The following is a response to a set of posts on a left mailing list (other authors’ names are not specified). The quoted passages at the beginning are in response to the previous passage(s).
The original question raised:
Since I am 1) female and 2) bisexual, I wonder if guys on the list could explain to me what exactly is so threatening about homosexuality?
Response:
I can only speak for myself, but the idea of having sex with a man is revolting on an almost physical level. I would rather eat poo. [clip]
Response:
But what does that have to do with feeling threatened?
It has almost nothing to do with being threatened. What is threatening is any major transformation of human relations. Immigration is threatening. Integration is threatening. Sex education in the schools is threatening. Abortion is threatening. Challenges to male supremacy are threatening (to women as well as men). Plato argued that changes in hair style were threatening to the stability of the state.
CHANGE is threatening. That is the legitimate foundation of conservatism, because change is for the most part destructive rather than constructive. This is the reason revolutionaries (or anyone working for fundamental reform) must seriously work to establish themselves as, n substance, a conserving force, not a force for mere change for the sake of change. It is also why defense of abortion must be based on the “In a Jar, Daddio, In a Jar”* strategy: i.e., abortion must come to be taken for granted, a commonplace, like an an appendectomy or clipping one’s nails. (*A phrase used by the late Lisa Rogers in her posts on abortion on the old Spoons Marxism list.)
Jane Austen, a conservative when conservatism could still be intelligent rather than mindless, analyzed mindless conservatism in the chief villain of Emma, Emma’s father. She also, there, analyzed how this sort of conservatism must be overcome: Mr. Woodhouse must be made to think Emma’s marriage inevitable, and that inevitableness would give it legitimacy. Actually, a similar process is analyzed in Mansfield Park in reference to that fathead, Sir Thomas.
And finally, note that there is nothing whatever hypocrtical in conservative homosexuals who stay in the closet and support heterosexist policies. Private (closeted) homosexuality does not threaten the state.
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