Culture Wars, Culture of Victimhood, 20 years and counting
Okay, here's another batch. (It's like badfic - sometimes you just can't resist.) This one is not by Buckley, but by one of Buckley's longtime proteges, the prolific Mr. Sobran, who fancies himself a Shakespeare scholar (paging matociquala!)
In defense of flesh and blood - judiciary system
National Review, Nov 30, 1984 by Joseph Sobran
THE REAGAN landslide means the time is ripe for real action on the so-called "social" issues. We used to debate about bread-and-butter issues. If is testimony to the aggression of liberalism against the culture that we now debate about flesh-and-blood issues. Abortion, homosexuality, school prayer, and the like used to be matters of consensus. Liberalism has made them matters of contention, and hypocritically pleads for the social peace it has done its best to rupture.
The primary instrument of liberal aggression has been the judiciary system. Through the use of what Justice Byron White has called "raw judicial power," the Supreme Court, followed and boosted by lower appellate courts, has done its utmost to remodel American society at the expense of traditional morality and self-government. The High Court has settled down somewhat since the mid-Seventies; but although this is a relief, it isn't enough.
Even a relatively conservation Court has a strong institutional motive to allow the major decisions of its predecessors to stand. The whole judicial mystique is on the line. Sitting Justices naturally feel that too direct a contradiction of those who have preceded them is likely to undermine their own authority, just as a pope who contradicted his predecessor would not so much strengthn himself as weaken the papacy.
If Mr. Reagan gets the chance to make two more appointments to the Supreme Court (as seems likely), he should select Justices who are willing precisely to end the era of judicial arrogance by demystifying the Court. It would be an excellent thing to destroy the aura of infallibility the Court currently enjoys, and to remind the nation that no body of nine experts can hava a permanent "last word" on the meaning of the Constitution. At this point in our history it is no longer tolerable that the Court or the nation should be burdened with the fiction that a large body of decisions, many of them arbitrary and ideologically motivated, is immutable. If certain vested interests are embarrassed by the news that the Court has erred, sometimes egregiously, so be it.
Hideous as abortion-on-demand is, there is no need to submit every prospective Justice to the sort of test prescribed by the 1984 Republican platform. The candidate should not be examined on the substance of his views about "family values" or "sanctity of life," provided he understands the nature and limits of the judicial role. Fidelity to the procedures actually prescribed by the Constitution is sufficient. No Justice who had a suitably modest view of "the least dangerous branch" could have voted with the Warren and Burger majorities on so many of the crucial social issues.
It is not the business of the Court to remake society, or for that matter to restore it. Conservative activism is no remedy for liberal activism. Strict construction and due respect for the legislative branch will suffice. If not, the Administration should propose legislation limiting the court's appellate jurisdiction, as provided in Article III, Section 2. MR. REAGAN will have to be prepared for liberal hysteria when he redefines the Court's role. He must be ready to make the case that the dormant limiting powers--"checks and balances"--are actually meant to be used. The Supreme court is not sacrosanct, and the notion that it is so is injurious to our form of government. Liberals have obvious motives for wanting to put their last stronghold beyond the democratic process, since they are losing badly at the polls. But this is the moment for a strong President to make use of the Constitution's fluidity.
In specific areas of contention, the Administration should hurry to pass a full agenda. Affirmative action is both bad and unpopular; it clearly means reverse discrimination. Lyndon Johnson instituted it by an executive order, in direct contravention of what we were explicitly assured was the motive of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: Mr. Reagan can and should repeal it with another order. His Justice Department should move to end all forced busing, which is both failed policy and a violation of parental prerogatives.
"Family values" is a phrase the President is fond of. Now it is up to him to prove he really means it. He should make it the overarching theme of his initiatives on social issues.
The family should be the focus of educational policies. Choosing schools is a key right of all parent; the public-school monopoly has been badly abused. Even now few parents are aware of their rights under Hatch Amendment; these rights--against intrusion into children's family, moral, religious, and sexual attitudes--should be vigorously promulgated and enforced. (Anyone who doubts that such intrusion is a serious problem in public schools should read the testimony collected in Child Abuse in the Classroom edited by Phyllis Schlafly.)
The Administration should promote alternatives to public education. Religious education should be understood as intrinsic to the "free exercise" of religion, and favored accordingly through tuition tax credits or, better yet, a voucher system. As things currently stand, parents who choose private schools for their children have the same relation to the public schools that religious dissenters have to an established church: Forced to support the state institution, they must pay for the institution they prefer out of their own funds, if they can still afford it by then.
Public-school prayer as a prerogative should be restored to local school boards. They can decide whether it is advisable and how to implement it; the notion that it is unconstitutional is an utterly unhistorical aberration of the Warren Court.
Always, the Administration should stress that government in the liberal era has not been merely "neutral" toward religion and the family: It has been actively hostile to them, simply by ignoring them while promoting other causes and institutions at their expense. The tax structure has likewise become for all practical purposes punitive toward the family. The Administration's proposal to double the personal exemption to $2,000 would be only a small step toward relieving the family's inflation-imposed tax burden. (to be equivalent to the 1948 level, the expemption would have to be nearly $5,000.)
Needless to say, liberal initiatives in favor of "gay rights" and "equal pay for comparable work" should be vetoed; but there is little chance that any such measures would pass Congress in the relatively conservative climate today. The Administration should also, of course, oppose any new measures advanced in the name of "civil rights," a weasel-phrase that now stands not for limitations on the state's power over the citizen but for the very opposite: increased power over private institutions.
But it would be highly becoming to a conservative regime to take note of the devastating results--"failure" would be too feeble a word--of liberal measures designed to help black Americans. Over the past of 25 years, the black illegitimacy rate has risen from 20 to 55 per cent. No simple corrective recommends itself. Patient long-term policies will have to be developed. A presidential commission should be assigned to study the impact of misguided programs on the black family and black economic efforts. As a practical beginning, minimum-wage laws can be modified for entry-level jobs and "enterprise zones" created in cities by means of special tax breaks. The entire walfare system must be redesigned to remove incentives to family dissolution. The liberal-appointed elite of "black leaders" should be bypassed, and blacks with street-level experience (clergymen, for instance) should be consulted instead.
Symbolism can't be overrated. The Reagan Administration can help blacks by visibly including them precisely because it has no self-interested reason for doing so. Mr. Reagan is peerless as the master of the gracious gesture, and there is enough genuine black talent around to make patronizing unnecessary. The size of his mandate should be sufficient to make formerly hostile blacks ready to come to terms with him.
Whatever he does, the phrase "family values" should be more than a slogan. It should stand for a conservative insight that distinguishes conservatism form both collectivism and individualist libertarianism: namely, that human nature works most happily, on the whole, through the patterned energy of the family structure. As Edmund Burke reminded his age, man's nature is prior to man's rights, and the "real rights of man" require a concrete footing--a home--rather than an ideological framework. Legal rights are only supplementary to a deeper kind of well-being that is prior to politics; and liberal "compassion"--what Robert Frost calls "that tenderer-than-thou,/Collectivistic regimenting love/With which the modern world is being swept"--is no substitute for the real affections that keep people together.
It won't do to sentimentalize family life, either, in the Victorian style. People are naturally flawed, turbulent, selfish, inconstant; their better nature needs the family, but the family also needs the reinforcement of state support. G. K. Chesterton speaks of "the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal"; and we have done more than enough in the way of assuring people of their "right" to do things they are bound to regret. Now we need to make it a little easier for them to lead normal lives.
And more in the gays-destroy-civilization vein: one by Sobran, and two unsigned editorials from the mid 80s, probably by Buckley.
The new school tie - Harvey Milk School
National Review, July 12, 1985
"WHAT DO YOU DO with a 15-year-old transvertite?" asked New York City Schools Chancellor Nathan Quinones. He obviously thought it was a rhetorical question to which the only reasonable answer was that you provide a special school for the junior drag queen. Which is just what had been done: The Harvey Milk School has been serving the alleged special educational needs of young homosexuals, with a $45,000 annual budget from the taxpayers.
Quinones contended that the city wasn't condoning or promoting homosexuality: Its neutrality on this red-hot social issue was somehow unaffected by its financial support of a school whose celebration of homosexuality is proclaimed by its name (Harvey Milk was the homosexual activist and San Francisco official who was murdered a few years ago). It's instructive to contrast this "neutrality" argument with the standard liberal position that government aid to religious schools, even in providing transportation, fatally compromises the state's neutrality on religion.
Mayor Edward Koch, who has been pressuring the Archdiocese of New York to comply with his "gay rights" hiring order, also supports the Harvey Milk School. Some "neutrality." Some way to answer the "needs" of kids who under other circumstances might not be arrested in an aberrant stage of development.
Such is the current shape of liberal compassion. When Mayor Koch and Governor Cuomo attack the Reagan tax-reform plan for ending exemptions for state and local taxes, it's worth rmembering that a high-tax state like New York exercises its option to tax by spending the citizen's earnings on literally perverse projects like the Harvey Milk School.
Hizzoner and the kids - Edward I. Koch banning of anti-homosexual discrimination
National Review, July 26, 1985
NEW YORK's Supreme Court has struck down, as a usurpation of legislative power, Mayor Ed Koch's Executive Order 50. This was an order banning anti-homosexual discrimination by city contractors, including the Archdiocese of New York, a provider of important social services that are heavily subsidized by the city. Koch and Cardinal O'Connor had been battling over the order for months.
Although no gay-rights law has ever passed in the City Council--which is why Koch had to resort to an executive order--organized homosexuals are powerful in New York, especially in Manhattan. That is why Koch courts them. A group can't win accredited victim status unless it has a certain amount of clout.
"Discrimination is simply unfair," says Koch. But "discrimination" is too loose a word to cover what is at stake. The Archdiocese isn't singling out homosexuals for special treatment; it is upholding the traditional sexual morality of the Catholic Church, which condemns adultery as well as sodomy. It claims the prerogative of taking personal conduct into account in hiring, and it is entitled to its own criteria.
Three days after the ruling, the New York Times, which has editorially supported Koch in the controversy, ran a front-page story on children who suffer from AIDS. There are three hundred of them in the New York area, and it is a practical certainty that all of them are going to die. Most of them are the children of mothers who use drugs intravenously; but homosexuals are the main carriers of AIDS, and virtually claim the disease as their own, using it as one of their main credentials in the quest for victim status.
The diseased children have a better claim to victim status, even if they don't have a lobby. In public discussion it has become de rigueur to speak of promiscuous homosexuality and drug use as private conduct in which th ecommunity has no proper interest. But the vocabulary of individual rights is too narrow when a plague is raging. Mayor Koch should quit talking about "private sexuality involving consenting adults" and face reality. Those children are his responsibility too.
The politics of AIDS
National Review, May 23, 1986 by Joseph Sobran
ON MARCH 20, New York City finally got its gay-rights law. After nearly two decades of rejecting it or bottling it up in committee, the City Council passed the bill by the surprisingly wide margin of 21 to 14. That night, New Yorkers' TV screens were filled with news footage of jubilant homosexuals hugging, kissing, and dancing in celebration. It was quite a triumph. The gay activists had beaten the opposition of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York and the Orthodox Jewish community, not to mention the mores of Western civilization and the revulsion of the general public.
Their victory was all the more remarkable in that it came in the teeth of widespread predictions of an "AIDS backlash,' which was expected to reverse the gains of gay activists as the public blamed homosexuals for the spread of the deadly syndrome. Since the death of Rock Hudson last October, anxiety about AIDS has risen sharply, sometimes breaking out into panic: In several widely publicized cases, parents have fought to prevent children with AIDS (contracted through blood transfusions) from attending public-school classes with their children.
Those parents weren't reassured by the soothing voices of public-health experts who told them that the chances of their children's getting AIDS from classroom contact were practically nil. The experts themselves aren't sure how the AIDS virus originated and spreads. They disagree with each other on many points, including the number of people already exposed to or carrying the virus. And public-health experts are in a sense politicians, appointed by politicians, and subject to the same political pressures that get gay-rights bills passed. A San Francisco health official, Dr. Mervyn Silverman, was forced to resign when, reluctantly reversing himself in the face of overwhelming medical evidence, he came out in favor of curbing the city's homosexual bathhouses.
It's hard to get a sense of proportion about the problem. AIDS is scary. Once it takes hold of the body's immune system, it kills. There is no known cure. To many it seems a ghastly retribution for a repulsive vice. It has moral resonances that go beyond the realm of antiseptic "experts,' experts who usually seem willing to take sharp measures against things--such as artificial sweeteners that cause cancer in overdosed rats--which carry relatively trivial health risks. Given the mystery that still surrounds AIDS, it seems strange, in an era of official panic about so many lesser dangers, for officialdom to be playing down the perils of AIDS.
Yet the experts have a point. For anyone who isn't homosexual, heterosexually promiscuous (though, statistically, straights must be extremely promiscuous--i.e., usually prostitutes or their patrons--to be at risk), given to intravenous drug-taking, or hemophiliac, the chances of catching AIDS are less than one in a million--as far as we know.
But how far do we know? The virus can lie dormant for years, and there is no telling whether it will soon break out in new categories of people. The public is entitled to its anxieties. And the official experts are oddly willing to let young AIDS victims expose themselves to classroom diseases that, their immune systems being enfeebled, could be fatal: A case of measles could kill such a child. One suspects that hidden axes are being ground.
The obvious carrier of AIDS is the "gay lifestyle'-- promiscuous homosexuality. AIDS is apparently transmitted mostly through the frequent exchange of bodily fluids, especially when one person's fluids enter the bloodstream of another. The main method seems to be anal intercourse, a primary mode of homosexual conduct: The walls of the anus are delicate and easily broken, allowing infection to occur. Some studies suggest that AIDS most often strikes homosexuals who engage in "fisting'--inserting the fist into the anus--which is especially likely to scratch or break the anal wall.
Homosexuals who reject the gay lifestyle and live, to the extent possible, quietly and decently with their vice, probably play a smaller role in spreading AIDS, but they are doubly its victims. Unless they are truly monogamous they risk catching the disease: In some urban areas, experts say, nearly the entire homosexual population has been exposed to the virus suspected of causing AIDS. Moreover, they cannot count on the public to make fine distinctions: Any anti-homosexual backlash will strike them as well.
But it is not the lifestyle of discreet homosexuals for which the gay activists fight. The activists had little to offer the discreet: Their closets were rarely as confining as the militants maintain. Straight friends always knew, and the rest of the world was less likely to notice, or care, than gay mythology suggests. What the militants sought and seek to legitimize, even in the face of the AIDS epidemic, is the most extravagant expressions of homosexuality, as their own publications and statements make clear. While it would certainly be wrong to say that most promiscuous homosexuals are serious activists, most of the activists endorse the promiscuous lifestyle; much of gay activism has as its goal the promotion of that lifestyle. Indeed younger gays now complain that the "movement' teased them with a glimpse of a sexual paradise from which they have been forever barred by the avenging angel of AIDS.
Most people have only a dim idea of the "lifestyle' under discussion. The general press is singularly uninformative, for reasons of both propriety and sympathy to the gay cause, preferring to keep discussion of gay issues at the level of abstraction chosen by gay activists themselves. There is no "adversary press' in this area.
But a glance at the New York Native, the city's leading gay newspaper, does a lot to fill the information gap. Even after the advent of AIDS, the Native serves as a dating service for lonely homosexuals. The personal ads tell the story the general press glosses over.
In a typical issue, the Native carries two tabloid-sized pages of personals. These are accompanied by a boxed list of abbreviations for standard--repeat: standard--homosexual practices and partner specifications. GWM stands for "gay white male,' GBM for "gay black male,' GJM and GOM for their Jewish and Oriental counterparts. BB means "bodybuilder.' Fr/AP means "French (oral) active/ passive'; Gr/AP, "Greek (anal) active/passive.' JO means masturbation, S/M sado-masochism, B/D bondage and discipline, FF fisting, and W/S "water sports (urine scenes).'
There are other variations; some abbreviations aren't explained. Many of the ads are bluntly graphic--too graphic to quote here. Suffice it to say their authors are not seeking romance. Some boast of the size of their organs, or specify the size they seek. Others advertise for favorite physical features, such as hairlessness, or such prized deformities as mutilated genitals. Others seek to be dominated, offering themselves as "girlfriend' or "maid' to a "real man.' Sordid and desperate, the ads make it impossible to idealize gay life. Just as revealing, in a way, is what is implied by those who insist on "safe sex,' or the one who cautions, "I love women so U can't hate them.' Some are married; one is a Catholic priest.
Such is the behavior gay-rights legislation protects. Or rather, such is the behavior gay-rights legislation forbids normal citizens to disapprove. Gay-rights laws don't establish equal rights. They redistribute rights, from straights to those gays willing to use the power of the state to compel social acceptance. Gays gain the right to force landlords to rent them apartments; landlords and their straight tenants lose the right of free association. Gays gain the right to force employers to hire them; owners of even small businesses lose the right to hire employees of whose morals they approve, and lose as well the right to employ the fruits of their labor in moral leadership. Though it may be amended, as it stands the New York City law directs the city's Human Rghts Commission to prepare school curricula aimed at teaching "non-discriminatory,' i.e., amoral, attitudes toward homosexuality. Gays gain the right to have the city proselytize on their behalf to (desirable?) children; parents lose the right to form their children's morals.
An important point is that what is being promoted is behavior, not status, as in the case of blacks or even women. The New York archdiocese objected to the law because it would, without precedent, treat morally controversial behavior as a civil right; those who violated that "right' would be penalized with up to a year in jail. This was not morally neutral libertarianism, but positive privilege for sodomy.
"What the bill primarily and ultimately seeks,' said an archdiocesan statement, "is the legal approval of homosexual conduct and activity.' The Church was accused of improper meddling in politics; one Native writer obscenely accused John Cardinal O'Connor of being a secret homosexual who hated other homosexuals. Apart from what this charge implies about gay self-esteem (straight people don't accuse their enemies of being straight), it displays the moral and emotional level of the gay activists, who impute hatred and bigotry exclusively to their enemies: The Episcopal bishop, Paul Moore, wasn't accused of impropriety when he called the Catholic archdiocese's opposition to the bill "immoral.' (The ironies of behavior were countless: Moore also counsels the public not to be "judgmental'--toward homosexuality.)
While calling the bill's opponents bigots for saying the bill carried moral approval or was an opening wedge for further gay-activist initiatives (affirmative action, for example), gay writers were, in their own way, saying exactly the same things. A Native writer said: "The gay movement does not exist to elect Mario Cuomo nor even to pass the gay-rights bill. These are at best steps in a much larger process, namely, the creation of a genuine acceptance of homosexuality in society at large.' A Village Voice columnist agreed: "In the end, the gay alternative means a departure not just from heterosexuality, but from social orthodoxy . . . In its most moderate politics--the enactment of civil-rights legislation--it has radical potential, because civil-rights legislation opens the way to acceptance, and acceptance opens the way to dissolution of the norm.' A few gays have spelled this out further: It will mean, for example, legitimizing "man/boy lovers.'
There is clearly no parallel to this frenzied normlessness in the "straight' community. Nobody audibly demands the "right' to have intercourse with little girls. Such facts undermine the percetion on which the gay activist depends for acquiescence by the larger community: i.e., the assumption that all that militant gays want is to take their place beside heterosexuals as responsible citizens, differing only in preferring their own sex for erotic partnership.
Unlike blacks, who have only sought to take their place in society, gay activists have brought deviant behavior up front and made it central to their self-identification; that's what "gay' means. And they insist that society give it centrality too, by giving it immunity from effective moral judgment. No other kind of citizen is specified by a personal taste, let alone a deviant one. Militant gays have chosen to make themselves a "minority.'
And they have proved they have the power to make the label stick. After all, it takes real clout to achieve accredited victim status. And in New York, a mecca for the boys of Sodom, they have so much clout that politicians-- Ed Koch, Geraldine Ferraro, Mario Cuomo (whose chief advisor on gay issues recently died of AIDS)--court them as openly as ethnic groups and labor unions. They are powerful in other major cities, too: San Francisco, Washington, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles (which has passed a bill outlawing discrimination against AIDS victims).
It may seem strange to speak of a gay "community,' when the usual basic component of community--the family --is absent from gay life. But the gay community is real, as any politician knows. In fact, the absence of family is, in a way, an important component of gay power. Gays don't have to support wives and children. For an allegedly victimized minority, they have high levels of income, leisure, and position. They exert great power in the theater, fashion, and advertising, and are well represented in other professions. Their very promiscuity helps them in the informal networking and mutual promotion that are so important in the real world of politics between elections.
And there is what political scientists call "the intensity factor.' To be gay is to be obsessed with one's homosexuality: That too is what "gay' means. Gays are therefore specified by their ideology--which, like all ideology, largely consists in systematically blaming the world for their woes. Gay ideology has risen to the challenge of AIDS.
This is a challenge, since most people reason that if homosexuals are catching AIDS, they must be carrying it too--a simple (gay activists would say "simplistic') line of reasoning that poses a threat to gay victim status. In the pre-Hudson days, the gay press embraced AIDS as the emblem of gay suffering, which wasn't otherwise evident. But after the actor's death the public took serious notice of the disease (syndrome, to be precise) and saw too that it was overflowing into the normal community. News stories featured AIDS victims, including small children, who had done nothing to bring their fate on themselves.
As Time and Newsweek, Dan Rather and Ted Koppel, gave sensational coverage to the disorder, AIDS joined herpes in Everyman's vocabulary of VD. The subject was out of the gays' control. The majority was no longer a statistical abstraction: It was coalescing against the "minority,' and talk of "gay rights' now antagonized millions who had formerly let it pass.
The gay community and its media myrmidons quickly changed their tune. AIDS was no longer a "gay disease.' It was "everybody's problem.' The gay party line had to be adapted to retain gay victimhood while denying gay responsibility.
Charles Ortleb, editor-in-chief of the New York Native, found a solution: Blame the CIA for AIDS.
To do this, Ortleb had to challenge the medical establishment. Virologists generally agree that AIDS is caused by a virus called HTLV III, which is traceable to Haiti and, beyond that (some think), back to Africa. AIDS seems to have come to the U.S. via Haiti.
But Ortleb theorizes that the CIA is to blame. His scenario goes like this:
The culpable virus is not HTLV III at all, but the African swine-fever virus. In 1971, it seems, the CIA tried to destroy the Cuban economy by infecting Cuban pigs with the deadly (for pigs, not humans) and highly contagious ASFV.
The pig plague not only wiped out myriad Cuban porkers, but spread to other Caribbean and Latin countries. It so happened that there was a swine stockyard right next to a whorehouse in Haiti, and . . . the reader can fill in the rest. Ortleb also thinks the Mormons are involved in the plot somehow. The Mormons would stop at nothing.
It's not clear how the origins of the disease, even if the virus was personally bred by G. Gordon Liddy on orders from the Oval Office, could diminish the responsibility devolving on those who now carry it, but Ortleb's theory, dismissed as crazy by most of the medical establishment, clearly serves a need. Many gays believe it. (So does the Soviet press.) And having disposed of the problem by ascribing it to the CIA, they continue to resist, on grounds of "civil liberties,' public-health measures to curb it: the closing of unsanitary gay "bathhouses,' mandatory blood tests, contact tracing (standard for other veneral diseases), quarantines, tattooing (the Native termed this proposal by our editor "Buckley's Buchenwald'), and of course the enforcement of long-dormant laws against sodomy.
Gays, in short, want to shift virtual responsibility for what was recently "their' disease onto the general public. And they are getting their way. The public is picking up the tab.
Last year, California's state insurance board rejected a Blue Cross request for exemption from the expenses of sexually transmitted diseases: That would be "discriminatory.' New York City alone will spend an estimated $100 million this year on the cost of caring for AIDS patients. The Centers for Disease Control put the total cost of the first ten thousand reported AIDS cases, in hospital costs and lost income, at $6 billion so far.
Since AIDS is as yet incurable and AIDS patients require prolonged medical care to alleviate their suffering, it isn't hard to foresee the impact of the disorder on private and public insurance systems. When a politician like Mayor Koch, ever compassionate, boasts of the level of his city's spending on AIDS patients, he is really telling the taxpayer, in traditional circumlocution, how much is coming out of said taxpayer's pocket, to wit, $600 per day per patient, "approximately 60 to 70 per cent more than the cost of treating the typical medical patient.' Koch compares New York's spending favorably with that of San Francisco, the gayest city, per capita, in the United States. New Yorkers can be proud.
Meanwhile, the public has acted less like the bigoted mob gay activists say they fear than like a passive sponge, soaking up the social, economic, and moral costs of the AIDS epidemic. Nobody died at Three Mile Island, but an accident there brought down strict controls--and moral opprobrium--on the nuclear-power industry. Thousands have died of AIDS, and more thousands are going to die of it, but no serious restraints or even censure has been placed on sodomite promiscuity. It's up to the rest of us to pay the bills, find the cures, and take the risks.
Gay power seems to be greater than nuclear power. The conservative activist Paul Weyrich is right when he says that popular "hysteria' over AIDS reflects justified mistrust of the official experts and the media. The powers that be are clearly defining acceptable risks to public health not according to measurable or potential danger, but according to an ideology that exempts the main vehicles of AIDS from responsibility for it.
It's impossible to sort out the economic worries from the hypochondria from the Judeo-Christian religious rules to the general rule-by-my-squick principle [sic]. I especially like Sobran approvingly confirming Buckley's tattooing suggestion. But you also have that oft-noted phenomenon of ostensibly-straight conservatives obsessing more on the sex lives of gay men than they themselves ever do - not new.
And finally, one last brief unsigned, probably-Buckley editorial in defense of biblically-supported bigotry:
Far from 1984 - anti-sodomy law
National Review, August 1, 1986
Far from 1984
IF FEDERALISM means anything, it means the right of states to make unjust laws.
Or, to put a finer point on it, states have the right to make laws that other states may regard as unjust, provided such laws aren't in violation of the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution doesn't, and can't, forbid bad or unwise laws as such. And in upholding Georgia's sodomy statute, the Supreme Court found only that the law, whatever its merits, didn't violate the specific terms of the Constitution--and rightly so, since to rule otherwise would have meant that until recently all fifty states had been acting unconstitutionally. (The Court did say that once, in Roe v. Wade --not exactly the model of a wise ruling.)
Nevertheless, the ruling provoked the usual spate of hysteria about "homophobia' and "Big Brother in the bedroom.' Whatever one thinks of the prudence of anti-sodomy laws, they have nothing to do with the modern totalitarian surveillance that was Orwell's theme, dating back as they do to Moses. In fact they express the sort of ancient norms that are the chief bulwark against the raw, fluid power of the contemporary state.
You really have to wonder, if Buckley et al ever actually read 1984 - it's sort of hard to miss the subtext of the equation of Eros and Rebellion and Individualism. (Given the shameless lying, distortion, and false opposition of the Old Guard, it's even odds.) But then, they can never make up their minds whether or not Individuallism is supposed to be Good, or Bad - Good, when you're against Communism and Collectivism and Social Justice, Bad, when it means people following their consciences or, heaven forbid, enjoying themselves.
They've always been the Morals Police, right from the start - even if it was comparatively under the radar back then.
In defense of flesh and blood - judiciary system
National Review, Nov 30, 1984 by Joseph Sobran
THE REAGAN landslide means the time is ripe for real action on the so-called "social" issues. We used to debate about bread-and-butter issues. If is testimony to the aggression of liberalism against the culture that we now debate about flesh-and-blood issues. Abortion, homosexuality, school prayer, and the like used to be matters of consensus. Liberalism has made them matters of contention, and hypocritically pleads for the social peace it has done its best to rupture.
The primary instrument of liberal aggression has been the judiciary system. Through the use of what Justice Byron White has called "raw judicial power," the Supreme Court, followed and boosted by lower appellate courts, has done its utmost to remodel American society at the expense of traditional morality and self-government. The High Court has settled down somewhat since the mid-Seventies; but although this is a relief, it isn't enough.
Even a relatively conservation Court has a strong institutional motive to allow the major decisions of its predecessors to stand. The whole judicial mystique is on the line. Sitting Justices naturally feel that too direct a contradiction of those who have preceded them is likely to undermine their own authority, just as a pope who contradicted his predecessor would not so much strengthn himself as weaken the papacy.
If Mr. Reagan gets the chance to make two more appointments to the Supreme Court (as seems likely), he should select Justices who are willing precisely to end the era of judicial arrogance by demystifying the Court. It would be an excellent thing to destroy the aura of infallibility the Court currently enjoys, and to remind the nation that no body of nine experts can hava a permanent "last word" on the meaning of the Constitution. At this point in our history it is no longer tolerable that the Court or the nation should be burdened with the fiction that a large body of decisions, many of them arbitrary and ideologically motivated, is immutable. If certain vested interests are embarrassed by the news that the Court has erred, sometimes egregiously, so be it.
Hideous as abortion-on-demand is, there is no need to submit every prospective Justice to the sort of test prescribed by the 1984 Republican platform. The candidate should not be examined on the substance of his views about "family values" or "sanctity of life," provided he understands the nature and limits of the judicial role. Fidelity to the procedures actually prescribed by the Constitution is sufficient. No Justice who had a suitably modest view of "the least dangerous branch" could have voted with the Warren and Burger majorities on so many of the crucial social issues.
It is not the business of the Court to remake society, or for that matter to restore it. Conservative activism is no remedy for liberal activism. Strict construction and due respect for the legislative branch will suffice. If not, the Administration should propose legislation limiting the court's appellate jurisdiction, as provided in Article III, Section 2. MR. REAGAN will have to be prepared for liberal hysteria when he redefines the Court's role. He must be ready to make the case that the dormant limiting powers--"checks and balances"--are actually meant to be used. The Supreme court is not sacrosanct, and the notion that it is so is injurious to our form of government. Liberals have obvious motives for wanting to put their last stronghold beyond the democratic process, since they are losing badly at the polls. But this is the moment for a strong President to make use of the Constitution's fluidity.
In specific areas of contention, the Administration should hurry to pass a full agenda. Affirmative action is both bad and unpopular; it clearly means reverse discrimination. Lyndon Johnson instituted it by an executive order, in direct contravention of what we were explicitly assured was the motive of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: Mr. Reagan can and should repeal it with another order. His Justice Department should move to end all forced busing, which is both failed policy and a violation of parental prerogatives.
"Family values" is a phrase the President is fond of. Now it is up to him to prove he really means it. He should make it the overarching theme of his initiatives on social issues.
The family should be the focus of educational policies. Choosing schools is a key right of all parent; the public-school monopoly has been badly abused. Even now few parents are aware of their rights under Hatch Amendment; these rights--against intrusion into children's family, moral, religious, and sexual attitudes--should be vigorously promulgated and enforced. (Anyone who doubts that such intrusion is a serious problem in public schools should read the testimony collected in Child Abuse in the Classroom edited by Phyllis Schlafly.)
The Administration should promote alternatives to public education. Religious education should be understood as intrinsic to the "free exercise" of religion, and favored accordingly through tuition tax credits or, better yet, a voucher system. As things currently stand, parents who choose private schools for their children have the same relation to the public schools that religious dissenters have to an established church: Forced to support the state institution, they must pay for the institution they prefer out of their own funds, if they can still afford it by then.
Public-school prayer as a prerogative should be restored to local school boards. They can decide whether it is advisable and how to implement it; the notion that it is unconstitutional is an utterly unhistorical aberration of the Warren Court.
Always, the Administration should stress that government in the liberal era has not been merely "neutral" toward religion and the family: It has been actively hostile to them, simply by ignoring them while promoting other causes and institutions at their expense. The tax structure has likewise become for all practical purposes punitive toward the family. The Administration's proposal to double the personal exemption to $2,000 would be only a small step toward relieving the family's inflation-imposed tax burden. (to be equivalent to the 1948 level, the expemption would have to be nearly $5,000.)
Needless to say, liberal initiatives in favor of "gay rights" and "equal pay for comparable work" should be vetoed; but there is little chance that any such measures would pass Congress in the relatively conservative climate today. The Administration should also, of course, oppose any new measures advanced in the name of "civil rights," a weasel-phrase that now stands not for limitations on the state's power over the citizen but for the very opposite: increased power over private institutions.
But it would be highly becoming to a conservative regime to take note of the devastating results--"failure" would be too feeble a word--of liberal measures designed to help black Americans. Over the past of 25 years, the black illegitimacy rate has risen from 20 to 55 per cent. No simple corrective recommends itself. Patient long-term policies will have to be developed. A presidential commission should be assigned to study the impact of misguided programs on the black family and black economic efforts. As a practical beginning, minimum-wage laws can be modified for entry-level jobs and "enterprise zones" created in cities by means of special tax breaks. The entire walfare system must be redesigned to remove incentives to family dissolution. The liberal-appointed elite of "black leaders" should be bypassed, and blacks with street-level experience (clergymen, for instance) should be consulted instead.
Symbolism can't be overrated. The Reagan Administration can help blacks by visibly including them precisely because it has no self-interested reason for doing so. Mr. Reagan is peerless as the master of the gracious gesture, and there is enough genuine black talent around to make patronizing unnecessary. The size of his mandate should be sufficient to make formerly hostile blacks ready to come to terms with him.
Whatever he does, the phrase "family values" should be more than a slogan. It should stand for a conservative insight that distinguishes conservatism form both collectivism and individualist libertarianism: namely, that human nature works most happily, on the whole, through the patterned energy of the family structure. As Edmund Burke reminded his age, man's nature is prior to man's rights, and the "real rights of man" require a concrete footing--a home--rather than an ideological framework. Legal rights are only supplementary to a deeper kind of well-being that is prior to politics; and liberal "compassion"--what Robert Frost calls "that tenderer-than-thou,/Collectivistic regimenting love/With which the modern world is being swept"--is no substitute for the real affections that keep people together.
It won't do to sentimentalize family life, either, in the Victorian style. People are naturally flawed, turbulent, selfish, inconstant; their better nature needs the family, but the family also needs the reinforcement of state support. G. K. Chesterton speaks of "the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal"; and we have done more than enough in the way of assuring people of their "right" to do things they are bound to regret. Now we need to make it a little easier for them to lead normal lives.
And more in the gays-destroy-civilization vein: one by Sobran, and two unsigned editorials from the mid 80s, probably by Buckley.
The new school tie - Harvey Milk School
National Review, July 12, 1985
"WHAT DO YOU DO with a 15-year-old transvertite?" asked New York City Schools Chancellor Nathan Quinones. He obviously thought it was a rhetorical question to which the only reasonable answer was that you provide a special school for the junior drag queen. Which is just what had been done: The Harvey Milk School has been serving the alleged special educational needs of young homosexuals, with a $45,000 annual budget from the taxpayers.
Quinones contended that the city wasn't condoning or promoting homosexuality: Its neutrality on this red-hot social issue was somehow unaffected by its financial support of a school whose celebration of homosexuality is proclaimed by its name (Harvey Milk was the homosexual activist and San Francisco official who was murdered a few years ago). It's instructive to contrast this "neutrality" argument with the standard liberal position that government aid to religious schools, even in providing transportation, fatally compromises the state's neutrality on religion.
Mayor Edward Koch, who has been pressuring the Archdiocese of New York to comply with his "gay rights" hiring order, also supports the Harvey Milk School. Some "neutrality." Some way to answer the "needs" of kids who under other circumstances might not be arrested in an aberrant stage of development.
Such is the current shape of liberal compassion. When Mayor Koch and Governor Cuomo attack the Reagan tax-reform plan for ending exemptions for state and local taxes, it's worth rmembering that a high-tax state like New York exercises its option to tax by spending the citizen's earnings on literally perverse projects like the Harvey Milk School.
Hizzoner and the kids - Edward I. Koch banning of anti-homosexual discrimination
National Review, July 26, 1985
NEW YORK's Supreme Court has struck down, as a usurpation of legislative power, Mayor Ed Koch's Executive Order 50. This was an order banning anti-homosexual discrimination by city contractors, including the Archdiocese of New York, a provider of important social services that are heavily subsidized by the city. Koch and Cardinal O'Connor had been battling over the order for months.
Although no gay-rights law has ever passed in the City Council--which is why Koch had to resort to an executive order--organized homosexuals are powerful in New York, especially in Manhattan. That is why Koch courts them. A group can't win accredited victim status unless it has a certain amount of clout.
"Discrimination is simply unfair," says Koch. But "discrimination" is too loose a word to cover what is at stake. The Archdiocese isn't singling out homosexuals for special treatment; it is upholding the traditional sexual morality of the Catholic Church, which condemns adultery as well as sodomy. It claims the prerogative of taking personal conduct into account in hiring, and it is entitled to its own criteria.
Three days after the ruling, the New York Times, which has editorially supported Koch in the controversy, ran a front-page story on children who suffer from AIDS. There are three hundred of them in the New York area, and it is a practical certainty that all of them are going to die. Most of them are the children of mothers who use drugs intravenously; but homosexuals are the main carriers of AIDS, and virtually claim the disease as their own, using it as one of their main credentials in the quest for victim status.
The diseased children have a better claim to victim status, even if they don't have a lobby. In public discussion it has become de rigueur to speak of promiscuous homosexuality and drug use as private conduct in which th ecommunity has no proper interest. But the vocabulary of individual rights is too narrow when a plague is raging. Mayor Koch should quit talking about "private sexuality involving consenting adults" and face reality. Those children are his responsibility too.
The politics of AIDS
National Review, May 23, 1986 by Joseph Sobran
ON MARCH 20, New York City finally got its gay-rights law. After nearly two decades of rejecting it or bottling it up in committee, the City Council passed the bill by the surprisingly wide margin of 21 to 14. That night, New Yorkers' TV screens were filled with news footage of jubilant homosexuals hugging, kissing, and dancing in celebration. It was quite a triumph. The gay activists had beaten the opposition of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York and the Orthodox Jewish community, not to mention the mores of Western civilization and the revulsion of the general public.
Their victory was all the more remarkable in that it came in the teeth of widespread predictions of an "AIDS backlash,' which was expected to reverse the gains of gay activists as the public blamed homosexuals for the spread of the deadly syndrome. Since the death of Rock Hudson last October, anxiety about AIDS has risen sharply, sometimes breaking out into panic: In several widely publicized cases, parents have fought to prevent children with AIDS (contracted through blood transfusions) from attending public-school classes with their children.
Those parents weren't reassured by the soothing voices of public-health experts who told them that the chances of their children's getting AIDS from classroom contact were practically nil. The experts themselves aren't sure how the AIDS virus originated and spreads. They disagree with each other on many points, including the number of people already exposed to or carrying the virus. And public-health experts are in a sense politicians, appointed by politicians, and subject to the same political pressures that get gay-rights bills passed. A San Francisco health official, Dr. Mervyn Silverman, was forced to resign when, reluctantly reversing himself in the face of overwhelming medical evidence, he came out in favor of curbing the city's homosexual bathhouses.
It's hard to get a sense of proportion about the problem. AIDS is scary. Once it takes hold of the body's immune system, it kills. There is no known cure. To many it seems a ghastly retribution for a repulsive vice. It has moral resonances that go beyond the realm of antiseptic "experts,' experts who usually seem willing to take sharp measures against things--such as artificial sweeteners that cause cancer in overdosed rats--which carry relatively trivial health risks. Given the mystery that still surrounds AIDS, it seems strange, in an era of official panic about so many lesser dangers, for officialdom to be playing down the perils of AIDS.
Yet the experts have a point. For anyone who isn't homosexual, heterosexually promiscuous (though, statistically, straights must be extremely promiscuous--i.e., usually prostitutes or their patrons--to be at risk), given to intravenous drug-taking, or hemophiliac, the chances of catching AIDS are less than one in a million--as far as we know.
But how far do we know? The virus can lie dormant for years, and there is no telling whether it will soon break out in new categories of people. The public is entitled to its anxieties. And the official experts are oddly willing to let young AIDS victims expose themselves to classroom diseases that, their immune systems being enfeebled, could be fatal: A case of measles could kill such a child. One suspects that hidden axes are being ground.
The obvious carrier of AIDS is the "gay lifestyle'-- promiscuous homosexuality. AIDS is apparently transmitted mostly through the frequent exchange of bodily fluids, especially when one person's fluids enter the bloodstream of another. The main method seems to be anal intercourse, a primary mode of homosexual conduct: The walls of the anus are delicate and easily broken, allowing infection to occur. Some studies suggest that AIDS most often strikes homosexuals who engage in "fisting'--inserting the fist into the anus--which is especially likely to scratch or break the anal wall.
Homosexuals who reject the gay lifestyle and live, to the extent possible, quietly and decently with their vice, probably play a smaller role in spreading AIDS, but they are doubly its victims. Unless they are truly monogamous they risk catching the disease: In some urban areas, experts say, nearly the entire homosexual population has been exposed to the virus suspected of causing AIDS. Moreover, they cannot count on the public to make fine distinctions: Any anti-homosexual backlash will strike them as well.
But it is not the lifestyle of discreet homosexuals for which the gay activists fight. The activists had little to offer the discreet: Their closets were rarely as confining as the militants maintain. Straight friends always knew, and the rest of the world was less likely to notice, or care, than gay mythology suggests. What the militants sought and seek to legitimize, even in the face of the AIDS epidemic, is the most extravagant expressions of homosexuality, as their own publications and statements make clear. While it would certainly be wrong to say that most promiscuous homosexuals are serious activists, most of the activists endorse the promiscuous lifestyle; much of gay activism has as its goal the promotion of that lifestyle. Indeed younger gays now complain that the "movement' teased them with a glimpse of a sexual paradise from which they have been forever barred by the avenging angel of AIDS.
Most people have only a dim idea of the "lifestyle' under discussion. The general press is singularly uninformative, for reasons of both propriety and sympathy to the gay cause, preferring to keep discussion of gay issues at the level of abstraction chosen by gay activists themselves. There is no "adversary press' in this area.
But a glance at the New York Native, the city's leading gay newspaper, does a lot to fill the information gap. Even after the advent of AIDS, the Native serves as a dating service for lonely homosexuals. The personal ads tell the story the general press glosses over.
In a typical issue, the Native carries two tabloid-sized pages of personals. These are accompanied by a boxed list of abbreviations for standard--repeat: standard--homosexual practices and partner specifications. GWM stands for "gay white male,' GBM for "gay black male,' GJM and GOM for their Jewish and Oriental counterparts. BB means "bodybuilder.' Fr/AP means "French (oral) active/ passive'; Gr/AP, "Greek (anal) active/passive.' JO means masturbation, S/M sado-masochism, B/D bondage and discipline, FF fisting, and W/S "water sports (urine scenes).'
There are other variations; some abbreviations aren't explained. Many of the ads are bluntly graphic--too graphic to quote here. Suffice it to say their authors are not seeking romance. Some boast of the size of their organs, or specify the size they seek. Others advertise for favorite physical features, such as hairlessness, or such prized deformities as mutilated genitals. Others seek to be dominated, offering themselves as "girlfriend' or "maid' to a "real man.' Sordid and desperate, the ads make it impossible to idealize gay life. Just as revealing, in a way, is what is implied by those who insist on "safe sex,' or the one who cautions, "I love women so U can't hate them.' Some are married; one is a Catholic priest.
Such is the behavior gay-rights legislation protects. Or rather, such is the behavior gay-rights legislation forbids normal citizens to disapprove. Gay-rights laws don't establish equal rights. They redistribute rights, from straights to those gays willing to use the power of the state to compel social acceptance. Gays gain the right to force landlords to rent them apartments; landlords and their straight tenants lose the right of free association. Gays gain the right to force employers to hire them; owners of even small businesses lose the right to hire employees of whose morals they approve, and lose as well the right to employ the fruits of their labor in moral leadership. Though it may be amended, as it stands the New York City law directs the city's Human Rghts Commission to prepare school curricula aimed at teaching "non-discriminatory,' i.e., amoral, attitudes toward homosexuality. Gays gain the right to have the city proselytize on their behalf to (desirable?) children; parents lose the right to form their children's morals.
An important point is that what is being promoted is behavior, not status, as in the case of blacks or even women. The New York archdiocese objected to the law because it would, without precedent, treat morally controversial behavior as a civil right; those who violated that "right' would be penalized with up to a year in jail. This was not morally neutral libertarianism, but positive privilege for sodomy.
"What the bill primarily and ultimately seeks,' said an archdiocesan statement, "is the legal approval of homosexual conduct and activity.' The Church was accused of improper meddling in politics; one Native writer obscenely accused John Cardinal O'Connor of being a secret homosexual who hated other homosexuals. Apart from what this charge implies about gay self-esteem (straight people don't accuse their enemies of being straight), it displays the moral and emotional level of the gay activists, who impute hatred and bigotry exclusively to their enemies: The Episcopal bishop, Paul Moore, wasn't accused of impropriety when he called the Catholic archdiocese's opposition to the bill "immoral.' (The ironies of behavior were countless: Moore also counsels the public not to be "judgmental'--toward homosexuality.)
While calling the bill's opponents bigots for saying the bill carried moral approval or was an opening wedge for further gay-activist initiatives (affirmative action, for example), gay writers were, in their own way, saying exactly the same things. A Native writer said: "The gay movement does not exist to elect Mario Cuomo nor even to pass the gay-rights bill. These are at best steps in a much larger process, namely, the creation of a genuine acceptance of homosexuality in society at large.' A Village Voice columnist agreed: "In the end, the gay alternative means a departure not just from heterosexuality, but from social orthodoxy . . . In its most moderate politics--the enactment of civil-rights legislation--it has radical potential, because civil-rights legislation opens the way to acceptance, and acceptance opens the way to dissolution of the norm.' A few gays have spelled this out further: It will mean, for example, legitimizing "man/boy lovers.'
There is clearly no parallel to this frenzied normlessness in the "straight' community. Nobody audibly demands the "right' to have intercourse with little girls. Such facts undermine the percetion on which the gay activist depends for acquiescence by the larger community: i.e., the assumption that all that militant gays want is to take their place beside heterosexuals as responsible citizens, differing only in preferring their own sex for erotic partnership.
Unlike blacks, who have only sought to take their place in society, gay activists have brought deviant behavior up front and made it central to their self-identification; that's what "gay' means. And they insist that society give it centrality too, by giving it immunity from effective moral judgment. No other kind of citizen is specified by a personal taste, let alone a deviant one. Militant gays have chosen to make themselves a "minority.'
And they have proved they have the power to make the label stick. After all, it takes real clout to achieve accredited victim status. And in New York, a mecca for the boys of Sodom, they have so much clout that politicians-- Ed Koch, Geraldine Ferraro, Mario Cuomo (whose chief advisor on gay issues recently died of AIDS)--court them as openly as ethnic groups and labor unions. They are powerful in other major cities, too: San Francisco, Washington, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles (which has passed a bill outlawing discrimination against AIDS victims).
It may seem strange to speak of a gay "community,' when the usual basic component of community--the family --is absent from gay life. But the gay community is real, as any politician knows. In fact, the absence of family is, in a way, an important component of gay power. Gays don't have to support wives and children. For an allegedly victimized minority, they have high levels of income, leisure, and position. They exert great power in the theater, fashion, and advertising, and are well represented in other professions. Their very promiscuity helps them in the informal networking and mutual promotion that are so important in the real world of politics between elections.
And there is what political scientists call "the intensity factor.' To be gay is to be obsessed with one's homosexuality: That too is what "gay' means. Gays are therefore specified by their ideology--which, like all ideology, largely consists in systematically blaming the world for their woes. Gay ideology has risen to the challenge of AIDS.
This is a challenge, since most people reason that if homosexuals are catching AIDS, they must be carrying it too--a simple (gay activists would say "simplistic') line of reasoning that poses a threat to gay victim status. In the pre-Hudson days, the gay press embraced AIDS as the emblem of gay suffering, which wasn't otherwise evident. But after the actor's death the public took serious notice of the disease (syndrome, to be precise) and saw too that it was overflowing into the normal community. News stories featured AIDS victims, including small children, who had done nothing to bring their fate on themselves.
As Time and Newsweek, Dan Rather and Ted Koppel, gave sensational coverage to the disorder, AIDS joined herpes in Everyman's vocabulary of VD. The subject was out of the gays' control. The majority was no longer a statistical abstraction: It was coalescing against the "minority,' and talk of "gay rights' now antagonized millions who had formerly let it pass.
The gay community and its media myrmidons quickly changed their tune. AIDS was no longer a "gay disease.' It was "everybody's problem.' The gay party line had to be adapted to retain gay victimhood while denying gay responsibility.
Charles Ortleb, editor-in-chief of the New York Native, found a solution: Blame the CIA for AIDS.
To do this, Ortleb had to challenge the medical establishment. Virologists generally agree that AIDS is caused by a virus called HTLV III, which is traceable to Haiti and, beyond that (some think), back to Africa. AIDS seems to have come to the U.S. via Haiti.
But Ortleb theorizes that the CIA is to blame. His scenario goes like this:
The culpable virus is not HTLV III at all, but the African swine-fever virus. In 1971, it seems, the CIA tried to destroy the Cuban economy by infecting Cuban pigs with the deadly (for pigs, not humans) and highly contagious ASFV.
The pig plague not only wiped out myriad Cuban porkers, but spread to other Caribbean and Latin countries. It so happened that there was a swine stockyard right next to a whorehouse in Haiti, and . . . the reader can fill in the rest. Ortleb also thinks the Mormons are involved in the plot somehow. The Mormons would stop at nothing.
It's not clear how the origins of the disease, even if the virus was personally bred by G. Gordon Liddy on orders from the Oval Office, could diminish the responsibility devolving on those who now carry it, but Ortleb's theory, dismissed as crazy by most of the medical establishment, clearly serves a need. Many gays believe it. (So does the Soviet press.) And having disposed of the problem by ascribing it to the CIA, they continue to resist, on grounds of "civil liberties,' public-health measures to curb it: the closing of unsanitary gay "bathhouses,' mandatory blood tests, contact tracing (standard for other veneral diseases), quarantines, tattooing (the Native termed this proposal by our editor "Buckley's Buchenwald'), and of course the enforcement of long-dormant laws against sodomy.
Gays, in short, want to shift virtual responsibility for what was recently "their' disease onto the general public. And they are getting their way. The public is picking up the tab.
Last year, California's state insurance board rejected a Blue Cross request for exemption from the expenses of sexually transmitted diseases: That would be "discriminatory.' New York City alone will spend an estimated $100 million this year on the cost of caring for AIDS patients. The Centers for Disease Control put the total cost of the first ten thousand reported AIDS cases, in hospital costs and lost income, at $6 billion so far.
Since AIDS is as yet incurable and AIDS patients require prolonged medical care to alleviate their suffering, it isn't hard to foresee the impact of the disorder on private and public insurance systems. When a politician like Mayor Koch, ever compassionate, boasts of the level of his city's spending on AIDS patients, he is really telling the taxpayer, in traditional circumlocution, how much is coming out of said taxpayer's pocket, to wit, $600 per day per patient, "approximately 60 to 70 per cent more than the cost of treating the typical medical patient.' Koch compares New York's spending favorably with that of San Francisco, the gayest city, per capita, in the United States. New Yorkers can be proud.
Meanwhile, the public has acted less like the bigoted mob gay activists say they fear than like a passive sponge, soaking up the social, economic, and moral costs of the AIDS epidemic. Nobody died at Three Mile Island, but an accident there brought down strict controls--and moral opprobrium--on the nuclear-power industry. Thousands have died of AIDS, and more thousands are going to die of it, but no serious restraints or even censure has been placed on sodomite promiscuity. It's up to the rest of us to pay the bills, find the cures, and take the risks.
Gay power seems to be greater than nuclear power. The conservative activist Paul Weyrich is right when he says that popular "hysteria' over AIDS reflects justified mistrust of the official experts and the media. The powers that be are clearly defining acceptable risks to public health not according to measurable or potential danger, but according to an ideology that exempts the main vehicles of AIDS from responsibility for it.
It's impossible to sort out the economic worries from the hypochondria from the Judeo-Christian religious rules to the general rule-by-my-squick principle [sic]. I especially like Sobran approvingly confirming Buckley's tattooing suggestion. But you also have that oft-noted phenomenon of ostensibly-straight conservatives obsessing more on the sex lives of gay men than they themselves ever do - not new.
And finally, one last brief unsigned, probably-Buckley editorial in defense of biblically-supported bigotry:
Far from 1984 - anti-sodomy law
National Review, August 1, 1986
Far from 1984
IF FEDERALISM means anything, it means the right of states to make unjust laws.
Or, to put a finer point on it, states have the right to make laws that other states may regard as unjust, provided such laws aren't in violation of the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution doesn't, and can't, forbid bad or unwise laws as such. And in upholding Georgia's sodomy statute, the Supreme Court found only that the law, whatever its merits, didn't violate the specific terms of the Constitution--and rightly so, since to rule otherwise would have meant that until recently all fifty states had been acting unconstitutionally. (The Court did say that once, in Roe v. Wade --not exactly the model of a wise ruling.)
Nevertheless, the ruling provoked the usual spate of hysteria about "homophobia' and "Big Brother in the bedroom.' Whatever one thinks of the prudence of anti-sodomy laws, they have nothing to do with the modern totalitarian surveillance that was Orwell's theme, dating back as they do to Moses. In fact they express the sort of ancient norms that are the chief bulwark against the raw, fluid power of the contemporary state.
You really have to wonder, if Buckley et al ever actually read 1984 - it's sort of hard to miss the subtext of the equation of Eros and Rebellion and Individualism. (Given the shameless lying, distortion, and false opposition of the Old Guard, it's even odds.) But then, they can never make up their minds whether or not Individuallism is supposed to be Good, or Bad - Good, when you're against Communism and Collectivism and Social Justice, Bad, when it means people following their consciences or, heaven forbid, enjoying themselves.
They've always been the Morals Police, right from the start - even if it was comparatively under the radar back then.