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OCTOBER 2012
A march of follybyKenneth MinogueOn progressives, Feminism, and gay rights.
Burkewas right!Support TheNew Criterion
The basic question in life is hat is actually going on"# and itoften requires a great deal of time to pass before one can find the
answer. That is why $ have only %ust begun to understand what is
actually at stake in the proposal to recogni&e civil partnerships as
marriages.# 'nd the clue came when $ discovered that
(tonewall, the homose)ual rights group in Britain, was
proposing a memorandum that the terms husband# and wife#
should be removed from the *+- arriage 'ct and replaced by
parties to the marriage.# This apparently trivial bit of semantics
carries a large moral significance.
$t is part of a two/stage operation. $n the first stage, some newliberating move is proposed, and anyone with an eye for personal
freedom0libertarians and conservatives alike0will support the
move. But then comes a new development1 the propaganda that
seeks to persuade us0and usually also the luckless children in
schools0that the new situation must change our attitudes to the
world. Freedoms, in other words, become parado)ically entwined
with the repressions of political correctness. 2et me elaborate
this thesis.
e associate the *+34s with a set of liberations# that set the
seal on a decent way of life, opening up choice and a clean sweep
of out/of/date restrictions on our conduct, especially in se)ual
matters. 'bove all, it is associated with Feminism as liberating
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women from the household, conceived of in those terms as a kind
of prison. 5hanging attitudes and technology had been opening
up new areas to women for at least a century, but now came a
breakout by a set of female graduates who wanted to liberate theentire se)0or should we say gender. 'nd the best they could
think to do was to demand that women should advance into the
workforce. To become a unit of production, to acquire a boss
6and perhaps eventually become one7 was not everybody8s notion
of liberation, but there8s no accounting for tastes. en, it was
thought, were respected for the work they did, and women in the
workforce would get the same respect.
This vast pro%ect had a number of important dimensions. One
was that family life moved from the center of female life to the
margins, requiring important ad%ustments in social life and a
massive reconfiguration of the duties of men as well as women.
9or of course were all women happy about this move. :ven those
who wanted to have it all# often had their doubts. Feminists,
one should remember, may claim to represent# women, but this
is bluff; no one ever legitimi&ed such a claim. 'nother vitaldimension of feminist liberation consisted of a passionate
re%ection of the chivalric idea that women, as physically
vulnerable, were to be protected by husbands, fathers, and men
in general. (uch complementarity between men and women was
thought to entrench the idea that women, because weaker, were
not equal to men. The solution was to switch the issue from one
of fact to one of legal and moral status.
Both kinds of status were covered in the dominant
codification of the moral life in recent times1 namely,
declarations of rights. The basic assumption of the moral life as
the en%oyment of human rights is that all human beings are
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vulnerable creatures, as no doubt they are, and that tolerable
lives depend on respect, by individuals but especially by
governments, for a set of rights. These rights kept on getting
more numerous, and they continue to do so. They began in thephilosophers8 labs 6as it were7 as freedoms from interference, but
modern versions 6such as the
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to be matters of choice at all. :veryone, meaning especially all
women, had to fall in with this new line.
The idea of liberation# has many problems, but the crucial onein this case is that the position of women had been changing fordecades before the *+34s, partly in response to feminist
pressures, but much more importantly because of developing
attitudes and advancing technology 6medicine and press button
machinery, for e)ample7. omen had been e)ploring new worlds
for over a century. The violent and resentful presentation of
these changes in the *+34s, as if they were unprecedented
uprisings against oppression, was no more than melodramatic
public relations. 'nd it served to obscure the fact that women#
as a class of persons were now losing elements of feminine
identity because they were embracing an essence in which they
were notionally non/gendered units of production in a modern
economy.
The idea that women in general could move into the
workforce was certainly more plausible in the later twentiethcentury than it could possibly have been at any earlier period of
history. Before, agricultural work and craftsmanship required
physical strength, life was shorter, and the family world itself was
vitally different. By the twentieth century, as we have seen,
advancing technology had transformed these earlier realities. $n
the modern world, women could certainly take up about A4 or +4
percent of the %obs men did because these %obs now seldom
demanded physical strength, and there were certainly plenty of
bright and capable women available. $n a few areas such as
building skyscrapers or furniture removal, for e)ample, women
could not really replace men, and in a variety of other %obs such
as servicing motor cars they had very little desire to do so. $n
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combat situations women were certainly not appropriate, but
feminists insisted that they should be trained to work on
destroyers and fly high tech airplanes. That being said, if you
were putting down a riot, only male policemen were really ofmuch use.
'll of these changes, however, were standard features of
developing modern societies. They did not seem to signify
modifications in our culture. But other changes were emerging.
One of them was the march of welfarism, which compassionately
took up the travails of young pregnant girls without a man to
support them. They were accorded places to live along withsubsidies, and became an increasing class of person. 'nd they
came to be described, by an e)tension of the term family,# as
one/parent families.# hy not"# one might think. Dlenty of
actual families, through death or divorce, operated with one
parent.
'nother development was the removal of all criminal
sanctions attaching to homose)ual conduct. This, again, was animpeccably liberal pro%ect. ho could seriously support the
criminali&ation of whatever consenting adults might do in
private" 'll of these reforms were no problem in a liberal society.
The significance of their con%unction only emerged a little later.
The industriali&ation of women was widely accepted, and themost evident repression associated with it was the re%ection of
se)ism,# an offense covering any suggestion that women were
not, in whatever relevant respects were advanced, the equals of
men. $t did, however, involve significant unrealities, many
resulting no doubt from the brutishness of men, which required
some legal concern with these vulnerabilities. (e)ual harassment
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legislation is, of course, in principle universal but its main impact
is to allow women to get redress for male aggression or for
failures in promotion. aternity leave raises problems for
employers, and had to be entrenched in law, and thensupplemented by paternity leave in order to sustain the
presumption of equality. But it took the gay rights movement to
make progressives8 agenda entirely clear, for it generated in its
wake politically correct campaigns 6often targeted in the first
instance at schools7 affirming 6for e)ample7 that se)ual
preferences were merely matters of taste, and one preference was
as good as another. :very liberal reform, it turned out, came now
to demand attitudinal conformism. 'll these forms of conducthad to be recogni&ed as equally virtuous. To prefer some to
others was merely a survival from illiberal dogmatism.
Dre%udice, however, remained, because many people regarded
the heterose)ual family marriage as the basic institution of
society. (o, too, did 'rticle *31- of the uman ?ights. >eterose)ual family life was obviously essential
to society in a way that homose)ual unions were not, because thenotional basis of marriage involved the likelihood of requiring
the disciplines involved in the nurture of children.
>eterose)ual unions were, further, unique because they
incorporated both male and female e)perience in the way they
worked. By contrast, homose)ual unions were the formali&ation
of desires that were certainly covered by the right of choice and
privacy, but were eccentric in terms of the basic drives thatsustained a society. They no doubt might well be admirable in
many ways, but there was no obvious reason why they should be
officially recogni&ed and accorded some respectable status,
beyond what happens in an individualist world of personal
inclinations. (ome people taking this view were 5hristians, but
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members of other religions often e)pressed a much more violent
revulsion against this new order. 'nd that, perhaps, provoked
the new development.
The suggestion that the law should give some recognition tohomose)ual unions is, again, an admirably liberal thing to do,
and civil partnerships were recogni&ed. e have now, however,
reached the ne)t stage of the march through the institutions, in
which the demand is the one tiny step forward of recogni&ing
gay marriage.# The proposal is in fact the desire finally to
remove the distinction between men and women entirely from
social recognition. >usband# and wife,# as we saw, must go,and in (pain, it seems, that father# and mother# must also go.
(ince a law of 44C, they have been superseded by Drogenitor
'# and Drogenitor B.# $ imagine soon the toddlers will have to
call the old folk progs.#
But0one must not deride, mock, disapprove, %udge, laugh at,
etc., any of these new categories, because that would be
discriminatory, and indeed a whole barrage of laws hasdeveloped to sustain illusions about the non/vulnerability of
women and the respectability of these various forms of conduct.
$n other words, the advance of these notable forms of liberation,
this moderni&ation# of our society, demands a servile response
from all of us. (laves knew very well not to deride, mock,
disapprove, %udge, or laugh at their masters, and so must we. The
long march through the institutions is in part a matter of
engineering the right attitudes, and the servility which that
entails.
hat then does this sequence mean for estern societies" $t isincreasingly clear that the central point of *+34s feminism was in
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fact the destruction of the idea of women altogether. Feminists
assimilated the class of women, in all essentials, to men. The
feminine as traditionally understood had to go, because women
were to be recogni&ed as se)ually undifferentiated or genderlessunits of production in the workforce. The economy here becomes
the fundamental aspect of society from which all other
%udgments must flow. $t is very odd, but certainly significant, that
the basic assumption of liberatory feminism, as of (oviet
communism, was that the conceptions of economic production
must take precedence over everything else.
The movement advanced itself as enhancing the choices made
by women, but that is misleading. Eohn (tuart ill had arguedthat one ought to be free to act as one wished provided one did
not harm others, but, as philosophers such as =erek Darfitt have
pointed out, ill8s question is not 6or may not be7 enough. The
basic question ought to be1 ill my act be one of a set of acts that
will together harm other people" 'nd of course the vast
movement of liberated women into the labor force in the second
half of the last century obviously so depressed returns to laborthat many women who would have preferred to stay in family life
6with the freedoms and enterprises that family life makes
possible7 also found it necessary to get %obs. >ere was indeed a
slippery slope.
$n the course of little more than half a century, our
conception of human beings and of the structure of society has
been steadily transformed. $n the inherited conception, humanbeings were as male and female moral agents, and responded
both to their desires on the one hand, and to ideas about what
they ought, rightly or honorably, to do, on the other. $n this
conception of human life, both freedom and love were disciplines
that certainly needed to be worked at. Freedom was our self/
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regulation in terms of the rule of law, good manners and
consideration for others, a form of independent life unique to
:uropean societies. This self/discipline set clear limits to the
powers that states might claim in order to sustain peaceful order.ithin the law, we, as sub%ects of civil society, disciplined
ourselves. 2ove required the discipline of commitment beyond
the initiating desire. Only such an institution could give its
members both a memory of the past and a commitment to the
future. 'nd in this conception of human life, male and female
were recogni&ed as the indispensable components of the family
as the institution on which our social order rested. $t is that
recognition that is now under attack.
$n that world, being a man or being a woman had an
anchorage in nature, and these roles entailed a certain
institutional discipline, along with the generali&ed respect that
went with it. anliness# went with a sense of responsibility 6in
ideal forms approaching the model of the gentleman#7 while
womanliness# involved a sense of decorum along with
e)pectations of a specific kind of human understanding. encontrolled their tendency to use vulgar words of language# in
the presence of a woman. $t is significant that both of these ideal
forms of complementary respect between men and women have
been significantly weakened, most notably in se)ual conduct, and
in such phenomena as binge drinking.# omanliness# as a
discipline has been abandoned as oppressive.
e are now, then, for these and many other purposes, no
longer to be understood as either male or female, but as
essentially human and sub%ect to universal human rights. (ome
of us are hetero, some homo, some bi or trans. But all of these
are equal as legitimate preferences in the en%oyment of affection
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and pleasure. They are all modes of relating# to one another
amid the ceaseless group/grope of a population of identicals bent
on e)ploring the many ways in which we may en%oy satisfactions,
including se)ual satisfaction. e belong to a single all/inclusivecontinuum.
$t is not altogether easy to follow the many odd ramifications
of this new conception of what we are and how we live, and ought
to live. But there is no doubt that the central concept is the all/
inclusive continuum of human beings who must not be
differentiated in terms of se)uality or of se)ual preference. $t is a
very abstract conception of what we are, and one may wellwonder where it begins and where it ends. For in the (panish
parliament, the idea has been seriously floated that the higher
primates0gorillas, for e)ample0share with us some of the
specifications of personhood, and ought therefore to be accorded
human rights. 'nd at the other end of this inclusive chain of
humanity will be found a parallel idea that newborn babies have
not yet attained the 6presumably 2ockean7 identity of
personhood, and therefore might, if necessary, be sub%ect to whatare apparently known, in the reflections of some ethical think
tanks, as post/natal abortions.# >ere, then, is a fascinating new
world of quite remarkable possibilities. 'nd all of this seems to
hang on nothing more formidable than a tiny semantic
modification of how we use the term marriage.#
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