Macklemore's *Same Love* Wags the Dog

The invocation of federal power to change a simple fact of marriage that has transcended time and space, age and and geography and religion and ethnos (apparently for no good reason other than a sort of bigotry that has no root in any particular doctrine) has theme music now.

It's not particularly good rap, passable but mediocre, it gets by mostly on its heartfelt liberal sentimentality.  But it's certainly not its sentimentality I object to--it is, after all, music.  Macklemore's Same Love sets progressive talking points to rhythm.  It's almost the musical version of a Michael Moore agitpropumentary, minus the total surrender to cynicism.

Some examples:

The right wing conservatives think it's a decision
And you can be cured with some treatment and religion
Man-made rewiring of a predisposition

Where to start?  Conservatives tend to operate from either a fundamental intuition that things are the way they are for a reason (radicals on the other hand reject tradition as anything other than a cornucopia of ideas to conveniently either embrace or jeer at) or a fundamental caution that mucking with some very basic things could have far-reaching unintended consequences.  Progressives instead say, "If you can't prove to me something will go wrong by pushing the red button, I'm pushing it."  And if things do go badly after pushing the red button, they will claim total ignorance as to the causes (though they will imply that traditional religion is partly to blame).

But the familiar trope of the social conservative having nothing more to say than "the laws of Moses say so, and since I believe every word as written, God obviously hates gays."  Yes, to the progressive, there is The Enlightenment (non-Christian liberals), there is Safe Christianity (the increasingly progressive, so-called "mainstream" churches and the liberation Catholics), and then what remains outside these are various shades of Westboro.  If liberals are capable of more sophistication than that, they have been jolly good at hiding it in recent years.

And God loves all his children, is somehow forgotten
But we paraphrase a book written thirty-five-hundred years ago

Another liberal trope: You either jump on the progressive (scientific! it's oh so scientific!) bandwagon that there is absolutely no downside at all to either homosexuality OR divorcing marriage completely from its roots in making the sexes get over their differences in order to raise children.  There is no in-between (none that progressives care to discuss).

You are either for love or for hate.  It's really as simple as that.  Oh, and remember that progressives pride themselves on avoidance of black-and-white thinking.  Liberal social scientists are trying to build a whole social science around this--liberals love nuance, and conservatives like to be told simple stories that leave them ever-so-satisfied.  (They don't actually admit this; they utter many disclaimers; but if you read what they have to say about the "conservative" brain, this is is what the reader is left thinking.)  And it's largely due to their different brains.  So it's all very scientific that it's the conservatives that are black-and-white thinkers.  Unions good, corporations bad.  Community organizer good, business exec bad.  White people racist, other people not.    Religion bad, communism good.  Republicans greedy, Democrats altruistic.  Churchgoers dogmatic, liberal college professors open-minded.

Yes, if a Christian doesn't renounce that "for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife," he or she has evidently forgotten that God loves all his children.  In fact, you can't be a good Christian if you don't believe that there is a point to promoting only men and women committing to each other to make families.  Because if you do:

If you preach hate at the service those words aren't anointed
That holy water that you soak in has been poisoned

Yes, the words are not from God and the holy water is poisoned because what is contrary to equating one love with another is hate speech.  Shades of Westboro, yep.  To revisit the progressive dismissal of doctrine as subjective cloud-gazing:

But we paraphrase a book written thirty-five hundred years ago

Yes, either the Bible is a terrible book (as Dan "It Gets Better" Savage loudly and proudly preaches) or everyone is misunderstanding it if it seems to go against liberal doctrine.  (And if you find yourself making both claims in the space of an hour you have mad liberal skillz.)   Yes, people have paraphrased the Bible and rewritten it to make Jesus say things about homosexuality he never said, or so we're told.

America the brave still fears what we don't know

Caution over the fundamental and universal is labeled fear.  It's even given a disorder-like name:  homophobia.  Yes, it's boiled down to calling someone "chicken" if they don't fall in with the progressive order.  You call yourself a brave American?  Then throw caution to the wind, say "What could go wrong?", and hoist the Equal Sign flag.  Yes, prove your courage by giving in to the shame game.  Being "courageous" certainly won't hurt your chances in the entertainment business and being "cowardly" will hurt you big time.

Look up the stuff on "conservative brain" and you will see disclaimers about brain plasticity.  (Don't worry, conservatives, you can become open-minded even if you weren't "born that way"...)  However, brain plasticity does not come up because it is supposed that there is no kind of homosexuality that one isn't predestined to.

And you can be cured with some treatment and religion
Man-made rewiring of a predisposition

Yes, Virginia, there are no ex-gays.  And I can prove it to you.  Here is Joe.  He claimed to be cured of homosexuality and then he had a bout of recidivism.  So he was born that way.  Therefore, neural plasticity plays no part in sexual preference and same-sex attraction.  (If you've been to college and have been trained in the art of "freethinking," these inferences may well make sense to you.)

Also, implicit in this liberal talking point is the conflation of same-sex attraction and homosexual behavior.  If you are at all attracted to the same sex then you were born to be fabulously gay at all times.  Also implicit is that if it's a predisposition, particularly a genetic or epigenetic one, it must not be at all a negative thing -- which is an absurd inference.  Challenging the neural plasticity of our brains to overcome negative predispositions is not a bad thing in general.  It's only seen as a bad thing if the concept of 'negative' is out of step with the liberal program.  The way things are going, people will no longer be permitted to pursue conversion therapy if they want it (already outlawed in CA by our liberal overlords), and yet they will be able to have their sex change paid for by society.

X-Men, Children's Films, & the Gospel of Normalization

After seeing X-Men: First Class, a pretty well-made movie, I heard a teen exclaiming about how much she liked the Mystique character and supported her decision to be a terrorist (she didn't use quite these words) in light of the terrible anti-mutant oppression she endured.  This passion and the similarity of this feeling to the pervasive "enlightened" moral relativism view of the terrorist/freedomfighter distinction brought something to mind:

There was a moment in a previous movie, X2, in which the director couldn't remain content with people drawing their own parallels to gay normalization without a nice big push.  A young mutant teen "comes out" to his parents about how he's a mutant.  The reaction of one of his parents is to ask whether he's "tried not being a mutant."  I might have missed the implication had that made a lick of sense; it didn't fit at all.  It didn't work in the scene.  So it was a ham-handed, eye-rolling political message shoehorned into an otherwise interesting movie.  But I'm sure it has nothing to do with the director actually being homosexual.

I had a moment watching X-Men: The Last Stand in which I wondered whether the "cure" for mutation motif was a kind of dystopian 1984-esque commentary on the ex-gay movement.  If you haven't heard of this movement, outside of the California governor's (Jerry "No Plan and Proud of It" Brown) attack on it, it's because the Left has absolutley no interest in hearing from the people who believe that "conversion" therapy has worked for them and made their lives better.  No, the Democrats support your decision to change your genitals if they don't suit you, but not your orientation.  After all, your orientation is something you were born with.  In the end, one of the X-Men vies for the "cure" because her mutation keeps her from having normal relationships.

It would seem that we are supposed to get the impression that "normal" humans are being a little ridiculous at being afraid of human beings that are able to do things like bypass any home security, control someone's mind at will, impersonate any living soul,  kill someone with a thought, etc.  Just because ever growing numbers of people can do these things, it doesn't mean that the general population is less safe.  No, this concern is an absurd idea to the people that think the average citizen can't be trusted with guns because God knows what could happen.

If you think I am reading too much into this you should read the many quotes in Michael Brown's post about the intended parallels in X-Men.  In addition to the insider comments on the film, Brown quotes one reviewer as saying, “As I watched the film, the connections and similarities were startling. You could have made the X-Men gay and the script would have worked perfectly.”  Whatever the writer and director intended, I have a hard time fitting the intended gay rights narrative to many scenes in the film, not to mention many fundamental aspects of the story.  However, society's rejection of gifted individuals through misperceiving their difference as a defect is a narrative that in broad terms naturally appeals to the gay community.  The attempts to connect the basic story to the political movement to make society recognize LGBTQ as normal and worthy of celebration through laws/jurisprudence (i.e., political coercion) comes across as forced and superficial through some ungainly humor (the awkward "mutant and proud" dialogue, for example).

Chad Thompson, an ex-gay writer, has written in "More Than Mutants" that he sees some definite agenda in the writing of the movies.  Of special interest though, he points out the third movie's plot points (likely unintended) support for ex-gay therapy.  (Here in California, the state is anti-choice with regard to conversion therapy.)  But one of the most interesting things in his article, to me, is his quote of gay actor Ian McKellan, “As a gay man, some people think that it ought to be cured and made normal again, and I find it as offensive as someone saying that they have a cure for the color of their skin.”  Do you find it as offensive as saying that they have a cure for having the wrong reproductive organs, Sir Ian?  After all, aren't we told that gender and race are equivalent class-based social constructions?  This is a tenet of the liberal creed, near as I can tell.

A left-leaning friend once opined some contempt for Michael Jackson's "Don't Matter If You're Black or White" message since it appeared to be hypocritical given that Jackson apparently didn't feel comfortable with dark skin.  I've wondered since if that friend still feels that way, and if he would think someone who got a sex change would be hypocritical for saying that it doesn't matter if you're male or female.  Which arguably is a message in Cloud Atlas, one of the directors of which recently was surgically given female parts.  (The Wachowski Brothers are now the Wachowski Siblings, if you catch my drift.)

Michael L. Brown has also highlighted this apparently bizarre inconsistency of the new orthodoxy in his article "Glee Celebrates the 'T'."  He rhetorically asks whether it would be socially acceptable for the Glee character who is a "woman in a man's body" to come out as a Caucasian in a black person's body.  Perhaps Unique would be uniquely more comfortable in his body if he had different skin.  You can actually feel liberals across America rankling at this idea.  In the 2005 movie that sought to normalize transsexuality, the protagonist says "After my operation, not even a gynecologist will be able to detect anything out of the ordinary about my body. I will be a woman. Don't you find it odd that plastic surgery can cure a mental disorder?"  You won't have a disorder in which you mind can't accept your body once you change your body to fit what it can accept.  Maybe Jerry Brown can outlaw any non-surgical therapies that address this issue.  (Michael Jackson had a mental disorder which made him hate his skin, and physical skin treatments cured him.  Don't you find that odd?)

If you don't think of X-Men as primarily targeted for minors, then consider this.  In the animated feature Para-Norman, Norman has a unique gift.  He is isolated because he is different and people, because they don't understand him, think he's weird and repulsive.  [SPOILER ALERT] The paranormal entity that threatens his town was once a child with a similar gift, mercilessly oppressed and killed by intolerant Puritans in God-fearing Pilgrim garb. (Think of Dan Savage's recent and public anti-Bible rants.) Not content with the idea that this is something to which lots of geeky kids might relate, the filmmakers work in their own specific plug for the New Normal.  The big dumb jock who you might assume is too dumb (or simply put off) to notice that a pretty girl is throwing herself at him, mentions at the end of the movie that he has a boyfriend.  Some boys talk to ghosts and some make out with other boys.  Different is okay.  Group hug, everyone!

It's only a matter of time before Disney works little messages like this into their films, being humbled by the low turnout for their films with more explicit political innuendo (Pocahontas and Hunchback come to mind), offering a little remedial morality adjustment to the children of social conservatives.