Gay Marriage and the Soft Totalitarianism it Implies

I use the term "soft fascism" every now and again on this blog to denote the intolerance of those on the Left who, while they LOVE to spout off about how inclusive and tolerant they are, they themselves are the most hate-filled, INtolerant bigots on the face of the planet. As author Jonah Goldberg wrote in his landmark classic, Liberal Fascism, The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, (quoting comedian George Carlin) "When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will be in Nike sneakers and smiley shirts. Smiley-smiley."

For example, one way the closed-minded, uncritically thinking screech-monkeys that support gay marriage scarcely notice their strong resemble to their ideological cousins, the racist segregationists of the American south from several decades ago, is in their arguments that they so predictably invoke involving race to rally their cause. Or as columnist Glenn T. Stanton wrote, (paraphrasing David Blankenhorn), "..some Southern racists redefined marriage to make it something it was never supposed to be about — racial purity — when race is not any part of marriage. It was about making marriage do something it was never intended to do for the sake of their own narrow social ideals. Likewise, same-sex marriage advocates today are drafting marriage into their own narrow social cause, as a way to elevate the social standing of homosexuality. Like keeping the races apart then, marriage has no place in this special-interest-based re-engineering... If the Loving [v. Virginia] analogy is exact, we would have to conclude that our current laws on marriage as a male/female union stem from some effort to keep others in their place. Study the anthropological origins of marriage for as long as you want and you will find nothing of the sort."



Getting back to the Left's "soft fascism" resemblance on this particular subject, George Weigel writes of a couple that he knows from a former Eastern Bloc nation who are all too familiar with the coercive power of government to redefine reality and shape it into an imaginary construct of a bureaucratically-approved fairy tale...

"As analysts running the gamut from Hannah Arendt to Leszek Kolakowski understood, modern totalitarian systems were, at bottom, attempts to remake reality by redefining reality and remaking human beings in the process. Coercive state power was essential to this process, because reality doesn’t yield easily to remaking, and neither do people. In the lands Communism tried to remake, the human instinct for justice — justice that is rooted in reality rather than ephemeral opinion — was too strong to change the way tastemakers change fashions in the arts. Men and women had to be coerced into accepting, however sullenly, the Communist New Order, which was a new metaphysical, epistemological, and moral order — a New Order of reality, a new set of “truths,” and a new way of living “in harmony with society,” as late-bureaucratic Communist claptrap had it.

The 21st-century state’s attempt to redefine marriage is just such an attempt to redefine reality — in this case, a reality that existed before the state, for marriage as the union of a man and a woman ordered to mutual love and procreation is a human reality that existed before the state. And a just state is obliged to recognize, not redefine, it.

Moreover, marriage and the families that are built around marriage constitute one of the basic elements of civil society, that free space of free associations whose boundaries the just state must respect. If the 21st-century democratic state attempts to redefine something it has neither the capacity nor the authority to refine, it can only do so coercively. That redefinition, and its legal enforcement, is a grave encroachment into civil society.

If the state can redefine marriage and enforce that redefinition, it can do so with the doctor-patient relationship, the lawyer-client relationship, the parent-child relationship, the confessor-penitent relationship, and virtually every other relationship that is woven into the texture of civil society. In doing so, the state does serious damage to the democratic project. Concurrently, it reduces what it tries to substitute for reality to farce."

When viewed in this light, the term "soft fascism" doesn't seem far-fetched at all.