What happens to the mainstream culture when a minority culture is treated as equal with it

Mark J. (not Jaws) writes:

A liberal friend told me an anecdote that illustrated for me some real-life consequences heterosexuals are faced with when homosexuality is de-stigmatized.

She was telling me about how she and her husband have started taking salsa dance lessons at a local community education center in their liberal Upper Midwestern city. There are ten or so couples in the class—one of them a pair of homosexual men.

At a certain point, the teacher explained that changing partners was part of the experience of dancing. The teacher said that anyone who only wanted to dance with their own partner could do so, and then the partner-switching dance practice commenced.

My friend’s husband ended up with one of the homosexual men as a partner. A committed liberal himself, he laughed it off and proceeded to salsa dance with this homosexual man as a partner.

Hearing this anecdote, and imagining how I might handle this situation if faced with it, I realized that this is an example of the kind of unanticipated consequence of de-stigmatizing homosexuality that liberals promise us won’t occur. The liberals tell us that we shouldn’t be cold and mean, that homosexuals are just people like anyone else, and that if they want to do their thing it isn’t going to affect us. This friend of mine has said, for example, with regard to homosexual marriage: “if they want to get married, that doesn’t hurt me. Who cares?” Well once you start treating male-male relationships as if they are no different than male-female relationships, the next thing you know you’re at your salsa lesson facing a homosexual man for a dance partner.

And you’re in a no-win situation. If you only refuse to dance with the homosexual man, you are put in the position of having to be publicly rude to someone and making a scene. If you sit out the partner-changing part of the practice entirely, you miss out on part of the experience of dancing. Or you could just not take salsa lessons at all, and in fact avoid any social situations where couples interact so as not to be faced with being forced to interact with homosexuals. (Or I suppose you could go ahead, like my friend’s husband, and jump right into some hot, sexy salsa dancing with a homosexual man.)

If you wanted to avoid the issue by organizing dance lessons for heterosexual couples only, you would be accused of discrimination. There is no socially acceptable way at this point for dancing classes to exclude homosexual couples. So heterosexual men who want to learn to dance are either going to have to accept dancing with other men or go without.

This is how it goes with these liberal changes. At first they promise that we won’t be affected by them, that our lives won’t be any different. But after their changes are implemented, and it becomes apparent in a hundred different unanticipated ways that our lives ARE affected, liberals pass laws forbidding anyone to express their discomfort (as in the case of the French persecuting Brigitte Bardot for her comments about Muslims), indoctrinate our children in school to try to train them not to see the differences (as in the Swedish primary school where little boys were made to wear dresses for a period of time), and subject adults to Chinese-style “self-criticism”/reeducation classes (“sensitivity training”) in the workplace.

LA replies:

This is a perfect example of how right-liberalism (the belief that all people are equal as individuals and there should be no discrimination), leads to left-liberalism (the substantive destruction of the existing culture, ethos, and liberties). To put it a different way, there cannot be equality between incompatible things. One or the other must rule. If the traditional, heterosexual ethos is changed into a neutral, liberal ethos in which heterosexuality and homosexuality are seen as equal, then inevitably you will have a homosexual ethos in charge, and the heterosexual ethos will not be able to express itself.

There is no way to prevent this from happening other than by not starting on the liberal road in the first place. Re homosexuality, I have said before what I think this means: society must not do anything that approves or normalizes homosexuality. That doesn’t mean homosexuals are persecuted or mistreated. Up through the Sixties, society disapproved of homosexuality. That didn’t mean that homosexuals couldn’t live, in fact they did live and had all kinds of interesting lives, but they could not manifest their homosexuality openly in mainstream society. Starting in the ’70s, and accelerating since ,then, homosexuals can manifest their homosexuality in mainstream society, and an inevitable result is the kind of situation Mark J. describes.

Paul K. writes:

Another illustration of the phenomenon you describe can be seen in today’s news, where it was reported that as Chelsea Clinton was campaigning in a gay bar district, a lesbian posing for a picture with her crowed afterward, “I grabbed her ass!” Here’s the story.

This sort of assault, which would rightfully be considered outrageous if perpetrated by a heterosexual man, is laughed off as a bit of over-exuberance when a homosexual does it. Can you imagine what the Secret Service would do to any man who tried this on Hillary?

Like the obscene antics during “gay pride” festivities, this sort of behavior is indulged as an expression of the unique gay culture.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 21, 2008 09:39 PM | Send