Sodomy Depot
A month ago, Democratic Senator Bob Allen got busted for soliciting gay sex
in a men's room. This week, Republican Senator Larry Craig gets busted for
exactly the same thing. Putting aside for a minute the idea that American
government and indeed all democracies are a conspiracy of people who hate
what they are, and it's finally spread to homosexuals (is Roy Cohn in
audience?) it is humorous to see yet another painful example of the split
between image and reality in a democracy.
Democracies are unlike well-run fascist states. In a fascist state, the
primary advantage is that you don't have to pretend that the reality of
what the state is doing is something of a more benign nature. If some
bright young reporter asks "Are you machine-gunning dissidents?" you can
reply with an enthusiast "Hell yeah, and you're next" or, if you're the
more demure type, "No comment." The state does what it says it will based
on publically-available ideas like ethnic-cultural consensus, elimination
of harmful ideas, and the like.
However, in a democracy, every political action is a sales job, because
we have to make it palatable for the citizens. How do you do that? First,
you make it sound friendly by justifying it in terms of things we "all"
agree are good, like human rights, free stuff, pity for Katrina victims,
or the right to believe in God. Next, you spin that sucker into an absolute.
You're not conducting some run of the mill machine-gunning of dissidents,
you're fighting terrorists who hate our freedom. You're not building a
little league field, you're combatting gangs with tough love. And so on.
A car salesman who began his pitch with "well, it's got wheels and an engine
and stuff" would be in for some lean years, as would a democratic politician
who did not construe ordinary actions as the heroic battle between good
and evil.
For this reason, we have the kind of hypocrisy that afflicts our gay sex
seeking missiles of Senators who keep getting caught. They want to be powerful
men, and they know most of their audience being heterosexual finds the idea
of homosexuality impalatable, so they marry a woman who also wants to be
rich and powerful, and suffocate their desires. They speak a good deal about
freedom and tolerance, and in the case of democratic senators, may even
vote for such things, but they know that it's bad salesmanship to be out
of step with the biological needs and consequent opinions of the majority.
If you want to have kids, you like the thought that they might do the same,
which won't be happening if they're gay. As a result, they deny the obvious
reality of gay populations and their needs.
In the introspection any good neurotic nation stumbles through after one
of its leaders is caught in search of sodomy, America is now besieged by
articles describing how gay men cruise for sex. Bathrooms in bad areas
are popular, but now they're even in Home Depot and Wal-Mart, passing by
word of mouth the best places to "cruise" for sodomy. Because our politics
are a sales job, we ignore this phenomenon in public and send the cops
in to run vice stings so property values don't decline. It's as if we're
determined to be tolerant of homosexuality, but we can't admit it exists,
so we're forever sandwiched between reality and a glamourous but
unrealistic sales job.
If elected president, I have a simple proposition: instead of Home Depot,
we will set up gigantic padded, washable bathrooms in the center of each
city with a big sign saying SODOMY DEPOT above each one. They will be your
one-stop, 100% legal area to go cruise for gay sex, and we'll also have
a library of boring statistics so politicians have an excuse when they
get snapped on film chasing down a little boing-boing. I don't know whether
this is a good idea or a bad idea, but at least it's a realistic one. Your
citizens have voted with their mouths and penises, even if only a minority,
to have sodomy, and while I support the right of any community to exclude
sodomy if that's their values system, I think we should stop the sham and
admit what's going on and accomodate it.
This will never get me elected in a democracy. In a fascist state, one
supposes, a leader could simply elect to suppress homosexuality with
violence, but I consider that equally unrealistic. Even the Nazis were
willing to tolerate quiet sodomy by those who were otherwise not opposed
to the state. Even totalitarian Russia had its bathrooms will holes
knocked between the stalls. It's hard to doom productive citizens for quiet
sodomy since it remains unknown to most people, and so you can claim you're
fighting homosexuality while removing only the most extreme cases. We have
a similar situation in our soft totalitarian democracy, where we claim to
be tolerating homosexuality but in doing so drive many to become extreme
cases.
by Brett Stevens
September 2, 2007
|
| 