewildering sexual varieties is testing medical values and social norms (The Sciences, July 01 2000, Anne Fausto-Sterling)
    -ESSAY : Transgendered' Student In Brockton Needs Help (Elizabeth Gilbert, Mass News)
    -ESSAY : The Sex That Dare Not Speak Its Name (Emily Nussbaum, Lingua Franca)
    -EXCERPT : Sex Roles : Biology v. Culture from Chapter 3 of Sex and Politics : Sex Differences v. Dogma ( Walter R. Dolen)
    -ESSAY : Multi-Dimensionality of Gender (Carl W. Bushong, Ph.D., LMFT, LMHC , Healthy Place)
    -ESSAY : THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION : MORTAL SINS : The sexual revolution was based on a lie. Judith Reisman has spent thirty years uncovering the truth. (National Review; May 19, 1997)
    -REVIEW : of "Circumcision" by David L. Gollaher : A physician argues the case against lopping it off. (Greg Villepique, Salon)
    -ESSAY : Let's Talk about Gender, Baby (Wendy Kaminer, American Prospect)
    -ESSAY : It's a girl - but she knows that already : How do babies learn about sex? Through a combination of nature and nurture (Sarah Brewer, 24/08/2001, Daily Telegraph)

8/14/01

Hearts of Men : American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) (Barbara Ehrenreich 1941-)

With the notable exception of the Anglo-American versions, most revolutions are premised on the belief that the existing structure of society has been artificially imposed and that by altering that structure you can remake human beings and human nature in a new image. So the French Revolution required that the monarchy and the aristocracy be discarded and expected that egalitarianism and brotherhood would follow, as day follows night; meanwhile, Marxist Revolutions suppose that once capitalism and capitalists are done away with, the happy workers of the world will share and share alike. Of course, history has shown these revolutionary ideals to be absolutely ludicrous, and such revolutions have come a cropper when the ugly but immutable facts of human nature have come roaring back with a vengeance. This creates a rather hilarious situation whereby revolutionaries are continually being surprised by manifestations of the very characteristics which mankind has understood itself to have since time immemorial--greed, lust,selfishness, etc.. Barbara Ehrenreich is not only a socialist, but a radical feminist, which means that besides that Marxist vision, she also believes that once the patriarchy is overthrown, men and women will be coequal and will live in blessed harmony. This book then is based on her supposedly controversial discovery that the disintegration of the nuclear family, which has generally been blamed on feminism, owes just as much to the political desires of men. Duh?

Just step back for a second and think about Women's Liberation has meant for men. Basically, women have had to take on more economic responsibilities and more child-rearing responsibilities, while at the same time their mortality rates have begun to more closely match men's and, thanks to abortion of female children and these worsening health rates, their absolute numbers have begun to decline back towards those of men, or even below. In exchange, men have gotten to slough off economic responsibility for women and children, have been able to get out of child rearing responsibilities, and have gotten much freer access to intercourse with females. How can Ehrenreich possibly be surprised that men were willing participants in this process ?

GRADE : D

Recommended books by Barbara Ehrenreich :
-Nickel and Dimed : On (Not) Getting by in America (2001) (read Orrin's review, Grade : C)

GENERAL :
-ESSAY : $8.25 an hour in a million-dollar world : It was hard for lower-end workers to make ends meet in the Bay Area of the dot-com boom. And it's still hard in the bust. (King Kaufman, Salon)
-ESSAY : Venus at the Ballot Box : Women may lean toward the "Mommy State," but their politics are more complex than pundits recognize (Cathy Young, Feb 2001, Reason)

Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994)(Christina Hoff Sommers)

In this wonderfully harsh polemic against modern feminism, Christina Hoff Sommers essentially sets out to hunt a mouse with an elephant gun. In a successful effort to demonstrate that radical feminists have betrayed the concerns of the vast majority of women, she does a great job of reporting horror stories from the gender wars, but she is not as good at analyzing the ideology that is causing them. When she's done, her target has certainly been destroyed, but there's not much meat left for us to chew on.

Her basic thesis is inarguable: the "First Wave" of feminism was based on the idea of equity, that women should have equal opportunity to succeed in society; but the "Second Wave" of feminism is based on a fight against men and an imaginary patriarchy bent on subjugating women. Unfortunately, the book consists almost exclusively of presenting anecdotes to demonstrate that the second half of this thesis is accurate. Whereas, if only Ms Hoff Sommers had taken the time to examine her own argument and place it in a broader historical and philosophical context, she could have both obviated the need for presenting quite so much detailed proof and taken advantage of the powerful preexisting critiques of this same tendency in other groups.

The transition she identifies is after all nothing more than the common historical movement by disadvantaged interest groups from a demand for equality of opportunity to a demand for equality of results. The Second Wave feminists, or gender feminists as she refers to them, are simply your garden variety radical egalitarians. Their ideas are nothing new--they are borrowed from Marxists and Black activists and others--all that has changed is who gets grouped in the victim class (in this case it's women rather than proletarians or people of color) and who gets grouped in the oppressor class (men instead of the bourgeoisie or whites). The solution offered by the gender feminists is nothing new either; when equality of opportunity fails to produce equal results, egalitarians only have one recourse and that is to place restrictions on those who are succeeding in the existing system.

Egalitarians are always coercive utopians. Having determined an ideal set of outcomes, but unable to produce them in the rough and tumble of the free market, they resort to limitations on certain individuals and classes, and to privileges for others, as the only means to reach their cherished goal. It is hardly surprising that some 100 years into the era of women's rights, the most radical fringe element of the women's movement should have reached this stage.

This book offers an important portrait of the real life effects that these feminists and their authoritarian tactics are having, particularly in American schools. The litany of abuses which these activists have perpetrated should serve as a wake up call to anyone who is concerned about the decline of the educational system and who believes in freedom of expression, in basic civil rights, in equality of opportunity and, ultimately, in the future of women specifically and society in general. One can only wish that the author had drawn back a little from her passionate but parochial concern with gender feminism and integrated her argument into the much wider ongoing struggle against coercive egalitarians everywhere.

GRADE: B-

For a fuller discussion of some of these ideas, see:

Hayek, Frederick
-The Road to Serfdom

Henry, William A. III (1950-1994)
-In Defense of Elitism (1994) (read Orrin's review, Grade: B-)

WEBSITES:
    -C.V.: Christina Hoff Sommers W. H. Brady Fellow (American Enterprise Institute)
    -ESSAY : Hillaryís Radical Feminism (Christina Hoff Sommers, The American Enterprise)
    -ESSAY: The war against Boys: This we think we know: American schools favor boys and grind down girls. The truth is the very opposite. By virtually every measure, girls are thriving in school; it is boys who are the second sex (Christina Hoff Sommers, the Atlantic)
    -ESSAY: Feminist fatale (Christina Hoff Sommers, New Criterion)
    -ESSAY: Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong: We need a "great relearning," to restore our moral environment (Christina Hoff Sommers, Hudson Institute)
    -ESSAY: Researching the "Rape Culture" of America: An Investigation of Feminist Claims about Rape (Christina Hoff Sommers, The Real Issue)
    -ESSAY: Are we living in a moral Stone Age? (CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS, Ph.D, Philosopheye)
    -ESSAY: Fleeing Science and Reason (Christina Hoff Sommers, AEI)
    -REVIEW : of The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem by Carolyn G. Heilbrun (Christina Hoff Sommers, New Criterion)
    -LECTURE: Where the Boys Are (Christina Hoff Sommers, A Bradley Lecture delivered at the American Enterprise Institute, November 9, 1998)
    -LECTURE: THE 'FRAGILE AMERICAN GIRL' MYTH (Christina Hoff Sommers, AEI)
    -EXCHANGE: Barbara Dafoe Whitehead vs. Christina Hoff Sommers (AEI)
    -INTERVIEW: Sommers on Deconstruction, Feminism (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Dartmouth Review)
    -INTERVIEW : The War Against Boys : A conversation with Christina Hoff Sommers (Michael Cromartie, Christianity Online)
    -ESSAY : Silencing Sommers : Clinton holdovers have their way with HHS (Stanley Kurtz, December 5, 2001, National Review)
    -PROFILE: A FEMINIST ON THE OUTS Christina Hoff Sommers' book irks her ideological kin by attacking their excesses and downplaying the downtrodden fate of women (BARBARA EHRENREICH, TIME)
    -EquityFeminism.Com: Christina Hoff Sommers
    -ARCHIVE: Christina Hoff Sommers (Upstream)
    -RESPONSE: American Association of University Women Memorandum To: Branch and State Presidents, Communication Chairs, and Initiative Chairs Re: Responding to Who Stole Feminism? by Christina Hoff Sommers
    -RESPONSE: The "Stolen Feminism" Hoax: Anti-Feminist Attack Based on Error-Filled Anecdotes (Laura Flanders, FAIR)
    -LETTER: Defense of Christina Hoff Sommers published in The Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.)
    -ESSAY: WARNING: Feminism is hazardous to your health (RUTH CONNIFF, The Progressive)
    -REVIEW: of WHO STOLE FEMINISM? How Women Have Betrayed Women. By Christina Hoff Sommers (Nina Auerbach, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Mary Lefkowitz, National Review)
    -REVIEW: of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Sanford Pinsker, Shadek Professor of Humanities at Franklin and Marshall College, Academic Questions)
    -REVIEW: of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, by Christina Hoff Sommers (Steve Roby)
    -REVIEW: of Who Stole Feminism? By Christina Hoff Sommers (John K. Wilson, Zmag)
    -REVIEW: of Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, by Christina Hoff Sommers Reactionary Feminism (Tama Starr, Reason)
    -REVIEW: of The War Against Boys How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. By Christina Hoff Sommers (Robert Coles, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, by Christina Hoff Sommers The Male Eunuch (Richard Lowry, National Review)
    -REVIEW: It's payback time: In "The War Against Boys," author Christina Hoff Sommers claims that unfair programs to empower girls have taken a toll on boys. (Cathy Young, Salon)
    -REVIEW: of The War Against Boys : How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men By Christina Hoff Sommers (Isabel Lyman, Enter Stage Right)
    -REVIEW : of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by Christina Hoff Sommers (Chester E. Finn, Jr., Commentary)

GENERAL:
    -The Dissident Feminist
    -REVIEW: of PROFESSING FEMINISM Cautionary Tales From Inside the Strange World of Women's Studies By Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY times)
    -ESSAY: Feminists Must Begin to Fulfill Their Noble, Animating Ideal (CAMILLE PAGLIA, Chronicle of Higher Education)
    -DOCUMENT: BEYOND TITLE IX: GENDER EQUITY ISSUES IN SCHOOLS
    -Feminists for Free Expression
    -EquityFeminism.Com: Critiques of Feminism page. This site is home to numerous essays debunking feminist authors and oft-repeated feminist myths as well as links and other resources for anyone interested in looking into the claims made by feminists or their opponents
    -Friesian School: non-peer-reviewed electronic journal and archive of philosophy (Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.)
    -Independent Women's Forum
    -Upstream: a home for the intellectually heterodox, the politically incorrect and other independent thinkers
    -DEBATE : Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Susan Moller Okin, Boston Review)
    -GREAT: Gender Relations in Educational Applications of Technology
    -Women's Freedom Network
    -Expect the Best from a Girl, That's What You'll Get (WOMEN'S COLLEGE COALITION)
    -INTERVIEW: Interview with the Vamp: Why Camille Paglia hates affirmative action, defends Rush Limbaugh, and respects Ayn Rand (Virginia I. Postrel, Reason)
    -INTERVIEW: The corruption of feminism An interview with Jean Curthoys (Philosopher Magazine)
    -ESSAY: Team players or tools of the patriarchy?: Women often are supplying the muscle behind the fathers' rights movement. (Cathy Young, Salon)
    -ESSAY: When Fairness Is Unjust: In an attempt to "level the playing field," education bureaucrats are lowering standards for minority students. The result? The bureaucrats are dooming minority students to lives of missed opportunities. (Thomas Sowell, Hoover Digest)
    -ESSAY: In the Land of Conservative Women: A diverse group of woman activists, including many young people and small-business owners, are bringing new energy to the Republican Party (Elinor Burkett, The Atlantic)
    -ESSAY: The return of the housewife : The full-time mother (FTM) is now a career aspiration for many working women (Lowri Turner, Times of London)

7/05/00

Virtually Normal : An Argument About Homosexuality (1995) (Andrew Sullivan)

    The homosexual experience may be deemed an illness, a disorder, a privilege, or a curse; it may be deemed worthy of a 'cure,' rectified,
    embraced, or endured. But it exists.
        -Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal

Even if you don't agree with another word in the book, I think we have to grant the validity of this premise : homosexuality exists and we, all of us, need to reckon with it. Andrew Sullivan, one of the most prolific and frequently interesting political writers of the day, here sets the stage for a reasoned discussion of how we, as a society, should handle the reality of homosexuality and of how we should treat homosexuals. Though I disagree with his final conclusions, I appreciate the way in which he treats differing viewpoints respectfully and I think he makes a serious moral argument for his own position. As we go forward and wrestle with the issues he raises, it seems likely that we will continue to utilize the framework that he has erected for analyzing them. This in itself makes the book eminently worthwhile.

Mr. (Dr.?) Sullivan begins his discussion of homosexuality by asking the question, What is a homosexual?, and rather than really answering, describes his own life experiences, essentially offering us an example of a homosexual. He does, however, present a portrait of homosexual as somewhat bifurcated beings :

    The homosexual learns to make distinctions between his sexual desire and his emotional longing--not because he is particularly prone to
    objectifications of the flesh, but because he needs to survive as a social and sexual being. The society separates these two entities, and for
    a long time the homosexual has no option but to keep them separate. He learns certain rules; and, as with a child learning grammar, they
    are hard, later on in life, to unlearn.

    It's possible, I think, that whatever society teaches or doesn't teach about homosexuality, this fact will always be the case. No homosexual
    child, surrounded overwhelmingly by heterosexuals, will feel at home in his sexual and emotional world, even in the most tolerant of
    cultures. And every homosexual child will learn the rituals of deceit, impersonation, and appearance. Anyone who believes political,
    social, or even cultural revolution will change this fundamentally is denying reality. This isolation will always hold. It is definitional of
    homosexual development.

This fundamental split between the private and the social realms provides the axes along which he locates what he defines as the four prevailing political stances towards homosexuality.

The first "politics of homosexuality" that he examines is prohibitionism :

    The most common view about homosexuality--both now and, to an even greater extent, in the past--has an appealing simplicity to it. It is
    that homosexuality is an aberration and that homosexual acts are an abomination. It is that homosexuality is an illness that requires a cure,
    and that homosexual acts--meaning sexual acts between two people of the same gender--are transgressions which require legal punishment
    and social deterrence. All human beings, in this view, are essentially heterosexual; and the attempt to undermine this fundamental identity
    is a crime against nature itself. In fact, to legitimize homosexuality is to strike at the core of the possibility of civilization--and to pervert
    the natural design of male and female as the essential complementary parts of the universe.

Perhaps the most depressing and fruitless feature of the current debate about homosexuality is to treat all versions of this argument as
the equivalent of bigotry. They are not.

Essentially, this is a politics which is derived from religious and/or moral objections to homosexual acts and so would totally prohibit them

Next is liberationism, which is prohibitionism's opposite :

    For the liberationists, homosexuality as a defining condition does not properly exist because it is a construct of human thought, not an
    inherent or natural state of being. It is a 'construction,' generated in human consciousness by the powerful to control and define the
    powerless. It reflects not the true state of human affairs, but a crude and arbitrary ordering imposed upon them. As with many
    prohibitionists, there are no homosexuals, merely same-sex acts; only unlike the prohibitionists, even these acts are dependent on their
    social context for their meaning.

    This at least is the liberationist analysis. The liberationist prescription is more inspiring. For all liberationists, the full end of human
    fruition is to be free of all social constructs, to be liberated from the condition of homosexuality into a fully chosen form of identity, which
    is a repository of individual acts of freedom.

Refusing even to acknowledge the existence of morality, the liberationists would not bar any behavior, anywhere, at any time.

The third politics of homosexuality is conservatism :

    It concedes, unlike much prohibitionism and liberationism, that some small minority of people are constitutively homosexual--they can't
    help it--and that they deserve a good deal of private respect. Most conservatives are well aware that many of the most distinguished
    members of society are homosexual; and that the existence of homosexuality seems to be a constant throughout all cultures and times.
    These conservatives are not alarmed to meet a homosexual at a dinner party (indeed, they may find it fashionable to invite one or two) and
    regard some level of comfort with homosexuals as a mark of civilized conduct. Moreover, these conservatives find it abhorrent that
    homosexuals--especially homosexuals they know--might be subject to harassment, violence, ill treatment, discrimination, or illness, for no
    fault of their own. So they're mainly at ease with the relaxation of social sanctions against homosexuality that has occurred in most
    Western countries since the 1960s, although it's not something they're particularly eager to discuss. The sensibility that privately tolerates
    homosexuality is often also the sensibility that finds it uncomfortable to talk about.

    Conservatives combine a private tolerance of homosexuals with public disapproval of homosexuality. While they do not want to see legal
    persecution of homosexuals, they see no problem with discouragement and disparagement of homosexual behavior in the abstract or, more
    commonly, a carefully sustained hush on the matter altogether. In this sense, they are also tolerant of private homosexuals and
    disapproving of public ones; they are the deftest enforcers of the code of discretion. They are liberals inasmuch as they respect and support
    a distinction between private and public life, and do not wish to see people's privacy invaded; but they are conservatives inasmuch as they
    wish to guide public life in a way that clearly demarcates homosexual behavior as shameful and to be avoided.

Conservatism basically allows homosexuality in private life but not in public life.

Finally, there's liberalism :

    Liberals believe, like conservatives, that homosexuality as a social phenomenon is a mixture of choice and compulsion. Some people, they
    concede, are involuntarily homosexual; others may be tempted that way, but could lead either heterosexual or homosexual existences. But
    unlike conservatives, whose first recourse is to ask how society's interests are affected by this phenomenon--and therefore what social
    effects would be incurred by a relaxation of the antihomosexual taboo--liberals ask first how the individual is affected. And by this, of
    course, they mean primarily the individual homosexual.

    They see the homosexual's rights infringed in several areas: the right to individual privacy, where the antisodomy laws exist; the right to
    free expression, where social oppression largely intimidates homosexuals from disclosing freely who they are; and, most significantly, the
    right to employment and housing, where antihomosexual prejudice results in homosexuals being fired or never hired because of their sexual
    orientation, or being refused housing. So the liberal's response is to create laws which protect this minority class from such infringements
    on its freedoms: abolition of antisodomy laws, enforcement of antidiscrimination statutes in employment and housing, discouragement of
    antihomosexual public expression in the form of hate crimes laws, and the like.

Liberalism not only accepts homosexuality in private life, but insists that it be accepted by the entire public, under penalty of law.

Mr. Sullivan is exceptionally even-handed in treating each of the four politics of homosexuality, pointing out what he thinks are weaknesses, but generally seeking to understand, rather than to question, the motivations of the respective adherents of each theory. It will come as no surprise to anyone who reads him regularly that Mr. Sullivan, though he seems to admire the ideological purity of the prohibitionists and liberationists, finds their absolutism to be ultimately untenable. Nor will they be shocked that he is, in many ways, toughest on liberalism, first for its belief that changing laws can change men's hearts, second for the very notion that it is appropriate for the state to try to dictate our opinions on such matters, and, finally, for its treatment of homosexuals as victims, which necessarily diminishes them and assumes that their liberation depends not on their own actions but on the good intentions of liberals. All that's really left at that point is conservatism, but Mr. Sullivan--who is, at least on issues that do not directly affect him, temperamentally conservative--finds its refusal to treat homosexuality as acceptable in public to be too restrictive. So, he offers a fifth option, a kind of synthesis of what he likes best about each of the existing politics.

In place of the four traditional theories, Mr. Sullivan offers his own politics of homosexuality :

    This politics begins with the view that for a small minority of people, from a young age, homosexuality is an essentially involuntary
    condition that can neither be denied nor permanently repressed. It is the function of both nature and nurture, but the forces of nurture are
    formed so early and are so complex that they amount to an involuntary condition. It is as if it were a function of nature. Moreover, so
    long as homosexual adults as citizens insist on the involuntary nature of their condition, it becomes politically impossible to deny or ignore
    the fact of homosexuality.

    This politics adheres to an understanding that there is a limit to what politics can achieve in such a fraught area as homosexuality, and it
    trains its focus not on the behavior of citizens in civil society but on the actions of the public and allegedly neutral state. While it eschews
    the use of law to legislate culture, it strongly believes that law can affect culture indirectly by its insistence on the equality of all citizens.
    Its goal in the area of homosexuality is simply to ensure that the liberal state live up to its promise for all its citizens. It would seek full
    public equality for those who, through no fault of their own, happen to be homosexual; and it would not deny homosexuals, as the other
    four politics do, their existence, integrity, dignity, or distinctness. It would attempt neither to patronize nor to exclude.

    This politics affirms a simple and limited principle: that all public (as opposed to private) discrimination against homosexuals be ended
    and that every right and responsibility that heterosexuals enjoy as public citizens be extended to those who grow up and find themselves
    emotionally different. And that is all.

This politics would obviously have a number of important implications for public policy but :

Its most powerful and important elements are equal access to the military and marriage.

He treats the issue of homosexuals serving openly in the military briefly, asserting that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy prevailed :

...because of the dominant, visceral, and powerful emotions upon which the politics of prohibitionism stands...

but that the dialogue it opened up, which required society to acknowledge that homosexuals had in the past rendered, and continue to render, exemplary service to the nation, must eventually transform how we deal with homosexuality. But Mr. Sullivan's more heartfelt purpose is to clear the way for homosexual marriage :

The critical measure for this politics of public equality-private freedom is something deeper and more emotional, perhaps, than the military.

It is equal access to civil marriage.

    As with the military, this is a question of formal public discrimination, since only the state can grant and recognize marriage. If the
    military ban deals with the heart of what it means to be a citizen, marriage does even more so, since, in peace and war, it affects everyone.
    Marriage is not simply a private contract; it is a social and public recognition of a private commitment. As such, it is the highest public
    recognition of personal integrity. Denying it to homosexuals is the most public affront possible to their public equality.

Thus, the crux of the matter, for Mr. Sullivan, is that each of us is entitled to discriminate against homosexuals in private, but the state is never allowed to make any distinctions between citizens on the basis of their sexual preferences : "public equality-private freedom."

It should be obvious by now that Mr. Sullivan's target audience is really just one of the four groups ; conservatives. After all, prohibitionists will not accept the idea of even private homosexual acts; liberationists will not be satisfied with any limitations whatsoever; and liberals will do whatever they are told to do by homosexuals. It is conservatives whom Mr. Sullivan hopes to convince with his argument. He is trying to demonstrate that it is their own best interest to allow these changes to occur.

Now, as it happens, I am a conservative; and while I would no more claim to speak for conservatives in general than Mr. Sullivan claims to speak for homosexuals in general, allow me to state some of my objections to his theses. First, I would take exception to a statement that he makes about conservatism :

Instead of mounting a steady and distasteful retreat, conservatives might concede that society is changing and that it is the quintessential
conservative posture to co-opt that change rather than to go into lonely opposition against it.

This seems to me to rather badly misstate the central purpose of conservatism and of its enduring value as a political philosophy. Contrast his assertion with this definition from Russell Kirk's epochal text, The Conservative Mind :

    [T]he essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity. Conservatives respect the wisdom of their
    ancestors...; they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate
    constitution : it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine. 'What is conservatism?' Abraham Lincoln inquired once. 'Is it not
    adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?'

Conservatism is never more sublime than when it stands in lonely opposition to the prevailing winds of change, particularly wholesale change, which is always for the worst. Likewise, it is never more valuable than when it serves as a brake on such helter skelter alteration of society. Conservatism is frequently in retreat, but when it manages to do so slowly, fighting for every hill and valley, it can often reduce, though sadly not avert altogether, the damage that is done by those who are so foolish as to try to remake man and society.

Second, it is important to note that the two institutions that Mr. Sullivan is most determined to tamper with, the military and marriage, lie at the very core of, respectively, government and civil society. For a conservative, it may well be that the only appropriate function of government he will concede is to provide physical security, through law enforcement and national defense. The suggestion that this one essential role of government be thrown open to experimentation must be especially alarming.

And what is the precise objection to homosexuals openly serving in the military? It is not mere homophobia, but it is at least partly sexual. The conservative opposition to homosexuals in combat is, at least in part, identical to the opposition to women so serving; it is that such service necessarily introduces an element of sexual tension into the most difficult and demanding of human tasks, the waging of war. It is that anything that might further confuse the already treacherous situation in which combat occurs should be avoided at all cost. Perhaps nothing is more important in battle than the cohesion of the fighting unit, and nothing should be allowed to undermine it. What could be more detrimental to the camaraderie and mutual dependence of a group of men than love or jealous hatred between certain members. It was after all one of the great homosexual novelists, E. M. Forster, who said, to the enduring applause of the Left :

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

How much stronger might the seduction of such a sentiment be if the choice were between a lover and a mere handful of countrymen?

Likewise, Mr. Sullivan himself repeatedly notes that homosexuals are quite simply different than heterosexuals. And his differentiation of the neutral public square from the sphere of private prejudices is based at least in part on the recognition that such prejudices do exist and will endure. Imagine the disaster that awaits when men who may well loathe the sexual behavior of their fellow soldiers are sent into battle and asked to fight shoulder to shoulder. It is somewhat bizarre for Mr. Sullivan to recognize that homosexuals will face prejudice in the private sphere but then to imagine that such prejudices will not assert themselves in such a highly emotional atmosphere as military service will often present. In defending his belief that the state can not force citizens to accept homosexuality and homosexuals in their private lives, he says that we have "in a liberal society...the right not to have the state impose a certain morality." Though the military is obviously a public institution, inserting homosexuals into the barracks and battle will represent the imposition of a certain morality on a massive and potentially disastrous scale. No conservative will blithely contemplate this eventuality.

As to marriage, Mr. Sullivan takes the curious stance that the institution of the family has already been so badly degraded that conservatives should not seek to uphold its ideal form :

    Some might argue that marriage is by definition between a man and a woman; and it is difficult to argue with a definition. But if marriage
    is articulated beyond this circular fiat, then the argument for its exclusivity to one man and one woman disappears. The center of the public
    contract is an emotional, financial, and psychological bond between two people; in this respect, heterosexuals and homosexuals are
    identical. The heterosexuality of marriage is intrinsic only if it is understood to be intrinsically procreative; but that definition has long
    been abandoned in Western society. No civil marriage license is granted on the condition that the couple bear children; and the marriage is
    no less legal and no less defensible if it remains childless. In the contemporary West, marriage has become a way in which the state
    recognizes an emotional commitment by two people to each other for life. And within that definition, there is no public way, if one
    believes in equal rights under the law, in which it should legally be denied homosexuals.

Of course, we might even go Mr. Sullivan one better and admit that marriage is no longer "for life", in our modern day, but rather "until you may find it annoying." But all of this is quite besides the point. There simply is no "right" to marry. Marriage is a privilege, granted by the state, along with a series of benefits, for the central purpose of continuing its own existence--procreation--and the raising of healthy citizens--in the nuclear family, for which we have yet to find an effective substitute. It goes without saying that if we dispense with the definition of marriage, the objections to its extension will go away. But we may dispense with the definition of a duck and its feet will still be webbed and water will still roll off its back.

If it is really true that all that is left of marriage is "a way in which the state recognizes an emotional commitment", then let's just get rid of it and start over. What conceivable social interest is served by such a recognition? Why is it necessary to destroy one of the West's greatest and longest lived institutions in order to achieve this petty purpose? Couldn't we just give any couple that wants one some kind of "emotional commitment" certificate or maybe have one of those vanity license plates? The thought that conservatives should not merely accept the already bastardized version of marriage that currently exists, but should also seek to extend it to people who can not bear children nor do we want raising them just seems like a venture into Cloud-Cuckoo Land.

Finally, we come to a topic which speaks loudly in Mr. Sullivan's book by its very absence : the homosexual act itself. I can't help feeling that Mr. Sullivan has very badly overestimated the degree to which conservatives have become comfortable with homosexuals and homosexuality. He is probably right in saying that most conservatives "regard some level of comfort with homosexuals as a mark of civilized conduct." But I suspect, if personal feelings and experiences are any guide at all, that this level of comfort extends only to the point of being courteous. The picture he draws of conservatives adding cache to their social occasions by inviting homosexuals may obtain on the Coasts, but seems preposterous as a vision of Middle America. And it is absolutely the case, as I believe his book implicitly concedes (both by its silence about sex between men and by its failure even to include lesbians in the discussion), that conservatives will avoid at all costs the discussion of the physical act of homosexual congress. Even in a group of mildly liberal people, mouthing the accepted social platitudes about how homosexuality is merely a different life style choice, nothing is more certain to redden faces and bring the conversation screeching to a halt than to introduce the fact that such sex requires the confluence of penis and anus. Is it not fair to question Mr. Sullivan's rather beatific image of us newly accepting conservatives when even he acknowledges that we find it "uncomfortable to talk about" ?

I suspect that he must have been confronted by this fact frequently after writing the book, because my copy has an Afterword that did not appear in the original edition, in which he says of the criticism he received from conservatives :

    There are times in the conservative critiques, despite the calm and serious tone of many of them, when one suspects a very simple thing is
    going on. Many conservatives simply have not yet absorbed the presence of gay and lesbian citizens in their midst. They assume still that
    such people are somehow outside society, and outside of the polity. So, even when they concede the gist and power of many of the points
    made, the burden of proof still lies, as far as they are concerned, with homosexuals themselves. For equal treatment, homosexuals have to
    prove not merely that they are not lying about their fundamental condition, but that they are as able--and in many cases more than able--to
    perform the responsibilities of citizenship that others take for granted.

Here I believe he is just wrong. The reluctance he has encountered from conservatives is not a function of our inability to perceive the presence of homosexuals in daily life, if nothing else, gay liberation has made homosexuals an unavoidable fact of our cultural life. Instead, what he has come up against is a depth of conservative commitment perhaps best expressed by Albert Jay Nock in his invaluable Memoirs of a Superfluous Man :

    As a man of reason and logic, I am all for reform; but as the unworthy inheritor of a great tradition, I am unalterably against it. I am
    forever with Falkland, the true martyr of the Civil War,--one of the very greatest among the great spirits of whom England has ever been
    so notoriously noteworthy,--as he stood facing Hampden and Pym. 'Mr. Speaker,' he said, 'when it is not necessary to change, it is
    necessary not to change.'

Mr. Sullivan's book is engaging, gracefully argued, and eminently readable, but it fails in one vital regard : it does not convince us that change is necessary. Conservatives can probably live comfortably in a world where homosexuals are allowed to do mush as they wish when they are in private and where government acknowledges the existence of commitment between homosexuals in some limited fashion--perhaps some kind of contractual relationship would be appropriate--but to ask conservatives to turn the central institutions of the civilization into laboratories for social experimentation, is to ask more than we can possibly allow and still be true to our core convictions. We wish Mr. Sullivan no ill, and have no great desire to intrude upon his privacy, but neither do we care to treat homosexuals as if they were exactly the same as heterosexuals. Since Mr. Sullivan himself repeatedly makes a point of the intrinsic differences between the two, the conservative position seems entirely reasonable to me.

Ultimately, I suspect that the politics of homosexuality that Mr. Sullivan outlines is a pretty accurate forecast of where we will eventually end up as a nation. But honesty compels me to say that I do not look forward to that day. It is incumbent on conservatives to offer the resistance to the process that will take us there, hopefully slowing that change to a glacial pace and perhaps managing to keep it from going any further. Of course, as conservatives, we believe that this change, once begun, will go on much further. We believe with Emerson that, "Events are in the saddle and ride mankind" and that they will end, in the words of one of the characters in Ghostbusters, with "cats and dogs sleeping together." Yet, we will remain forever with Falkland.

GRADE : A-

Buy Virtually Normal at Amazon.com

WEBSITES :
    -AndrewSullivan.com
    -New Republic (Senior Editor)
    -CARICATURE : of Andrew Sullivan (David Levine, NY Review of Books)
    -BOOK LIST : Faith in Reading : Andrew Sullivan, author of "Virtually Normal" and former editor of The New Republic, recommends some books that have shaped his thinking about the Catholic faith (August 17, 1997, NY Times)
    -EXCERPT : from Love Undetectable : The Eye in the Storm : Andrew Sullivan takes on love, loss, friendship and sex (POZ)
    -ESSAY : Negatives (on Michael Oakeshott) (Andrew Sullivan, 07.26.01, New Republic)
    -ESSAY : Longing : Remembering Allan Bloom (Andrew Sullivan, The New Republic, April 17, 2000)
    -ESSAY : Some Like It Hot : Tina Brown was the Bill Clinton of journalism. (ANDREW SULLIVAN, January 24, 2002, Wall Street Journal)
    -ESSAY : Why is this race even close? Because George W. Bush has campaigned better, proposed more forward-thinking programs and
proved, in the end, that he's smarter than Al Gore. (Andrew Sullivan, 11/07/00, Salon)
    -ESSAY : America's gay vote: all in the family : President Bush and America's gay voters (Andrew Sullivan, The New Republic, February 14, 2001)
    -ESSAY : Only Human (Andrew Sullivan, 07.19.01, New Republic)
    -ESSAY : InnerNet (Andrew Sullivan, Forbes ASAP, 10.04.99)
    -ESSAY : Sea of Tranquility (Andrew Sullivan, Forbes ASAP, 11.30.98)
    -REVIEW : of AN AFFAIR OF STATE : The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton By Richard A. Posner (Andrew Sullivan, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Pontius Pilate by Ann Wroe (Andrew Sullivan, National Review)
    -REVIEW : THE LIFE OF THOMAS MORE By Peter Ackroyd (Andrew Sullivan, NY Times Book REview)
    -REVIEW : of THE NEW PRINCE : Machiavelli Updated for the Twenty-first Century. By Dick Morris (Andrew Sullivan, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of The Big Test The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. By Nicholas Lemann (Andrew Sullivan, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Just As I Am The Autobiography of Billy Graham. By Billy Graham (Andrew Sullivan, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : CONSTANTINE'S SWORD : The Church and the Jews: A History. By James Carroll (Andrew Sullivan, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : DOG LOVE By Marjorie Garber (Andrew Sullivan, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of The Golden Age By Gore Vidal (Andrew Sullivan, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Serving The Word Literalism in America From the Pulpit to the Bench. By Vincent Crapanzano (Andrew Sullivan, NY Times Book Review)
    -ARCHIVES : Andrew Sullivan (Independent Gay Forum)
    -INTERVIEW : Virtually Normal (Mark Marvel, September 04 2000, Interview)
    -INTERVIEW : with Andrew Sullivan (DAVID ADOX, May 1997, Salon)
    -INTERVIEW : Man in the hot seat.(Andrew Sullivan)(Advocate, The, September 05 2000 by Sarah Schulman)
    -INTERVIEW : Sullivan on Bush: "So far, so good" : Andrew Sullivan has emerged as one of the prominent voices of the gay conservative movement. The Dartmouth Review caught up with Sullivan to ask him a few questions about Bush and his gay constituents. (Matthew Tokson, 5/14/01, Dartmouth Review)
    -PROFILE : Sullivan's Travels : Ambitious and self-absorbed, ex-pat Andrew Sullivan has made a career out of his personal and political
contradictions -- and pissing people off. (MICHAEL WOLFF, New York)
    -PROFILE : Uncle Andrew's cabin : HOW DID A MORALIZING, SELF-CENTERED TORY NAMED ANDREW SULLIVAN BECOME THE SPOKESMAN FOR GAY AMERICA? (PETER KURTH, November 1998, Salon)
    -PROFILE : The Britishisation of American Magazines (Katie Prout, NY Review of Magazines)
    -ESSAY : Take a Shill Pill : Andrew Sullivan Sings for His Drugs (Cynthia Cotts, November 2000, Village Voice)
    -ESSAY : The Queer/Gay Assimilationist Split : The Suits vs. the Sluts (Benjamin H. Shepard, May 2001, Monthly Review)
    -ESSAY : THE DEATH OF INTELLECT (National Review, 2/22/99)
    -ESSAY : Andrew Sullivan's Descent Ý(Ken Sanes, July 13, 2001, Transparency Now)
    -ESSAY : Falling Off the Wagon : Andrew Sullivan and the Estate Tax. (Derek Copold, March 11, 2001, Houston Review)
    -ESSAY : You don't have children, do you? (Lawrence Henry, June 25, 2001, Enter Stage Right)
    -ESSAY : The Dread Sullivan Show (Michael E. Ross, Ishmael Reed's Konch Magazine)
    -ESSAY : Outing by any other name : The gay press was pilloried a decade ago for outing. But the practice we were accused of inventing
is now used by the likes of Barbara Walters and The New York Times (michelangelo signorile, The Advocate)
    -ARCHIVES : Salon.com Directory | Andrew Sullivan : A complete listing of Salon articles on Andrew Sullivan (Salon)
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    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal (Andrew Delbanco, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal (Elizabeth Kristol, First Things)
    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal (Walter Olson, Reason)
    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal (K. Anthony Appiah, NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW : Virtually Normal (Samuel Gladden, The Touchstone)
    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal (Shane Phelan, American Political Science Review)
    -REVIEW : Virtually Normal (Michael Joseph Gross, Boston Phoenix)
    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal (Nik Trendowski, Daily Trojan)
    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal (Julie L. Anderson, The International Gay & Lesbian Review)
    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal (Bi Community News)
    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal (Badpuppy, Gay Today)
    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal (MELISSA MURPHY)
    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal (David Wright, The Care Review)
    -REVIEW : of Virtually Normal by Andrew Sullivan (Joseph Nicolosi, The Crisis)