History swings both ways
Mark Steyn - Monday,27 February 2006
Western Standard
For a humble first minister lacking a majority in the House of Commons, Scary Stephen already looms over the land like Big Albertan Brother, at least to those of a certain disposition. The other day Nicole Langlois of The London Free Press went to see Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar-nominated "gay western," and found herself strangely distracted. "I watched it--the lush, majestic beauty of mountains and streams; the struggle and surrender between the two men," she cooed, "and I thought of Stephen Harper."
Well, each to her own. I saw Brokeback in Montreal and Stephen Harper was the furthest thing from my mind. At the moment of "struggle and surrender between the two men," I don't recall looking at Jake Gyllenhaall and thinking, "The West wants in." But to Ms. Langlois the scene underlined the impotence of Stephen Harper. Not compared to being taken in the manly arms of Heath Ledger, I hasten to add, but his broader socio-politico-cultural impotence. "I came out of the cinema," wrote Ms. Langlois, "and thought of Harper because I realized how truly powerless he is--no matter that he now holds the so-called reins of power--against the rising tide of cultural acceptance for gays."
The so-called reins of power are good for a modest canter round the paddock but you'll never catch Jake and Heath galloping off into the sunset. Or as the Free Press headline put it, "Clock Can't Be Turned Back On Gay Reality."
Well, it's true that the average 25-year-old does not feel about homosexuality the way his great-grandfather felt at that age. In that sense, there is indeed a "rising tide." But the salient feature of tides is that they go out again. Whatever their appeals to virtue, inevitablist theories of history are always the weakest--the notion that progress is a ratchet effect, moving irreversibly in one direction. On September 10, 2001, for example, not many commentators in North America or Europe paid much attention to the views of Islamic lobby groups. The idea that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Britain would have seemed absurd to most Europeans a mere five years ago. Things change very suddenly.
One might also note that a rising tide lifts all boats. If the sex of the participants should not be relevant in our marriage laws (as Ms. Langlois believes) why should the number of participants? In these pages in 2004, I suggested that polygamy was "closer than you think"--and not because of stump-toothed patriarchs from the B.C. backwoods: "If it's a Muslim who finally makes it to the Supreme Court of Canada with a polygamy case, I'd reckon their lordships will rule that forbidding it is an unwarranted restriction of charter rights. And I'd wager a few of those justices will be happy to license polygamy if only to prove that their demolition job on 'traditional marriage' was legally grounded rather than mere modish solidarity."
The moment approaches. As the Toronto Star reported just before the election, "A new study for the federal Justice Department says Canada should get rid of its law banning polygamy, and change other legislation to help women and children living in such multiple-spouse relationships . . . "
"Why criminalize the behaviour?" the report's principal author, Martha Bailey, told the Star.
"We don't criminalize adultery. In light of the fact that we have a fairly permissive society . . . why are we singling out that particular form of behaviour for criminalization?"
Why indeed? After all, there are potentially far more takers for polygamous marriage than there ever will be for gay marriage. Martha Bailey has been determined to move Canadian marriage "beyond conjugality" (as she puts it) for some time. Stanley Kurtz of National Review thinks it's part of her wholesale dismantling of the institution: if everything's marriage, then nothing is. But, if that's her plan, Ms. Bailey is cannily using the multiculti cover I discussed here a year and a half back. As Mr. Kurtz writes:
"Stressing 'the multicultural nature of Canadian society,' Bailey claims that Canada has an urgent practical need for more Muslim immigrants. If Canada can just 'expand the pool of applicants,' says Bailey, it just may win 'the global competition for highly skilled immigrants.'"
What a hop and a skip from one flimsy lily pad to another: does Canada really have an "urgent" need for more Muslim immigrants? And, if it does, do polygamy and "high skills" correlate in any way?
But let's say Ms. Bailey gets her way and legal polygamy succeeds in attracting more skilled Muslim men and their legions of wives to Canada. What proportion of the population has to be Muslim before Nicole Langlois notices that "the rising tide of cultural acceptance for gays" is beginning to recede?
The relevant hadith of the Prophet on "cultural acceptance for gays" is pretty straightforward: "Kill the one who is doing it and the one to whom it is being done"--a distinction which suggests Mohammed doesn't subscribe to Ms. Langlois' line on the "beautiful complexity" of "gay love." How would a Human Rights Commission rule if you put that hadith up on a billboard? Not all Muslim societies kill the sodomites--some just toss them in jail--but, oddly enough, punishing homosexuality by death correlates more with polygamy than a "highly skilled" workforce does. For example, under the Taliban, pretty much the only construction work in Afghanistan was the building of brick walls for the purpose of crushing homosexuals. Possibly all those polygamous masons will now be attracted to our decadent Dominion.
Or perhaps Ms. Bailey's preferred type of Muslim immigrant is a chap like Sir Iqbal Sacranie, a Muslim of such exemplary "moderation" he's been knighted by the Queen. Sir Iqbal, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, was on the BBC the other day and expressed the view that homosexuality was "immoral," "not acceptable," "spreads disease" and "damaged the very foundations of society." A gay group complained and Sir Iqbal was investigated by Scotland Yard's "community safety unit" which deals with "hate crimes" and "homophobia."
Independently but simultaneously, the magazine of GALHA (the Gay And Lesbian Humanist Association) called Islam a "barmy doctrine" growing "like a canker" and deeply "homophobic." In return, the London Race Hate Crime Forum asked Scotland Yard to investigate GALHA for "Islamophobia."
Got that? If a Muslim says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for homophobia; but if a gay says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for Islamophobia. As someone who's routinely called Islamophobic and homophobic every day of the week, I feel a bit like the former U.S. secretary of state James Baker did about the Balkan civil war: I don't have a dog in this fight. Actually, it would be truer to say I have both dogs in this fight. "Hate crimes" are thought crimes, a concept more pernicious and harmful than whatever offence is caused by any particular statement. So I'm in favour of everybody suing everybody else over every imaginable phobia until the whole system collapses.
But, even so, one can't help noticing the speed and skill with which Muslim lobby groups have mastered the language of victimhood so adroitly used by the gay lobby. If I were the latter, I'd be a little miffed at these Ahmed-come-latelys. "Homophobia" was always absurd: people who are antipathetic to gays are not afraid of them in any real sense. The invention of a phony-baloney "phobia" was a way of casting opposition to their political agenda as a kind of mental illness. On the other hand, "Islamophobia" is not phony or even psychological but very literal--if you're a Dutch MP or Danish cartoonist in hiding under threat of death, your Islamophobia is highly justified. But Islam's appropriation of the gay lobby's framing of the debate is very artful.
At the moment, Sir Iqbal and the homosexuals are in a kind of Mexican standoff. But, demographically and culturally, time is on his side. Bruce Bawer's new book, While Europe Slept, is an instructive read in that regard: he's a gay American who moved to Holland because it was more open and tolerant than his repressed uptight theocratic native land yet in the end he was driven out of the Netherlands by a--what's the phrase? --"rising tide" of gay bashing and other forms of homophobia from the ever more culturally confident young Muslim men who now dominate urban life up the European coast from France through Belgium to Scandinavia. It's not a good time to be a gay man in Europe.
The question is whether Canada will prove more like the Continent and succumb to creeping Islamification or more like America and resistant to would-be encroachments? Which would you bet on? Nicole Langlois is wrong. History moves in one direction until it doesn't. When the beating hooves of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal's mounts have died away, that rumbling is the ground shifting under her feet.
Mark Steyn - Monday,27 February 2006
Western Standard
For a humble first minister lacking a majority in the House of Commons, Scary Stephen already looms over the land like Big Albertan Brother, at least to those of a certain disposition. The other day Nicole Langlois of The London Free Press went to see Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar-nominated "gay western," and found herself strangely distracted. "I watched it--the lush, majestic beauty of mountains and streams; the struggle and surrender between the two men," she cooed, "and I thought of Stephen Harper."
Well, each to her own. I saw Brokeback in Montreal and Stephen Harper was the furthest thing from my mind. At the moment of "struggle and surrender between the two men," I don't recall looking at Jake Gyllenhaall and thinking, "The West wants in." But to Ms. Langlois the scene underlined the impotence of Stephen Harper. Not compared to being taken in the manly arms of Heath Ledger, I hasten to add, but his broader socio-politico-cultural impotence. "I came out of the cinema," wrote Ms. Langlois, "and thought of Harper because I realized how truly powerless he is--no matter that he now holds the so-called reins of power--against the rising tide of cultural acceptance for gays."
The so-called reins of power are good for a modest canter round the paddock but you'll never catch Jake and Heath galloping off into the sunset. Or as the Free Press headline put it, "Clock Can't Be Turned Back On Gay Reality."
Well, it's true that the average 25-year-old does not feel about homosexuality the way his great-grandfather felt at that age. In that sense, there is indeed a "rising tide." But the salient feature of tides is that they go out again. Whatever their appeals to virtue, inevitablist theories of history are always the weakest--the notion that progress is a ratchet effect, moving irreversibly in one direction. On September 10, 2001, for example, not many commentators in North America or Europe paid much attention to the views of Islamic lobby groups. The idea that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Britain would have seemed absurd to most Europeans a mere five years ago. Things change very suddenly.
One might also note that a rising tide lifts all boats. If the sex of the participants should not be relevant in our marriage laws (as Ms. Langlois believes) why should the number of participants? In these pages in 2004, I suggested that polygamy was "closer than you think"--and not because of stump-toothed patriarchs from the B.C. backwoods: "If it's a Muslim who finally makes it to the Supreme Court of Canada with a polygamy case, I'd reckon their lordships will rule that forbidding it is an unwarranted restriction of charter rights. And I'd wager a few of those justices will be happy to license polygamy if only to prove that their demolition job on 'traditional marriage' was legally grounded rather than mere modish solidarity."
The moment approaches. As the Toronto Star reported just before the election, "A new study for the federal Justice Department says Canada should get rid of its law banning polygamy, and change other legislation to help women and children living in such multiple-spouse relationships . . . "
"Why criminalize the behaviour?" the report's principal author, Martha Bailey, told the Star.
"We don't criminalize adultery. In light of the fact that we have a fairly permissive society . . . why are we singling out that particular form of behaviour for criminalization?"
Why indeed? After all, there are potentially far more takers for polygamous marriage than there ever will be for gay marriage. Martha Bailey has been determined to move Canadian marriage "beyond conjugality" (as she puts it) for some time. Stanley Kurtz of National Review thinks it's part of her wholesale dismantling of the institution: if everything's marriage, then nothing is. But, if that's her plan, Ms. Bailey is cannily using the multiculti cover I discussed here a year and a half back. As Mr. Kurtz writes:
"Stressing 'the multicultural nature of Canadian society,' Bailey claims that Canada has an urgent practical need for more Muslim immigrants. If Canada can just 'expand the pool of applicants,' says Bailey, it just may win 'the global competition for highly skilled immigrants.'"
What a hop and a skip from one flimsy lily pad to another: does Canada really have an "urgent" need for more Muslim immigrants? And, if it does, do polygamy and "high skills" correlate in any way?
But let's say Ms. Bailey gets her way and legal polygamy succeeds in attracting more skilled Muslim men and their legions of wives to Canada. What proportion of the population has to be Muslim before Nicole Langlois notices that "the rising tide of cultural acceptance for gays" is beginning to recede?
The relevant hadith of the Prophet on "cultural acceptance for gays" is pretty straightforward: "Kill the one who is doing it and the one to whom it is being done"--a distinction which suggests Mohammed doesn't subscribe to Ms. Langlois' line on the "beautiful complexity" of "gay love." How would a Human Rights Commission rule if you put that hadith up on a billboard? Not all Muslim societies kill the sodomites--some just toss them in jail--but, oddly enough, punishing homosexuality by death correlates more with polygamy than a "highly skilled" workforce does. For example, under the Taliban, pretty much the only construction work in Afghanistan was the building of brick walls for the purpose of crushing homosexuals. Possibly all those polygamous masons will now be attracted to our decadent Dominion.
Or perhaps Ms. Bailey's preferred type of Muslim immigrant is a chap like Sir Iqbal Sacranie, a Muslim of such exemplary "moderation" he's been knighted by the Queen. Sir Iqbal, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, was on the BBC the other day and expressed the view that homosexuality was "immoral," "not acceptable," "spreads disease" and "damaged the very foundations of society." A gay group complained and Sir Iqbal was investigated by Scotland Yard's "community safety unit" which deals with "hate crimes" and "homophobia."
Independently but simultaneously, the magazine of GALHA (the Gay And Lesbian Humanist Association) called Islam a "barmy doctrine" growing "like a canker" and deeply "homophobic." In return, the London Race Hate Crime Forum asked Scotland Yard to investigate GALHA for "Islamophobia."
Got that? If a Muslim says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for homophobia; but if a gay says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for Islamophobia. As someone who's routinely called Islamophobic and homophobic every day of the week, I feel a bit like the former U.S. secretary of state James Baker did about the Balkan civil war: I don't have a dog in this fight. Actually, it would be truer to say I have both dogs in this fight. "Hate crimes" are thought crimes, a concept more pernicious and harmful than whatever offence is caused by any particular statement. So I'm in favour of everybody suing everybody else over every imaginable phobia until the whole system collapses.
But, even so, one can't help noticing the speed and skill with which Muslim lobby groups have mastered the language of victimhood so adroitly used by the gay lobby. If I were the latter, I'd be a little miffed at these Ahmed-come-latelys. "Homophobia" was always absurd: people who are antipathetic to gays are not afraid of them in any real sense. The invention of a phony-baloney "phobia" was a way of casting opposition to their political agenda as a kind of mental illness. On the other hand, "Islamophobia" is not phony or even psychological but very literal--if you're a Dutch MP or Danish cartoonist in hiding under threat of death, your Islamophobia is highly justified. But Islam's appropriation of the gay lobby's framing of the debate is very artful.
At the moment, Sir Iqbal and the homosexuals are in a kind of Mexican standoff. But, demographically and culturally, time is on his side. Bruce Bawer's new book, While Europe Slept, is an instructive read in that regard: he's a gay American who moved to Holland because it was more open and tolerant than his repressed uptight theocratic native land yet in the end he was driven out of the Netherlands by a--what's the phrase? --"rising tide" of gay bashing and other forms of homophobia from the ever more culturally confident young Muslim men who now dominate urban life up the European coast from France through Belgium to Scandinavia. It's not a good time to be a gay man in Europe.
The question is whether Canada will prove more like the Continent and succumb to creeping Islamification or more like America and resistant to would-be encroachments? Which would you bet on? Nicole Langlois is wrong. History moves in one direction until it doesn't. When the beating hooves of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal's mounts have died away, that rumbling is the ground shifting under her feet.