Horowitz’s confusions on homosexual rights

With regard to the debate over homosexual rights, David Horowitz at least appears to be deeply contradictory. After passionately denouncing Christian conservatives several months ago as “intolerant bigots” for their opposition to a leftist pro-homosexual organization, the Human Rights Campaign, he himself now goes on a rampage against another leftist pro-homosexual organization, the ACLU, over its efforts to ostracize the Boy Scouts. One moment, Horowitz is trying to silence Christian conservatives in the name of an all-embracing “tolerance” for pro-homosexual activists; the next minute he’s waging his own war against those same activists.

However, before we dismiss Horowitz as terminally confused on this subject, we need to recognize that by his own reasoning he is not contradicting himself at all. In his mind, the Christian conservative leaders’ attack on the Human Rights Campaign was “bigoted” because the Christian leaders spoke of a “homosexual agenda.” According to Horowitz, there is no such thing as a homosexual agenda. There is only a leftist agenda, which falsely speaks for homosexuals, just as racial quota advocates falsely speak for blacks, and just as open-the-borders advocates falsely speak for immigrants and illegal aliens. We must remember that in Horowitz’s political geography, leftist organizations are the virtually sole source of political ills in America, while the actual ethnic/sexual interest groups whose “rights” are being advanced by those organizations are not a problem and cannot be morally seen as a problem. Thus he addressed the Christian conservative leaders: “It is the left that insists its radical agendas are the agendas of blacks and women and gays. Are you ready to make this concession—that the left speaks for these groups, for minorities and ‘the oppressed?’”

This is very close to the Bush administration’s disastrous argument in its misnamed “war on terror”—that Muslims are not the problem, but only the extremists and terrorists who falsely claim to speak in their name. The distinction is false and dangerous. When the president of a Muslim majority country denounces world Jewry in classic anti-Semitic language before an international conference of leaders of Muslim countries and receives a standing ovation from those leaders, those acts can be fairly said to represent the Muslim world, even if not all Muslims as individuals share those views. In the same way, when activist organizations and public officials seek to advance special rights for homosexuals and to destroy traditional organizations like the Boy Scouts, and when, moreover, that same agenda is clearly backed by a majority of homosexuals, we can fairly say that such organizations and such leaders represent homosexuals, even if not all homosexuals as individuals support every aspect of that agenda.

The proof of what I’ve just said can be seen in the ineluctable connection between numbers and power. As Muslims have become more numerous in the Western world, the Muslim jihadist agenda (which President Bush says is not a Muslim jihadist agenda but only a terrorist agenda) has grown more powerful. Similarly, as homosexuals have become more accepted and mainstreamed in America, the homosexual agenda (which Horowitz insists is not a homosexual agenda but only a leftist agenda) has grown more powerful. The fact that there are some powerless “moderate” Muslims, just as there are some powerless “conservative” gays, does not change the fact that the dominant core of each of these groups is extremist, and that therefore the group’s extremism can only be successfully resisted by resisting that group as a group.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 04, 2003 12:22 PM | Send