Who’s afraid of being labeled homophobic? A great many people, that’s who, importuned incessantly by the liberal media and other keepers of the woke flame of proper public behavior. That behavior trends ever more left-wing, collectivist, and anti-Western—following Barack Obama’s “arc of the moral universe.”

The Supreme Court’s recent decision to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for homosexuals and transsexuals into case law makes this matter more relevant than it has been since 2015 when the court ruled in favor of “gay-marriage.” This ruling comes after much media-generated fanfare concerning our first openly gay presidential candidate.

At the end of February, thank God, a benevolent South Carolina windstorm blew Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg into the footnotes of American presidential politics, where, God willing, he will remain—though he quickly formed a political action committee, Win the Era PAC, in order to try to stay in the limelight.

Buttigieg had little to offer: a smart-aleck, 38 year old, charisma-free management consultant, with minimal government, military, or philosophical experience, busily telling everyone how the world should be run―i.e., not in accordance with the traditions of Western civilization.

Western civilization is essentially the heritage—the practices, customs, and manners, as well as the religious beliefs from which they are derived—of Christian Europe, bequeathed to us by our European forebears, who, despite everything you may have heard, founded this country.

Ignorant people may believe some of that heritage was invented recently: women’s equality, for example, which they may think was discovered by the late 19th-century suffrage movement. It was not. Christianity gave women their due centuries before woke liberals appeared.

But already, we are on dangerous ground: the religion of Christianity is precisely what the liberals seek, no less than the communists sought, to abolish, or make irrelevant. And by outlawing religious practices, the left hopes to denude religion of its meaning.

As Attorney General William P. Barr said to the National Religious Broadcasters, “We live at a time when religion—long an essential pillar of our society—is being driven from the public square.”

The three central attacks on religion have been the promotion of abortion, homosexuality and “gender fluidity,” and the trashing of marriage, which has led to a tsunami of illegitimacy. Abortion, forced on the country by national elites, is finally being questioned and, to the elites’ horror, may soon be limited, perhaps severely. The normalization of homosexuality, however, is still ascendant.

Even before Buttigieg appeared on the scene, the homosexual lobby was busily notching up victories. Almost four hundred corporations and employer organizations urged the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges to strike down state bans on gay marriage, claiming in their amicus brief, “Employers are better served by a uniform marriage rule that gives equal dignity to employee relationships.”

In 2018 Catholic Charities of Buffalo phased out its century-old adoption program because it could not comply with state law that required it to allow same-sex couples to adopt children.

And in 2019 the San Antonio City Council banned Chick-fil-A from that city’s airport because the company had donated money to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army. Most Americans would hardly consider such organizations bigoted.

But of course, there’s more. A Texas jury ruled against a father’s attempt to stop his ex-wife from “transitioning” one of his twin seven-year-old sons into a girl. The case continues; maybe the father will win in the end. But if the “transitioning” proceeds, it seems reasonable to blame, among others, Pete Buttigieg for the damage, even if he doesn’t personally wield the knife or administer the pills. We await, and pray for, the lawsuits.

In April The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is considering cutting back on sharing intelligence with countries that criminalize homosexuality. Okay—maybe. But how long before the standard of “not criminalizing homosexuality” becomes “not promoting” the homosexual agenda?

Homosexuals have an uphill climb. What they want―the normalization of abnormal practices―is difficult to impose on normal people, hence the need for enlisting, or capturing, state power in order to achieve their ends. It remains to be seen whether normal people, quietly, routinely, unreflectingly living the Western-civilization life have the wisdom, strength, and courage, to resist the homosexuals before they destroy the culture.

After Buttigieg dropped out, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, a homosexual himself, wrote: “One of the wonders of his unprecedented campaign was how little his sexual orientation was talked about as his bid progressed.” Bruni is exactly correct, and that is living proof of how woke, or desensitized, or scared, we have all become that we would not do battle with the vandals, of which Buttigieg is a leader. Vandals are defined as people who intentionally damage property belonging to other people. The property, in this case, is the heritage of Western civilization, a part of which is: “he created them male and female; and blessed them….” (Genesis 5:2)

Buttigieg is the poster-boy for homosexuality. Having him as president, kissing his “husband” on the White House lawn, would have been a triumph for the forces of anti-Western woke liberalism. But Buttigieg didn’t make it, and the tide might turn against the homosexuals at any moment―as it may even now be turning against the pro-abortion movement. For the homosexual, therefore, there is no time to waste. Hence their ferocity.

Opposing the homosexual agenda doesn’t require hating homosexuals. It just means opposing their attempts to change the culture. This doesn’t require throwing them off tall buildings as some Muslims do, Muhammad reportedly having said that homosexuals “should be thrown from tremendous height then stoned.” But it’s important to understand that those pushing the homosexual agenda seek to destroy Western civilization as surely as the militant Muslims would like to. Unlike many westerners, militant Muslims understand the threat to their culture.

The dictionary definition of “homophobia” is “irrational fear of homosexuals”―but there’s nothing irrational about fearing people who are trying to destroy your culture. Technically, Western civilization enthusiasts are not homophobic because their fear is not irrational.

But anyone who asks if you are homophobic is probably trying to embarrass you. The right answer, because it creates a teaching moment, is a brave “Yes,” followed by, “and you should be too.”


Daniel Oliver is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review. Email Daniel Oliver at [email protected].

 

[Image by Stefano Bolognini / CC BY-SA 3.0 via wikimedia commons, cropped]