HOMOPHOBES ARE PEOPLE TOO
The Republican presidential hopefuls are ignoring the most controversial
issue of 2000, says Mark Steyn Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig was not amused. He declared that the player's bigot- ed, homophobic remarks were 'reprehensi- ble and completely inexcusable' and ordered him to undergo 'psychiatric tests' to determine whether Mr Rocker was off his proverbial. Psychiatric tests? It's some years since I last rode the Number Seven, but I'd say it was, though harsh, a not inaccurate breakdown of the passenger demographic. He left out the 280 lb black women, but perhaps that's just as well or he'd be banged up in the loony bin indefinitely. I'm no psychiatrist, but I doubt whether Mr Rocker is clinically insane. Still, what do I know? I woke up the other morning to find myself described in the New York Times as 'extremely homophobic', so doubtless, even as I write, my own psychi- atric-evaluation team is heading up the hill with the physical restraints and a large hypodermic. Mr Rocker hasn't flipped his wig, only flipped his finger at conventional left-wing pieties on 'diversity' and 'inclu- siveness'. But the Left has long taken the view that those who disagree with them are mentally unbalanced — or 'clinical psychopaths', as John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Com- mittee, described those Congressional Republicans who voted to impeach Presi- dent Clinton. And, given that in social and cultural matters theirs is now the ortho- doxy, it was inevitable that Congressman Conyers's verbal shafts would soon be upgraded to a literal diagnosis. If you make non-respectful remarks about gays or single moms or career criminals, don't worry, it's not your fault, you're just men- tally unbalanced. Just lie down, let us clamp the electrodes to you, and you'll soon be feeling better. A couple of months' treatment and, once we've sta- bilised your medication, you'll be stagger- ing out of the re-education camp with a glassy-eyed expression murmuring about how it's important that in a multicultural society we reach out to all the shining hues in our rainbow.
Needless to say, in a multicultural society not all cultures need psychiatric testing. For example, Mr Rocker's boss, Atlanta Braves's owner Ted Turner, last year sneered at the Ten Commandments and attacked Chris- tianity as a 'religion for losers'. Commissioner Selig did not rule these remarks 'reprehensi- ble and completely inexcusable' and require a psychiatric evaluation of Mr Turner, though I for one would be interested to see one. Nor will Mr Rocker's municipal supre- mo, Atlanta mayor Bill Campbell, be under- going any tests. While the city council has been demanding that the Braves fire Rock- er, they're relaxed about Mr Campbell, whose view of legal interest-groups which oppose racial quotas for employment is that they're 'a homogenised version of the Klan. They may have traded in their sheets for suits,' said Hizzoner, 'but it's the same old racism.'
No psychiatric tests, either, for the Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad whose portrait of Buford Furrow — the nutball who opened fire on a Jewish community centre and then killed a Filipino mailman — appeared over the caption 'A faith-based compassionate conservative'. You can com- pare faith'-based compassionate conserva- tives to psycho killers, the Ku-Klux-Klan and Adolf Hitler to your heart's content and no one's ever going to make you sit through a single 'sensitivity training' session.
Perhaps that's why the family-values crowd have pretty much given up on this election. On 20 December, just in time to get buried by the holiday season, the Ver- mont Supreme Court ruled that the state's marriage law is unconstitutional. The Ver- mont constitution's been around since 1793 and lots of folks have been getting married under it, but it wasn't until 20 December that it was discovered that those Green Mountains boys with the quill pens had thoughtfully provided for same-sex unions as well. In this part of the world, getting wed involves a trip to the town clerk for a marriage licence. Various Vermont lesbians and gays have been turning up at their town offices only to be told, 'Sony, you need one of each.' Irked, they took their case to the state's supreme court, which agreed with them 5-0: such permits as the town clerk issues should also be available to two men and two women. It's unclear whether they'll also be handed the helpful leaflet my betrothed and I were given over the border by the state of New Hampshire, which advises the bride to ask the groom if he's had sex with other men. Presumably that will now be a minimum requirement. So 'gay marriage' is no longer hypotheti- cal: it's here, and, having slipped in through the back door in one state, it will soon spread to others. Doubtless it never occurred to the framers of the Vermont constitution specifically to reserve the insti- tution of marriage for a man and a woman, any more than it would have occurred to them to specify that, under state law, water has to flow downhill.
You'd think, with six candidates jostling for the Republican presidential nomination, that someone would have something to say about this issue. Well, I spent Sunday night at the New Hampshire GOP's Primary din- ner in Durham and the only reference to it came from the diminutive Christian activist Gary Bauer, who takes the view that the Vermont Supreme Court is a bigger threat to America 'than terrorism'. Otherwise, nothing. John McCain has said not a word on the subject. When I met George Dubya Bush in Littleton, NH, the other week, he declared his general belief that 'marriage should be between a man and a woman'. But, as to Vermont's rejection of this nar- row definition, he's keeping mum. Despite the 'wild, irresponsible youth' and the cocaine rumours and the photo of him danc- ing nude on a Mexican bar, my impression of Dubya close-up is that, as nude-dancing cokeheads go, he's more morally conserva- tive than he's letting on. But, along with almost all mainstream politicians, he's fig- ured this is a tide he cannot stem. There is a gay issue in this election: last week, Al Gore proposed a 'litmus test' for generals who wished to join the Joint Chiefs of Staff — they'd have to be in favour of gays serving openly in the military. General Colin Pow- ell, General Norman Schwarzkopf and most of the rest of the top brass of recent years would have been unable to meet this test.
With the vice-president using the nation's military to promote his gay-rights agenda, Bush and McCain came out in favour of the current policy on homosexuals in the ser- vices — 'Don't ask, don't tell'. But, on the broader issue of rebuffmg Vermont's chal- lenge to the institution of marriage, that's pretty much the strategy, too: don't ask us, 'cuz we won't tell; we don't want to sound 'mean-spirited' like that redneck cracker Rocker. 'Homophobia' is a dodgy word to any self-respecting classicist, meaning not an irrational dislike of gays but rather fear (phobia) of the same (homo-). Whatever else they are, Bush, McCain and co. are not literally homophobic: far from fearing the same, on this issue they embrace it whole- heartedly, desperate to sound exactly the same as the Democrats. I don't suppose Senator McCain or Baseball Commissioner Selig are terribly partial to gays, but they pre-emptively cave in to avoid chastisement by the media.
Contemporary tastes are against 'judg- mental' views in these matters. On Mon- day, the lesbian pop star Melissa Etheridge and her partner, Julie Cypher, belatedly revealed that the biological father of their two moppets was the drug-abusing, liver- damaged leathery old rock legend David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. `Teach Your Children,' sang Crosby back in the hippy-dippy days, but, with these two children, he doesn't seem to have bothered to teach 'em anything: he just parked his sperm with a couple of lesbians and sat back to see how the experiment turned out. Perhaps it'll all be swell, perhaps Melissa's and Julie's kids will grow up and not mind that their father chose to play no part in their upbringing. But all the other experi- ments of the last 40 years have been disas- ters: there are always exceptions, but the rule is that divorce and out-of-wedlock birth and single motherhood all increase the kid's chances of becoming a drug addict and a teenage criminal. Given that hetero- sexuals redefined marriage to provide easi- er opt-out clauses, it's no surprise that others have used that wedge to create opt- in clauses.
Meanwhile, a generation of American children has learned to keep its suitcase packed and a bundle of change-of-address cards on hand. There's currently a grand- parents' 'visitation rights' case before the Federal Supreme Court, but who knows who else will want a piece of the action by the time marriage has been 'redefined'? On Sunday Junior's with Mommy and her les- bian wife, Monday with Grammy and Grampa from Mommy's first, non-gay mar- riage, Tuesday with Mommy's gay biological sperm donor, Wednesday with Mommy's lesbian's egg donor's boyfriend, Thursday with his turkey baster's manufacturer's ex- wife, Friday with his shrink. And, if the shrink's not enough, he can join the rest of the most medicated generation of children in US history on his daily dose of Prozac and/or Ritalin, which seems to work pretty well, at least until the day the kid forgets to take it and guns down his schoolyard. Maybe that's all John Rocker needs. Maybe it would do wonders for my 'extreme homophobia'. Maybe Dubya and Al are on it already, purring complacently to election day. But, if not even Republican candidates will stand against the redefini- tion of marriage in 2000, what's the betting that in 2004 they'll speak out against cloning and the redefinition of humanity? (Some gays have already argued that a ban on human cloning infringes their reproduc- tive rights.) Campaign 2000 has finally found a big issue. Now all it needs is a can- didate big enough to tackle it.
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