Gibson’s film has been controversial because it is rooted squarely in the Gospels.  Unlike his critics, Gibson accepts the Gospels as they are and does not believe that they require any external justification, a view undoubtedly in accord with both traditional Christianity and the view of most Christians today.  Gibson told Peter Boyer of the New Yorker that he experienced great despair in his 30’s, “And I just hit my knees.  And I had to use the Passion of Christ . . . to heal my wounds.  And I’ve just been meditating on it for twelve years.”

If any of Gibson’s critics have ever meditated on Christ’s Passion as anything other than a source of antisemitism, they have given no evidence of it in their criticism of Gibson.  Indeed, Boston University academic Paula Fredriksen is an unbeliever who feels “anti-Semitism has been integral to Christianity.”  ADL National Director Abraham Foxman told the New Yorker that “the Gospels, if taken literally, can be very damaging,” and he told Jewish Week that “The ‘truth’ [Gibson] is talking about has been used for 2000 years to buttress anti-Semitism and to give a rationale for persecuting Jews.”  The other academics who have been busy attacking Gibson, although Christians, are on record as blaming the New Testament for antisemitism, favoring the censoring of New Testament passages used in worship, and repudiating the belief that salvation is available only through Jesus Christ.

The scholars’ allies in the media have been even more outspoken in their views.  Canadian Donald Akinson attacked both Gibson’s movie and another film, The Gospel of John, in the Globe and Mail, writing that “to film a literal version of the Gospel of John is like filming a faithful version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  Shmuley Boteach, writing in the Jerusalem Post, dismisses the passages in Matthew where the crowd accepts responsibility for Jesus’ death as “cheap forgeries” and contends that there was a “deliberate effort on the part of New Testament editors to slander the Jews.”

The scholars’ attacks on Gibson have been driven, in part, by an academic arrogance bordering on gnosticism, a belief that no layman or churchman outside of their coterie could possibly understand the Gospels.  Fredriksen dismissed Gibson in the New Yorker because “He doesn’t even have a Ph.D on his staff.”  Sr. Mary Boys told the Albany Times-Union that Gibson “wouldn’t know a scholar if he ran into one.”  Sister Boys has elsewhere opined that Scripture is like poetry—beyond the understanding of most people—and that “we are inviting people to a reading that seems to contradict the apparent meaning of the text . . . ”

Mel Gibson is not the only object of the academics’ scorn.  John Pawlikow-ski confirmed for Jewish Week that Pope John Paul II had both watched Gibson’s movie and praised its historical accuracy by stating “It is as it was.”  However, Pawlikowski also told Jewish Week that “I remain . . . very skeptical as to whether the ailing Pope was fully briefed about the concerns we and others have expressed.”  Pawlikowski noted that he and the other scholars “seriously question the way in which this papal screening was handled by some of [the Pope’s] advisors.”  The scholars made similar comments when Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, the prefect for the Congregation of the Clergy, praised Gibson’s film and when Avery Cardinal Dulles disagreed with their desire to jettison core Christian teachings about salvation through Jesus Christ.  Apparently, no one can understand anything about the Gospels unless they have been “fully briefed” about the scholars’ own—admittedly counterintuitive—readings of Sacred Scripture.

To Gibson’s credit, he has largely outmaneuvered his critics and provided an object lesson in how to win a battle in the Culture War,  by staking out his position and refusing to back down.  He has largely ignored the critics’ calls for “sensitivity” and “dialogue,” cultivating instead conservative Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox who share his belief in the Gospels, as well as conservative Jews who appreciate Gibson’s sincerity and see in the Gospels something other than antisemitism.  While the same small, unmerry band of academics and ecclesiastical apparatchiks continue to assail him, the increasing number of his supporters now includes many prominent evangelical Protestants, including Billy Graham, and, in addition to the Pope, such leading Catholics as Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, Archbishop Chaput of Denver, and Fr. Augustine DiNoia, undersecretary to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and former theologian to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Needless to say, all of those praising Gibson’s film affirm that it is not antisemitic.  In addition, as Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos noted, “Mel Gibson not only closely follows the narrative of the Gospels, giving the viewer a new appreciation for these Biblical passages, but his artistic choices also make the film faithful to the meaning of the Gospels, as understood by the Church.”  By contrast, as Fr. DiNoia pointed out, “It is regrettable that people who had not seen the film, but only reviewed early versions of the script, gave rise to the charge that [the film] is anti-Semitic.”

Gibson has actually accomplished something the critics claim to be interested in—advancing ecumenism.  Sister Boys has claimed that The Passion is “dividing evangelicals and Catholics,” when, in fact, it has done just the opposite, as evangelical Christians have warmly embraced a film directed by a Catholic, starring another devout Catholic, and placing a strong emphasis on Mary and the Eucharist.

In addition to demonstrating how the Culture War can be won, Gibson has also reminded us why it is worth fighting.  Of necessity, much cultural commentary by conservatives and traditionalists has focused on what is wrong, as the popular culture over the last few decades has continued to expand the frontiers of degeneracy.  In order to win the Culture War, however, we have to do more than point out the manifest defects in current movies, music, and fiction.  We also must support artists committed to producing art that builds on our Western heritage rather than trashing it.  Gibson is attempting to do just that.

Gibson’s aims, however, are even higher.  He has spoken repeatedly of his religious motives in making this movie, and those who have seen it have described a film with the capacity to change hearts.  Respected Vatican reporter John Allen, writing in the National Catholic Reporter, confirmed the Pope’s praise for The Passion.  In the same piece, Allen quoted a Vatican official who said “that while Gibson may be a bit idiosyncratic theologically, his ‘heart is in the right place.  There will be conversions because of this film.’”  The straightforward faith expressed by Gibson and his allies is far more likely to attract new Christians than the belief, expressed by at least some of Gibson’s critics, that the principal legacy of Christianity is hatred and the principal task of today’s Christian is apology.

This article first appeared in the March 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Liberals are almost always wrong in their principles, but that does not automatically make them bad men.  I do not think my father necessarily believed in the institution of marriage per se, but he was intensely loyal to his own wife, and he despised men who broke the marriage bond.  He disliked any display of nationalism and viewed the flag-waving, oath-taking chauvinism of the 1950’s with contempt; yet, at the outbreak of World War II, he enlisted more than once in the Marines, though, each time, the irregularity of his diphtheria-scarred heart betrayed him to the medical examiners.

Though he made no complaints against homosexuals, he loathed actors (among other effeminate men), especially actors who came to imagine that they were as tough as the heroes they portrayed.  I can imagine him coming to me now and asking what had happened to American men that so many had gone homosexual or had become so effeminate that they drove their wives into lesbianism; what sort of judges and legislators we had that they could even conceive of the possibility of “gay marriage.”  What would any of us, looking our liberal parents and grandparents in the eye, say of such things?

Let us begin by stating what was obvious to my father.  The problem does not lie with homosexuality per se or with homosexuals.  My childhood piano teacher, for example, was the only well-known homosexual in my hometown.  He was also one of the few communists and, although he left school in the sixth grade, the only person in godforsaken Superior who had read Goethe—and in German.  My father, defending his friend from the usual barroom insults, took on several men who held his arm against a red-hot stove until it burned the skin and flesh off.  I have always believed that he was unquestionably right to defend his friend, my teacher, who did not prey upon the innocent or corrupt the uncorrupted.

We all have moral demons to grapple with, even the saints.  In my father’s case, it was the curse of the Irish, which he successfully managed throughout his life, and arrogance, which he never mastered.  The private miseries of the “gay” are not my problem, and, in a healthy society that upheld positive ideals of the masculine and the feminine, homosexuals would always constitute a fringe element, as they did in the 1950’s, when they were confined not to their closets—that is the lie they tell now—but to their own social sphere.  A Christian moral dictator, if he were sensible, would not try to eliminate or persecute homosexuals, any more than he would try to eliminate gambling, prostitution, or fornication.  Tacitus’ definition of a wise ruler is still a good one: “To know all, but not to follow up on everything.”

The “queer” (to use their own favorite term) we shall always have with us.  Living, as I have lived, in Charleston and San Francisco, I have numbered more than the usual amount of homosexuals among my teachers, workmates, friends, and acquaintances.  Some were otherwise honorable people, like my French professor who once begged me to get him out of a bar before the young hustlers enticed him into a compromising situation.  Others were not.  I once taught in a classics department with an effeminate and obviously homosexual married colleague.  Because he was poorly trained and unbearably silly (giving papers on Catullan echoes in Frankie Avalon’s “Venus”), I avoided him, but I told my wife repeatedly that he would come to a bad end.  I did not know how bad.  He was ultimately convicted of molesting his son on two continents.  Some of his colleagues have defended him, arguing that he should retain his position in a society that takes college students abroad.  After all, they said, there is no evidence that he molested anyone outside of his immediate family.  I wish I were making this up, but that is the state of the humanities in American universities today, where college teachers who die of AIDS have awards named in their honor.

The problem, I repeat, is not with homosexuality per se or with homosexuals.  In nearly every known society, some number (often quite small) of human beings chromosomally male will fail, for one reason or another, to become fully men.  With some, the failure takes the form of effeminacy and timidity, but, in other cases, males who are outwardly as tough and virile as an NFL quarterback will find other males, either some of the time or all of the time, sexually attractive.

In some societies, passionate relationships between men are permitted, up to a point, though they are often circumscribed by ceremonies and restrictions.  These customs may become so complicated that it is difficult—even impossible—to know to what extent actual sexual relations were permitted.  Among young Athenian males in the fifth century, for example, there was a fair amount of hanky-panky, though the ideal was stated more in terms of passionate friendship than of physical consummation.  Whatever they did or did not do with one another in their late teens, however, most Greek men expected to marry and beget children, and, if erotic art, love poetry, and ribald comedy are correct, men who cheated on their wives chased women more often than men.

For the Athenians, heterosexuality was a mainstream and everyday necessity, while homosexual relations were occasional, restricted to youth and young manhood, and optional.  “Gayness,” as it is known today in America—that is, a primary or exclusive orientation toward other men—was viewed as bizarre and unwholesome.  Such people would be warned not to attend meetings of the assembly (in other words, they lost their political rights) on pain of death.

The problem today is, therefore, not with homosexuals or even with the “gay rights” agenda promoted by homosexual organizations.  Most people would love to exploit their problems to secure special privileges.  In America today, lame people have rights, short people have rights—to say nothing of people who claim to be allergic to peanuts or perfume or a steady job.  As annoying as the whining of the privileged masses can be, it is no worse (considering the general collapse of civilization) than an annoyance.

In the parallel case of the “women’s” movement, the problem with feminism has little to do with individual women trying to get better jobs or higher salaries that they do not deserve but with the feminist ideology that denies the reality of what they call “sexual identity” and the special roles that men and women are called upon to play.  Similarly, the problem with the movement to legislate “gay marriage” is not with the few homosexuals who foolishly want to take on the legal and economic burdens that the anti-Christian U.S. government imposes on married couples but with the ideology of homosexualism, an ideology created and sustained by far more heterosexuals than homosexuals.

I have neither the interest nor the stomach to trace the complete history of the homosexualist ideology.  Part of it clearly derives from Renaissance Hellenism, which was not merely a discovery of the Greek language and literature but the deliberate use of ancient Greek culture as a weapon against the Church.  The Medici family, which supported the neoplatonist conspiracy against Christianity, nourished every vice, and it is no accident that the last of the ugly lot, so memorably described by Harold Acton, lay in bed all day in a drunken stupor, rousing himself only to observe the sexual antics of the ragamuffins he hired to enflame his imagination.

The men of the Enlightenment were fornicators and adulterers but not, for the most part, homosexual.  Odd things went on at the Palais Royal, but still odder is Voltaire’s famous statement about sodomy: that once makes you a philosopher, twice makes you a pervert.  Why in the world would an act of sodomy constitute a philosophical act?  Precisely because a heterosexual finds it disgusting.  It breaks down an important barrier between the world of normal experience, restricted by categories of sex, age, status, and nationality, and the completely open world of undifferentiated individuals advocated by liberal intellectuals since the 18th century.

Voltaire’s statement has to be read in a wider context: Repellent acts are often a requirement in initiation rituals: Aspiring gangbangers may have to commit a murder, and initiates into Hell’s Angels were given a particularly repulsive erotic (heterosexual) chore to perform.  The greatest of the philosophes, the Marquis de Sade, took the Enlightenment to its ultimate conclusion.  God did not exist; religion and morality were invented to repress mankind; therefore, rape, torture, and multisexual orgies were all part of a program for liberating the human spirit from the shackles of Christianity.  Like his disciples today, Sade opposed capital punishment and favored abortion—the opposite of the historic Christian position.  For Sade, as for liberals today, abortion and homosexualism are merely different aspects of the same campaign to destroy the connection between sex and procreation.

Feminism is another, and women can only be fully liberated if they kill their children.  Some men, however timidly, continue to draw the line at eliminating their genetic future, but heterosexual American males who cannot have an abortion themselves and would not dream of encouraging a wife or daughter to kill a child can, nonetheless, take part in the Sadean revolution by breaking down the barrier between masculinity and femininity.  I cannot be the only older man in America who finds most young men unbearably epicene.  Even the macho louts who pinch waitresses and harass women on the street pouf their hair, pour on perfume, and talk with a voice as drained of masculinity as any NPR announcer.

When was the last time you heard a young man’s voice on NPR?  (Bob Edwards is an old guy like me.)  When was the last time you saw a major film with a manly male under 50?  Who are the stars today?  Pick them at random: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio, Elijah Wood.  Elijah Wood?  What film genius decided to portray Frodo as a testosterone-deprived homosexual?  (No, I haven’t seen the movie.  There are a lot of things I have not done and do not intend to do, and you probably do not want me so much as to name them.)  None of these celluloid gentlemen is virile enough to qualify for the position of eunuch in a seraglio, but they, presumably, are inspiring the erotic dreams of the Wal-Mart clerks, Methodist pastorettes, and high-school English teachers who go to movies.

Metrosexual is the codeword used to destigmatize and celebrate the effeminate and the epicene, and soft-voiced metrosexuals are everywhere displacing men, as in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  They are everywhere on television, selling cars, wooing bachelorettes, pontificating on the political events that they do not understand, posing as ministers of the Gospel.

Most of the girlie boys on TV (to borrow Ann Coulter’s phrase) are not homosexuals, but they present a problem that is far worse.  Homosexuals, after a certain number of years, are what they are, and their choice (for most of them) is being “gay” or being celibate.  Of course, they were not predestined by their genes or childhood, but each of us is the sum total of experiences, our own and our ancestors’.  “I am a part of all that I have met,” declared Tennyson’s Ulysses, and, if Ulysses were one of the nice guys on Queer Eye, he would have a hard time turning himself into Gary Cooper.

But the epicenes and Ganymedes are self-created out of fear—fear of conflict, fear of social disapproval, fear of women, fear of being men, and fear of having to take the responsibility that men have to take.

Perhaps their fathers never took them fishing or gave them a pair of boxing gloves.  Whatever the reason, whether it is out of fear or wilderness deprivation, or—what is more likely—because they have willingly signed on to the left’s Sadean agenda, the metrosexuals are promoting homosexualism in ways that no homosexual can.  My own conclusion is that we should leave the “gays” to their own world and save our anger and disgust for the high-voiced, soft-palmed, hair-waved, nonjudgmental, unthreatening unmale nonpersons who will soon be putting the last real men onto tribal homelands.

We might start with the girlie boys who bray so loudly for wars that they will never fight in.  Since so many of the “chicken hawks” have never landed a bass or shot a duck or decked (or been decked by) an enemy, they might benefit from a treatment of shock-virility.  Perhaps Chilton Williamson could take them on an elk hunt, or they could go down to Florida and spend two weeks with Bill Mills, learning to drive a truck, fish, and drink like a man.  Roger McGrath could teach them how to surf and scrap; Chris Check could try to make Marines of them.  Then Aaron Wolf could take them deer hunting on Dan Harrington’s farm or, better still, beat them into repentance.  After all, Jack Palance made a man out of one Billy Crystal (at least in the movie).  Think what a few Chronicles editors could do with the others.

This article first appeared in the March 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The first is Adam Wolfson, editor of the Public Interest and virtually unknown outside of it.  In the Winter 2004 issue, Mr. Wolfson, himself a neoconservative, published an article entitled “Conservatives and Neoconservatives.”  Much of what he says about conservatism, its history, and the various subspecies included in it is simply wrong, and, in general, the article is not worth reading.  What he has to say about paleoconservatism, however, is of some interest, because it reveals what the average neocon mind thinks.

What Mr. Wolfson thinks is that paleoconservatives are just plain oddwads who are “not conservatives so much as reactionaries or pseudo-radicals” and who “can fairly be said to despise much of contemporary American life and would like somehow to move beyond the modern American political debate.”  In itself, that is probably not a bad description of most paleos and what they think, but, to Mr. Wolfson, it is simply inconceivable that any sane person would think it at all, let alone frame it in the body of ideas that some paleos seem to invoke.  Thus, Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming “has looked to sociobiology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology—hardly traditional conservative guides—for a new beginning,” while paleo historian Paul Gottfried has “sought solutions in the philosophy of Carl Schmitt as well as varieties of historicist ideology,” and “Samuel Francis . . . has called for ‘radical opposition to the regime.’”  Clearly, the idea that someone could mount a serious critique of contemporary American life, want to move beyond the “modern American political debate,” demand “radical opposition” to the dominant forces in national life, and then frame such “pseudo-radicalism” in ideas drawn from sociobiology and anthropology, Carl Schmitt, and historicism is just too weird.  Like most neocons, Mr. Wolfson is deeply frightened by unconventional thought of any species and has trouble assimilating it within the conventions that comfort him.  Supposing that his brief and grotesquely simplified account of paleoconservatism has sufficiently exposed its absurdities, he passes on in the bulk of his essay to expounding the brilliance of neoconservatism.  There is no need to follow him there.

Mr. Wolfson and his fellow neocons like America the way it is and the way it promises to become in the future—the First Universal Nation, a vast plastic palace of shopping malls, canned sitcoms, fast food, elevator music, two mass political parties that say and do the same thing, and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace—and anyone who dislikes this or sees a problem with it is a “reactionary or pseudo-radical.”  In this sense, the neoconservatives really are “conservatives” who wish to conserve the “regime”—the system of domination by which the First Universal Nation is constructed, ruled, and enforced.

It is not very surprising that neocons such as Mr. Wolfson do not like paleo-conservatism, but the other critic who popped up recently was perhaps less predictable.  Donald J. Devine, vice chairman of the American Conservative Union, launched a critique of the paleos on the ACU Foundation website last December.  More precisely, Mr. Devine launched a critique of me.

The criticism was mainly a reply to my column in this space in the December 2003 issue, in which I discussed the recent admissions of failure of the “conservative movement” by various of its elders and concluded that the movement was dead.  Mr. Devine apparently did not care for that conclusion, but then, to judge from what he wrote, he did not quite grasp what I was talking about.

In the first place, Mr. Devine writes that I concluded that “fusionism ‘died childless.’”  In fact, I said nothing whatsoever about “fusionism”—the label for a 1960’s makeshift conservative ideology to which Mr. Devine seems to adhere religiously—but addressed the “conservative movement” as a whole.  Fusionism was mainly the brainchild of National Review editor Frank S. Meyer, an ostensible attempt to wed the ideas of the “traditionalist” wing of the movement (e.g., Russell Kirk et al.) with the libertarian wing (e.g., Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, et al.).  Meyer more or less defined “fusionism” (I don’t believe he actually used the term) by the mantra that the American tradition was “a tradition of liberty,” so that the True Conservative did affirm the importance of “tradition” so long as the tradition he supported was the one that affirmed “liberty.”  In fact, Meyer’s fusionism amounted to little more than an effort to swallow “traditionalism” and conservatism itself by libertarianism and to read out of the movement anyone who disagreed—including Russell Kirk himself.  When Kirk was founding the journal Modern Age, a traditionalist organ, Meyer’s ally, Frank Chodorov, sent Kirk’s founding editors copies of Meyer’s attack on Kirk’s The Conservative Mind in The Freeman to try to strangle the new journal in its cradle.  The art of the backstab was not invented by neoconservatives.  A former Communist Party apparatchik, Meyer quickly set himself up as the pope of postwar conservatism through his column in National Review (Principles and Heresies—Meyer was the Principle; everyone else, the Heresy) and his indefatigable work as a conservative activist.  Meyer was, in fact, a sound conservative on most political issues, but his command of political theory seems to have been confined to a textbook knowledge, and his dogmatism helped drive from the “movement” just about anyone with an independent mind, including some of the best ones.

His manifesto of fusionism, In Defense of Freedom, was pounded with criticism by almost every major thinker associated with conservatism—not only Kirk, in a devastating review in the Sewanee Review, but Fr. Stanley Parry, Willmoore Kendall, Richard M. Weaver, and Whittaker Chambers, among others.  The value of fusionism, however, was that it offered an ideology, a quick and dirty formula by which wet-nosed conservative activists could crib a few slogans from John Stuart Mill or John Locke when they needed to craft a fundraising letter or debate with the campus communists.  As such, Meyer’s book and the simplicities it offered were a smashing success among the Teen Age Republican set and helped to shape the “conservative mind” of the ensuing generation of the right.  Baptized in the ideological kiddie pool of fusionism, the “movement” was ripe for takeover by neoconservatives who despised it but recognized its usefulness for their own purposes.

Fusionism, however, was never identical with the conservative movement, nor did it serve as its chief ideological vehicle, which is what Mr. Devine seems to think, and my criticism of the “movement” had little to do with Meyer or fusionism per se.  Mr. Devine lurches from one bald inaccuracy and distortion of what I actually wrote to another, the most serious of which is that I denounced “fusionist conservatism” for its preoccupations with “‘pet abstractions’ of liberty, national security, and the Judeo-Christian tradition.”  Of course, my point was not to denounce or reject these concepts in themselves but to criticize conservatives for having turned them into little more than convenient slogans and catchphrases.  I have been writing columns and articles for literally decades defending all these concepts, but apparently Mr. Devine has missed them.

What seems really to have hurt Mr. Devine’s feelings, however, is my claim that conservatism (he says “fusionism”) “died childless,” and so hurt by this was he that he “sent a memo challenging fusionists to show themselves if, in fact, they still existed.”

Happily, “they poured out in hundreds of e-mail responses,” although “Of course most were unfamiliar with the term fusionist . . . but as good conservatives, they knew it when they saw it.”  Well, that’s terrific, but, if the “hundreds” who responded did not know the term fusionism, in what sense can it be said that they were fusionists at all?  Moreover, “hundreds” do not constitute a serious social and political force.  You can get “hundreds” to show up at conventions about the existence of Bigfoot and the Roswell Incident, and, if you have to send out e-mail memos to locate the “hundreds,” they are probably not exactly a rising tide.  My larger point, however, was that the ideology of conservatism as it came to be understood in the 1950’s and 60’s is now defunct because the social framework—the class and cultural institutions that allowed the abstractions to flourish—has now largely vanished.  The counter-attack of the fusionists—all the “hundreds” of them—cannot revive that.

As a fairly typical representative of the moribund “conservative movement,” Mr. Devine exhibits most of its weaknesses, many of which his hero Frank Meyer helped to import and lock into conservative psychology in the first place: a narrow and arid dogmatism; an impatience with ideas that deviate from the “principles” of conservatism; and an unseemly eagerness to ferret out “heresies” and deviant thoughts.  In these respects, he is not very different from Mr. Wolfson, who is so upset at the prospect of a conservatism that knows about sociobiology and Carl Schmitt.  Frank Meyer certainly would not have approved of them either, but, of course, Mr. Devine’s conservatism and Mr. Wolfson’s are quite different—I think.

I know what Mr. Wolfson wants to conserve—the regime of the First Universal Nation—but exactly what it is that Mr. Devine wants to conserve, I cannot tell you, other than the high orthodoxies of fusionism and the pet abstractions of “liberty, national security, and the Judeo-Christian tradition,” and I have no idea what any of that means.  Does he think that the incumbent ruling class of the United States in the federal and state governments, corporations, media conglomerates, and universities and think tanks supports something like fusionism and the catchphrases of which he is so proud?  Does the leadership of any major religious denomination preach them and reflect them in their theology and social beliefs?  Do the schools enforce the ethics of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” or the universities teach and explore it with their students and professors?  The answer, at least for most paleoconservatives, is obvious enough, which means that the regime, the apparatus by which those who have power in this country maintain it, is not something to be “conserved” but is alien and hostile to the concrete meaning of these concepts; that it is not a “conservative” regime but a regime destructive of tradition, community, order, and liberty; and that those who really do believe in the pet abstractions (which means that they wish them to cease being abstractions and to become animating values and forces in American society) need to work seriously on behalf of “radical opposition to the regime.”

I get absolutely nothing from Mr. Devine or his colleagues at the ACU or from any of the other fossils of fusionism that still flop about inside the Beltway that they have any disposition to think or do any of that.  What I see among the remnants of “movement conservatism” today is an obsessive devotion to electing Republicans, to denouncing Bill and Hillary, to applauding any and every war the ruling class decides to drag the country into, to carrying water for Big Business whenever and wherever possible, to deluding voters and donors with constant jabber about “family values” and “free enterprise,” and to denouncing and “turning away” any “heretic” who seems not to be totally on board with their vaunted “principles.”

What paleoconservatism tries to tell Americans is that the dominant forces in their society are no longer committed to conserving the traditions, institutions, and values that created and formed it, and, therefore, that those who are really conservative in any serious sense and wish to live under those traditions, institutions, and values need to oppose the dominant forces and form new ones.  I do not expect that Mr. Wolfson and his neocon buddies will agree with or like this position, because they like precisely the forces paleoconservatives oppose.  As for Mr. Devine and his hundreds of fusionists, I do not know.  Maybe there is still hope that they will see what has happened to the country that they say they want to conserve.  But, quite frankly, so irrelevant has the “conservative movement” become that I do not think it makes an awful lot of difference whether they do or not.

This article first appeared in the March 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

“Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man”
by Thomas Fleming

From Frodo to Elijah Wood.

VIEWS

Boys Will Be Boys
by Roger D. McGrath
(If given half a chance.)

“Gay Marriage”
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.
From Genesis to Revelation, by way of the New Yorker.

NEWS

Marriage and the Law
by Stephen B. Presser
Time for a divorce?

Homosexuality, In the Cards
by Virginia Deane Abernethy
Hating ourselves.

REVIEWS

The Kindness of Strangers
by James O. Tate

Dale Peck: What We Lost

E. Lynn Harris: What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

Stephen B. Presser on Richard A. Posner’s Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy and Lawrence M. Friedman’s American Law in the Twentieth Century

Derek Turner on Peter Ackroyd’s Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

Clark Stooksbury on Joe Conason’s Big Lies: The Right Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Mexico: Open Roads to Nowhere
by V. Groginsky

VITAL SIGNS

CHRISTIANITY: Pulling the Trigger
by David Mills

THE MEDIA: Pink Elephants on Parade
by Marian Kester Coombs

COLUMNS

SINS OF OMISSION
by Roger D. McGrath

PRINCIPALITIES & POWERS
by Samuel Francis

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY
by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
House of Sand and Fog
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DICTATIONS
by Matthew Rarey

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
Another Country
and
At Quaker Meeting
by Barton Sutter

ON THE COVER

Cover and inside illustrations by H. Ward Sterett and Melanie Anderson.

At the beginning of 1999 . . . my wife Cathleen Schine, announced that she no longer wanted to be married to me.  She had to leave, she had to get away for a new life, for she had mysteriously changed in her affections . . . I stood there like a rejected petitioner, chewing my innards but unwilling to fight.  “I have to go to sleep now.”  “But I want to talk.”  Talk was the center, we used to talk over everything, endlessly . . . For almost two decades, I had felt that no thought of mine was complete until I had conveyed it to her . . . We spoke every day, we were amiable and affectionate . . . I was in a rage, but I suppressed it.  Of what use was anger?  I was determined not to become one of those embittered men encountered at work, at a party—men a little too articulate about “women.”

Thus David Denby, movie critic at the New Yorker, describes his reaction to his novelist wife’s leaving him in his brand new and not-particularly-recommended-here book American Sucker.  What was it that had “mysteriously changed” in her affections?  At least one thing for sure: She was leaving him for a woman.  When we examine his response to her announcement, we can say that Mrs. Schine-Denby’s move may have come as a surprise to Mr. Denby, but it is definitely no mystery.  It is one individual instance of a species whose “genesis” I will describe here, using the second chapter of the homonymous book, without even needing to refer much to the nineteenth, in the hope that some reader may, by serious reflection on what follows, begin, even if only slowly at first, to flee his moral Decapolis (Manhattan? L.A.? Vermont? Massachusetts? Crawford, Texas?) without looking back—not before, but because, it is too late.

If it was not for help in producing children that a wife was made for the man, then what other help was she made for?  If it was to till the earth together with him, then there was as yet no hard toil to need such assistance; and if there had been the need, a male would have made a better help.  While if it was expedient that one should be in charge and that the other comply, to avoid a clash of wills disturbing the peace of the household, such an arrangement would have been ensured by one being made first, the other later, especially if the latter were created from the former, as the female was in fact created.  The same can be said about companionship, should he grow tired of solitude.  How much more agreeably, after all, for conviviality and conversation would two male friends live together on equal terms than man and wife?  For these reasons I cannot work out what help a wife would have been made to provide the man with, if you take away the purpose of childbearing.

These are the words of Saint Augustine in the ninth chapter of his On the Literal Meaning of Genesis.  They bear careful attention beyond the initial shock they might cause.  The real, historical inequality of women to men clearly implied here is, nonetheless, in Augustine’s view, extrinsic to womanhood as such.  Indeed, it is later presented as a punishment for the Fall in the third chapter of Genesis.  Similarly, a friendly equality between man and woman as between men could never explain their partnership.  The relationship of man and woman is based neither on inequality and servitude, nor on simple equality and friendship, but on something which transcends these poles and thus moves freely between them: procreation.

Thus it is that friendship and hierarchy between members of the same sex have always been more unambiguously friendship or hierarchy than when these are found between members of the opposite sex, whose relationship as male and female is defined by its procreative foundation.  An army (before the days of little Jessica Lynch) or a monastery (of men or of women) or colleges (before Oberlin) have traditionally exemplified this fact: Where are men and women more clearly under authority, while remaining clearly peers, than in these places?

Our society, for ideological reasons, has chosen to judge all human relationships according to the standard of equality and inequality, even the rapport between the sexes.  Thus it was only consistent that the relationship between man and woman would be freed of its original and essential foundation in procreation, a good not precisely measurable by any standard of social equality, since, in a sense, birth and family ties are the natural foundation of any evaluation of equity and inequity within the human race.  The development of effective means of contraception and the promotion of abortion gave the impression of solidity to this putting asunder of what God hath joined together.  So what could the new, nonprocreative standard of male and female be, if not the friendship that obtains between equals?  (We can leave to some of our nation’s Muslim allies the other possible option: servitude.)

Go back and look at David Denby’s words.  What do they reveal if not that he felt bound to view his marriage as primarily a friendship?  Leave it to the embittered to grouse that it had to do with her being a woman!  He had been formed in a milieu that views a man’s expressing rage or shame at being cuckolded—not by another man, but even by a woman—as a tisk-tisk imperfection: as if his marriage was really about being a man and woman after all!  Small wonder, then, that his wife might find a more satisfying friendship with a woman, one with whom her equality was less ambiguous.  So what is wrong with that?  Is that not the case for millions of men and women whose best friends are not their spouses but members of their own sex?  Nothing and yes indeed, but this friendship ended their marriage.  It claimed to take its place.

The replacement of procreation with equality as the foundation of relations between the sexes has required our society to accept homosexuality as legitimate.  After all, the foundation and ideal for the relations between members of the same sex is seen as morally the same as the foundation for relations between the sexes: undifferentiated equality and friendship.  What is wrong with this?  Let the feminist Dame Rebecca West shed some light here for the perplexed reader from her study St. Augustine, a horrible hatchet-job of a book but full of the finest, useful insights, as long as she is not concerned directly with her subject: “[Augustine teaches] in a sentence which with characteristic insight, puts its finger on the real offense of homosexuality, by pointing out that it brings the confusion of passion into the domain where one ought to be able to practice calmly the art of friendship.”

The unhinging of the relationship between man and woman from its procreative framework has led to the sexualization of relationships which ought to remain serenely free of this momentous burden.  Onan has slouched all the way to Gomorrah singing, “Get me to the church on time.”

I am not so much concerned here to give a Dr. Dobson argument against “gay marriage” or even homosexual relationships in general.  I am asserting a self-evident fact that such relationships, to the extent that they are sexual (if this were not the case, then there would be no issue), are, on the witness of Creation, fictitious, illusory, and, yes, perverted.  In the 11th century, St. Peter Damian, in his notorious and devastatingly relevant letter 31 on clerical sodomy, the so-called Book of Gomorrah, made this psychologically and morally trenchant observation:

Tell us, man, what do you seek in another male that you do not find in yourself?  What difference in sex, what varied features of the body? . . . For it is the function of the natural appetite that each should seek outside himself what he cannot find within his own capacity.  Therefore, if the touch of masculine flesh delights you, lay your hands upon yourself and be assured that whatever you do not find in yourself, you seek in vain in the body of another.

What should one man seek from the body of another man?  Only the union of wills, expressed in speech, shared thoughts, expressions of mutual interest.  Let us hear the robustly heterosexual Saint Augustine in an often mistranslated passage of his Confessions:

The union of two in one: this is what is loved in friends, and so loved that a man’s conscience must confess his guilt if he does not love one who loves him in return or does not love in return one who loves him, seeking nothing from his body, but the expression of good will.

The natural law requires the love of friendship between members of the same sex.  Homosexual relationships, however, are inherently dishonest, in both the Latin and the English senses.  They imply a foundation beyond the relationship that is not there.  They outrage the simplicity of equality and—unlike the transcendent, procreative relationship of man and woman—have no alternative to friendship but submission.  By this description, of course, they differ, it would seem, only aesthetically from the NPR-New Yorker ideal of “heterosexual” marriage, which denies its foundation.  And so Mr. Denby and “Ms.” Schine seethe with frustration, while striving to be amicable.  Small wonder, then, that not all homosexuals support giving binding, legal status to their “marriages.”  Here is the great irony of the “equality of the sexes”: It destroys what natural equality there truly is and denies that there is a basis in human society for the sublimation of inequality into a greater, common good.  True marriage has both of these and something even greater.

What is it?  The creation of Eve is about procreation, but not only according to the flesh.  According to Augustine, in the same ninth chapter of On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, the ecstasy of procreative union has its archetype and final cause in the creature’s ecstatic union with God, for which end, the filling up of the number of the blessed, man and woman bring forth new life:

That ecstasy, which God cast on Adam, to put him into a deep sleep, may rightly be understood as cast upon him precisely in order that he in his mind through ecstasy become as it were a member of the angelic court, and so “enter into the sanctuary of God and understand the last things” (Psalm 73:17).  Finally, on waking up full of prophecy so to say when he saw his wife brought to him he immediately burst out with what the apostle holds up to us as a great sacrament: “This is now bone out of my bone and flesh of my flesh, this shall be called woman, since she was taken out of her man: and for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife and the two shall be one flesh.”

Marriage was, from the beginning, the Great Sacrament of the union of God with mankind, of Christ and His Church, in which new birth there is “neither male nor female, Jew or Gentile, slave or free,” but “they shall all be like the angels in heaven, neither marrying nor giving in marriage.”  After all, it was the Bridegroom who said, “I no longer call you servants, but friends because I have revealed to you everything I have heard from my Father.”  There is thus a very profound sense in which a certain supernatural equality is the standard for all relationships—that is, the capacity of man’s heart for a marital union with God.  This is what led David, son of Jesse, foreshadowing the love of the God Who was procreated from him, to cry out (II Samuel 1):

The beauty of Israel is slain upon thine high places: how are the mighty fallen! . . . How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!  O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places.  I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

May God grant such love to David Denby and his many modern brethren.

This article first appeared in the March 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Parents and other interested parties expressed shock and awe, flooding the CBS switchboards with angry protestations: Whose idea was it to have the metrosexual Justin Timberlake tear off half of Janet (“Ms. Jackson, if you’re nasty”) Jackson’s Nazi dominatrix top, leaving nothing between our eyes and her breast, save a small, round metallic decoration?  Were CBS executives aware that Timberlake planned to act out the words “Gonna have you nekkid by the end of this song”?  Will CBS ever allow MTV to produce another halftime show?  (Does it matter that both networks are owned by Viacom?)  Must our children be subjected to such sights “during the dinner hour”?  We, the parents of America, demand answers!

The FCC, we have been assured, is launching a full-scale investigation, and, by the time you read this, Timberlake and Jackson may be in Guantanamo Bay, awaiting trial for deliberate “wardrobe malfunction” (to borrow a phrase from Timberlake), despite the tepid apologies issued by Timberlake, Jackson, CBS, MTV, and the National Football League.

In the end, however, it is the parents of America who ought to be brought up on charges for the perverted message they have sent to their children by singling out the two-second-long breast-exposing affair as the only halftime event that put their children in Grave Moral Danger.

Nearly every other two-second segment of the halftime show was laden with lasciviousness.  Take your pick: Kid Rock, draped in the American flag, singing about “crack-heads,” “hookers,” and his “heros at the methadone clinics”; Nelly (a male rapper) grabbing himself amongst strippers, wondering when he can “shoot his steam,” and adding “It’s hot in here / so take off all your clothes”; or Timberlake’s and Jackson’s entire performance, which can only be described as one extended sex act.  How, exactly, did Janet Jackson’s breast stand out against this background?

The records made by Timberlake, Jackson, Nelly, Kid Rock, and all of their millionaire friends are filled with explicit references to sex.  With that in mind, consider the all-too-typical comments made by Michigan Governor (and mother of three) Jennifer Granholm, who called the bodice-ripping “outrageous”: “Janet Jackson is a role model to girls, whether we like it or not; Justin Timberlake, same thing to young boys. . . . Enough is enough.”  There we have it: Pornographers are role models—but a bare breast?  Now that’s too much!

FCC chief Michael Powell has announced that he hopes to levy fines of $27,500 on every CBS affiliate that broadcast Nipplegate.  How much should parents who allow porn stars to be role models for their children be assessed?

This article first appeared in the March 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.