Why are Santorum’s remarks an issue at all? How is it that an allegedly conservative administration and congress who enjoy high approval ratings fail to defend Santorum’s obvious, common-sense statement? What does the electorate think about the GLSEN/Gay/Tranzi agenda for the destruction of tradtional marriage and families? Is this simply an issue drummed up by the Tranzi-controlled mainstream media, or are Joe Sixpack and Sally Soccermom, as participants in a
libertine, amoral lifestyle advocated by the popular culture in
which they are immersed, simply incapacitated in their
ability to make any sort of moral judgement?

I must say that for a long time I resisted reading Santorum’s statement, partly because I mostly avoid the news of the day and partly because of a prejudice that when someone on “our side” in public life says something on an important issue he’ll botch it. When I finally read the whole thing in response to Mr. Auster’s challenge to defend it against Andrew Sullivan’s attack I was impressed how thoughtful, substantive and moderate it was. Quite a contrast to Sullivan.

The Santorum Affair relates to what I wrote in this forum several months ago during the Lott imbroglio. Every time a GOP figure says something the PC commisars don’t like, he will be attacked in this fashion. The neocons never thought of that, did they?

Fifty years ago this was still a topic that was unmentionable in polite society. And such conduct was illegal everywhere.

Then we were told that it was necessary to amend these laws out of concern for privacy. Many sympathized with this argument.

But it didn’t stop there. This ‘community’ went public with a vengeance, demanding not only ‘rights’ but public approbation and legitimization. They have now demanded the right to have their contractual unions legally recognized on par with traditional marriage. They have infiltrated our public school system in many regions so that Kindergartners now learn that Heather Has Two Mommies.

This is going to get worse, due to the very nature of the perversion. At present, the activistic push to obtain public ‘acceptance’ of this deviance offsets to some extent what the ‘lifestyle’ itself cannot satisfy. The promiscuous tendency of this practice of course is also very symptomatic of its shorcomings.

Once accepted, still further steps will need to be taken in the search for the satiation that unnatural pursuits can’t provide. The nature of the acts committed — deliberately downplaid now for strategic political reasons, will take an even more depraved turn. This will undoubtedly include the ‘right’ to engage in child molestation. (Oh, pardon me — that’s “intergenerational intimacy.”)

Among the people who suffer are former homosexuals who have been delivered from this deathstyle. They are pilloried and villified, and generally defamed. Funny how plausible it seems to this crowd that someone could pretend to be heterosexual but then ‘find himself’ as actually being a homo, and yet it’s not allowed for a person who was homo to finally come to realize that they would like to be normal, like having a wife and children. And there are those who are still in this community who want to get out but feel trapped by the social pressures brought to bear, in addition to the low feelings of self-esteem, as many ex-homosexuals attest. THEY are the ones who really suffer.

So much for the tolerance this community claims to seek.

Another group who suffers is young boys, especially those who are not popular with the girls during those years when they are discovering their own desires and sexual drive. They are easy prey for predatory adults, initiated into experiences that could have lasting repurcessions.

And of course, the general public is harmed by this, not only in the assault on age-old morality, but in general health matters. The promiscuity and risky nature of the practice makes this group very prone to deadly sexually transmitted diseases, which gradually filter into the general population.

HIV carriers of course should have been quarantined from the beginning — this is a DEADLY, communicable disease! The reason why this wasn’t done is eminently clear. Innocent people have paid for it with their lives, as advancement of the homosexual agenda trumped concern for public health.

No, this is not a light and trivial matter. It is one thing to recognize the inconsistency of our humanitarian values with overt persecution of homosexuals. But society has a right to discourage this wretched practice, including through legal means. The accumlated wisdom of thousands of years supports this.

Now Sen. Santorum’s analysis was of a straightforward legal matter. He simply stated that if the law cannot proscribe homosexual conduct, then it can hardly proscribe other types of conduct that share similar circumstances, as that they are done in private and are of a consensual nature. This is not in itself the same as comparing the different practices mentioned — one can only laugh at the Utah resident who objected to polygamy being compared to homosexuality. It was not. This was strictly a matter of legal reasoning, and obviously was correct. In fact, no one has come forth to show a plausible reason why one could be proscribed and not the others according the the legal arguments advanced in this case.

THAT is probably the reason for the shrill response from people like Mr. Sullivan. A critical flaw in their arguments has been ‘outed.’

Joel, re your “deathstyle” comment, you might be interested in the following link http://www.narth.com/docs/atleast.html

Clarification: I just realized that Justice White’s words could be misconstrued: “It would be difficult, except by fiat, to limit the claimed right to homosexual conduct while leaving exposed to prosecution adultery, incest, and other sexual crimes even though they are committed in the home.” The phrasing is slightly confusing as it could be read to mean that what is being sought is to “limit” a “right to homosexual conduct.” That interpretation would make a hash out of the whole sentence. What White meant was that plaintiffs were saying that the right of consensual conduct that they were seeking was limited to homosexual conduct, and would not extend to other forms of conduct. White, like Santorum, is expressing his doubts about the logical and practical possibility of limiting the claimed right to only homosexual conduct.

Whatever happened to freedom of speech? These liberals seek total freedom for their lifestyles while wanting to take away the freedom of speech for everyone else. Its hypocritical. Even if you disagree with the guy, tell him so, dont start ranting and raving about removing him from office or threatening him with legal action. Soon with all the hate crimes garbage, to even be a Christian that says politely “I believe homosexuality is wrong” will be reason for a fine and a jail sentence.

About 12 years ago, a writer names Nicholas Davidson wrote in Chronicles that pretty soon traditional moral views would simply be illegal. We’re still moving in the direction he prophecied.

“Whatever happened to freedom of speech?”

Freedom of speech started out as a right to say things against the current established order without fear of being charged with treason or other reprisals; it started out as a tool in support of liberal rebellion. The pretense that plenary “freedom of speech” is value-neutral has always been just that: a pretense. “Freedom of speech” has always meant an assertion of liberal power over and against the traditional order, and of course the liberal rebellion has now become the established order. “Freedom of speech” has never meant freedom to support the king and the traditional moral order against liberalism: it has always meant a right to rebel without repercussions, at least verbally, against that order.

We traditionalists have our own speech codes, our own restrictions on free speech, etc (witness the recent flap about making crass atheist assertions in this public Christian forum on Easter). We call our speech codes names like honor; dignity; propriety. The fundamental difference is that our speech codes are based in the traditional moral order, which rests ultimately on objective transcendent truth; whereas liberalism is based on assertion of the human will as the ultimate standard.

There is no possibility, even in the abstract, of a “right to free speech” that does not favor liberalism over the traditional moral order. Among traditionalists there can be reasonable room for debate, concession to the fact that we are human and do not often have perfect access to the truth. There can be respect and honorable treatment of other human beings in the context of our imperfect, fallen world. There can be a presumption, often against experience and better judgement, that a speaker has something to say that is worthy of the air through which it is breathed. But there can not be — not even in principle — a fundamental inalienable right to assert anything whatsoever that one wills to whomever one wants without social, economic, and potentially legal consequences. Therefore discourse favoring a “right to free speech” serves liberalism, and only liberalism, over and against traditionalism.

Unless we repent from our liberalism at a very basic, fundamental level the West will self destruct utterly.

An informative history lesson from Matt. But it seems that because the established order is liberal, the current degree of freedom of speech will harm liberalism. This site is an example of free speech. It is teaching people how to fight the established order.

Some restriction on speech is necessary, but for the most part and over the long term, it seems that the truth will be spoken and learned. So I am unsure that freedom of speech will always favor liberalism. It seems freedom of speech is a necessary part of traditionalism. It seems that hard work and commitment, among many other things, will be the determining factors in the war of words with liberalism, which is based on lies.

It is true that because rebellion is intrinsic to liberalism, once liberalism becomes the established order different factions within it begin to eat each other like mutually antagonistic hydra heads. There may (or may not, it is difficult to say) be some merit in traditionalists encouraging this process, at least in certain times and places. Actually participating in it by adopting (or failing to repent from) liberal principles is another matter, though. It is my own opinion that our repentance from liberalism needs to be total.

Part of the problem of course is that one can always backpedal and claim that the liberal “right of free speech” means (or perhaps used to mean in some classical liberal utopian past) something reasonable, even though on the other hand liberal rights are supposed to be presumptively absolute and inalienable until they violate the rights of another. That is why I used reasonable but illiberal words to describe how one might have a non-tyrannical approach that was traditional rather than liberal: “Among traditionalists there can be reasonable room for debate, concession to the fact that we are human and do not often have perfect access to the truth. There can be respect and honorable treatment of other human beings in the context of our imperfect, fallen world. There can be a presumption, often against experience and better judgement, that a speaker has something to say that is worthy of the air through which it is breathed.”

Does an absolute inalienable right to free speech make any sense except as an arational bludgeon against traditionalism? No. Can someone attempt to backpedal from the absolute inalienable right and present it as though it were something reasonable; as though it were simply a modest form of a traditional and reasonable view codified with the liberal language of “rights”? Yes.

Do such attempts at equivocation help the cause of traditionalist repentance from liberalism? No.

A traditionalist can’t object to speech codes as such. A traditionalist can object to liberalism, and can claim that liberal speech codes are divorced from the truth: that they have substituted the lie of asserted will for the transcendent truth of the traditional moral order. But the argument that speech codes qua speech codes are unnaceptable or even undesirable is a purely liberal argument.

Matt is getting at something very fundamental. It is that the good of any society is concrete, not abstract, and that the forms of freedom appropriate to that society—which also implies the forms of restriction appropriate to that society—will flow logically from the society’s notion of the good. This is what all societies in practice do and can’t help but doing. But liberal society, to a unique degree, PRETENDS to itself that it is doing otherwise. Liberal society PRETENDS that it believes in a universal equal right of free speech, when, in fact, as Matt points out, this equal freedom of speech greatly favors those who are advancing liberalism and disadvantages whose who are defending any remaining tradition. The same fallacy holds with “freedom” generally. In reality, there is no universal freedom; there are particular freedoms, the exercise of which will interfere with other particular freedoms. For example, the freedom of advertisers to fill the public spaces with sexually exhibitionist or perverse advertisements destroys the freedom of the rest of us to have a decent public environment in conformity with Christian or bourgeois sensibilities. The freedom of foreigners to enter a country en masse destroys the freedom of the natives to have any real choice over the destiny of their country.

So every society will encourage those freedoms that are compatible with its particular form of existence and discourage others. The ability to determine what is allowed and what is not allowed is power. All societies rest on such power. But liberal society, as I said, denies to itself that it exercises power. The result is that its power is hidden and thus less accountable. Another result is that it becomes much harder to discuss the real choices that the society faces. For example, the real choice we face vis a vis immigration is between immigrants’ freedom to come here and our freedom to maintain our own society. But as long as the issue is presented in terms of a universal (ie. a non-existent and fraudulent) freedom, it becomes impossible to articulate the real issue.

This is a vast subject and much more could be said about it.

These are all great contributions; I have the impression that the success of the liberal drive for free speech must have startled its most ardent proponents. This is why today they resort to the standard fall-back response to a dissenter: try to ruin the speaker’s reputation and livelihood. I’ve been through it myself. That said, I find myself on the side of P Murgos rather than Matt’s.

It may well be that near-absolute freedom of speech such as we enjoy in the US (I’m talking in the constitutional sense, ignoring issues of private libel and societal retaliation) has been a liberal-driven concept. But should that make us shy away from using it? In the last 10-15 years there has been an upsurge of conservative opinion, in print as well as in the broadcast media. You could speak of a renaissance. I don’t see how it could have happened if American First Amendment protections had been as circumscribed as they are in continental Europe or Canada. In those places Liberalism, with its emphasis on “fairness” and its abhorrence of offending group rights has succeeded in outlawing the forceful expression of conservative values that we take for granted here. In Germany, a crooked liberal politician like Schroeder is protected from the German media by privacy laws, and he is looking forward to the day when under EU law he can also muzzle the British tabloids’ probing into his “private life”. In France and in Holland, writers and even clerics can be prosecuted for preaching “hate” against an offended population group, of which there are endless numbers. With full access to the benefits of the EU’s Human Rights laws, the Church of England will be forced to ordain practicing homosexuals; these are all facts.

It seems to be in the nature of conservatism to be reluctant to step into the public arena and slug it out with the social deconstructionists; we don’t like to get our hands dirty. Nevertheless, our near-total freedom of speech is a great good, and I’m inclined to be on the side of the Supreme Court Justice, whichever one it was, who stated that the marketplace of ideas should be open to all, good and bad, to let them slug it out.

Mr. Auster’s emphasis on concreteness versus abstraction is very helpful here. Wim points out validly enough that the actual concrete restrictions on speech and other activities in Europe are based in liberalism. But again the issue is not abstract restrictions qua restrictions; the issue is that the actual restrictions are substantively liberal (to the extent one can use the term “substantively” to describe anything liberal, of course; descriptions of a self-contradictory ideology like liberalism will always necessarily be problemmatic).

Faced with a choice of substantively liberal versus discursive duking-out it is no great wonder that conservatives prefer the latter, as a day-to-day practical matter. This is a great example of the damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t dilemma that conservatives will always face under a liberal order. The only way to avoid the dilemma, it seems to me, is to reject liberalism’s abstract universalist discourse; it is to reject the liberal premeses that are implicitly asserted prior to the presentation of the dilemma.

Mr. Auster’s example is helpful: “the freedom of advertisers to fill the public spaces with sexually exhibitionist or perverse advertisements destroys the freedom of the rest of us to have a decent public environment in conformity with Christian or bourgeois sensibilities.” The difficulty in accepting the idea of less-than-free speech is the inability to picture what speech restrictions a good society could have. Because most people do not question the supposed virtue of free speech, most people find it difficult to imagine things being different. Mr. Auster’s example paints part of the picture of a society with less than free speech. This is another example of how one can learn from this Website.

As Mr. Murgos points out, it is difficult for us even to imagine an alternative to a society wholly given over to expressive freedom and to secularism generally. And that indicates how pervasive is the grip of liberalism over us. A key reading in this connection is L. Brent Bozell’s 1969 essay, “Letter to Yourselves,” from his book Mustard Seeds. Its theme is the impossibility of sustaining a Christian or even a decent culture when the public spaces and institutions are resolutely secular.

Here are some excerpts: “[The modern conservative] criticism of the liberal education system, while usually valid as far as it has gone, has not … proposed a helpful reform of the system because it has not proposed to make going to school an occasion of grace.” “[Modern conservative politics] have not acknowledged the Christian teaching that the proper goal for the orderers of the public life is to help open men to Christ.” “For the great generality of men a Christian civilization [is] the indispensable medium for communicating the Christian message.” Bozell quotes a Jean Danielou, a French Jesuit: “It is practically impossible for any but the militant Christian to persevere in a milieu which offers him no support…. [Pascal saw] a conflict, a ripping apart, an abyss between an interior experience which has no outside evidence of its existence and a cold world which contradicts it.”

Even if we leave aside the specifically Christian content of these ideas (which I wouldn’t want to do), the connection between the external societal environment and the interior spiritual life is a fundamental point which simply doesn’t occur to modern conservatives. If there’s anything that traditionalist conservatives should strive for and believe in, it’s a society whose public environment reflects and supports the good, the true, and the beautiful, or at least one that is not continually violating the good, the true, and the beautiful. And that means a society that consciously and systematically favors certain concrete and particular values over other, secular values, such as total freedom of expression. Without some thinking along these lines, conservatism is only neo-conservatism, a conservatism of ideas, not of substances.

A Mullah hoping to establish an Islamist state might be heartened by the direction this discussion is taking. So might a P.C. activist. If at present we’re willing to accept a less open society because it would support our own sensibilities, one or two generations from now those limits could be put to a use we don’t like at all.

Is Wim seriously suggesting that if the West became once again the Christian West, that would help advance the Islamist agenda of taking over the West? The West has become so open to Islamic incursions precisely because it has given up its former moral and religious essence and so is equally open to all beliefs, including Islam.

Up to the mid 20th century, public institutions in this country still reflected and supported to a significant degree the Christian religion and traditional, Judeo-Christian morality, and there was much less personal freedom of expression than there is now. With all due regard to Wim, that was not a world of politically correct tyranny or fascism or Mullahs. That was a world of the then still-existing Christian West, with liberty under law, and one nation under God. It was not the totally open society we have today. And you know what? In that less open America, we also didn’t have the White House surrounded by several blocks of barricades to protect it from the Muslim terrorists who have been permitted into this country through our philosophy of total openness.

Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned while traveling, you can go back to a place, but you can’t go back to a time.

Given the present state of legal reasoning in this country, even if you were able to re-create your Christian utopia (if it ever existed), in due course it could be turned upside down using the same legal mechanisms that made it possible in the first place.

And maybe it wouldn’t be the Muslims or the Hindus who’d be taking advantage. Look at how in a few decades, virtually every mainline Christian church has been perverted from the inside.

What was that again: “Be careful what you wish for, because you may get it” ?

Wim wrote:
“If at present we’re willing to accept a less open society because it would support our own sensibilities, one or two generations from now those limits could be put to a use we don’t like at all.”

And again this dismisses the particular (as “sensibilities”), makes a self-contradictory abstraction-in-itself the sole measure of politics, and thereby asserts liberal nihilism as the only actual concrete possibility. In Wim’s expressed view the abstract possibility of restrictions on plenary freedom of speech is unnacceptable simply because some conceivable concrete instances of the abstraction — say in a blasphemous Islamic theocracy — would be unnacceptable. If we (the ubiquitous deified “we” that stands above civilization and manipulates its levers) allow for a Christian King to expect (and in the extreme enforce) civilized public behavior - including civlized public speech - then we may as well hand the keys of the kingdom to the Mullahs. All this is the case in Wim’s view, apparently, despite the fact that this mythical utopia of free speech has not, can not, and will not exist ever in the actual concrete world in which we live. Every polity including ours has its speech codes; every polity including ours always has had its speech codes; every polity including ours always will have its speech codes. But the alternative apparently is to accept Wim’s free speech utopia on the one hand or submit to dhimmitude on the other; because to the liberal mind there is no difference between one concrete authority and another. Allowing any concrete authority over speech — from that place of metacontrol standing above ourselves and pulling society’s levers — constitutes the same folly irrespective of any particulars: all concrete authority is anathema.

The problem, once again, is not authority in the form of restrictions on speech as an abstraction. That sort of authority always has been with us, and, in this fallen world, always will be. These sorts of facts are best faced squarely.

No, the problem is not the abstraction of authority-over-speech qua authority-over-speech. The problem is the actual current concrete authority. The problem is that authority over speech is now held by liberalism, which exhalts the human will exercised freely and equally (despite the fact that that is a nonsequitir) over objective actual truth (which we come to know in part through tradition and other things that we do not will).

Maybe it’s me, of course, but Matt’s theocratic musings are as comprehensible as his spelling is impeccable. As he puts it, not once but twice in one sentence, this is “unnacceptable”. What sort of halter is worn by “Liberalism which exhalts the human will”? And that “despite the fact that that is a nonsequitir.”

Check that bottle. Quale vinum, tale Latinum.

Fi donc.

Indeed, to a liberal anything that acknowledges as fact the universal existence of particular authority in politics is incomprehensible. All possible particular authorities are indistinguishably equal tyrannies to the liberal mind (and thus “theocratic musings”), despite the fact that all actual governments of any sort — including current liberal ones — are particular authorities. Indeed even Merriam-Webster is a particular authority of a sort, and one over speech at that; although invocation of that particular authority in the current discussion seems a bit off point.

But then, for the liberals, some particular authorities are mysteriously ok, as determined on the basis of the unprincipled exception, without which any political and social existence would be impossible.

Precisely: liberals live and die by the unprincipled exception, because consistency is not possible even in principle for liberals (whether of the modern, classical, or some other type). Thus (e.g.) being critical of open borders is not “free speech” but rather “hate speech”, the “hate speech” formulation providing the means for this particular unprincipled exception. For example we have this from a recent article entitled “Hate on the Net”:

“Another site is the Canadian Association for the Freedom of Expression. The group says it is protecting civil liberties like free speech.

But if you scroll down the home page, the writers are also against Canada’s immigration policies that open citizenship to people from all parts of the world.”

http://www.canoe.ca/LondonToday/lf.lf-05-05-0082.html

Liberalism in order to function has to exercise particular authority, including particular authority over speech, like any other political ideology. What makes liberalism unique is its denial of the fact that it exercises such authority. Of course conservatives can criticize that hypocrisy, but a spirit of rebellion against authority over speech _in the abstract_ helps liberalism and does nothing for conservatism. All polities must exercise particular authority over the actions of their citizens, including the speech of their citizens. Liberal polities must do so while denying that they do so; it is this antinomy within liberalism that must be unwound, not the necessity for authority in general.