Scott Yenor provides a framework to understand the present and real battle for the soul of America, not to mention other western democracies.  His American Greatness article is Conservatives and Our Queer Constitution, an excerpt from his book on the subject. Article excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Queer Constitution

Every country has a sexual constitution: a set of laws and opinions, which use shame and honor to shape and guide sexuality. The old marital constitution was, shall we say, the Straight Constitution, which honored enduring, monogamous, man-woman, and hence procreative marriage. It also stigmatized alternatives. This Straight Constitution upheld a vision of marriage that, among other things, limited divorce and proscribed fornication, contraception, sodomy, and adultery, promoted a family wage (under some circumstances), and imagined marriage for the purposes of procreation and educating offspring. We lived under the Straight Constitution until roughly the 1970s.

That constitution no longer exists, or perhaps just barely.
We currently live under the Queer Constitution, which claims
to—and in fact does—reject the Straight Constitution.

The Queer Constitution was developed by winning legal battles in the service of broader cultural recognition of what once were called alternative lifestyles. It moved from gay rights in the 1970s, to proclaiming “Gay Pride” a virtue in the 1990s, to a legal recognition of the constitutional right to sodomy in the early 2000s, to making the Boy Scouts and the U.S. military accept homosexuals, to constitutionalizing same-sex marriage in the 2010s, to protecting gender identity under the civil rights laws in the 2020s, to practically banning intellectual and legal opposition to the Queer Constitution on speech platforms.

Some conservatives fought these changes. Nonetheless, nearly all acquiesced to them serially—fighting against new extensions while accepting their previous defeats. Rarely have conservatives acted as if the future of practices encouraged under the Straight Constitution—with its manner of directing passions and ordering loves—depended on reversing efforts to queer our sexual constitution.

At the Queer Constitution’s core are two ideas:

First, that all sexual behaviors, if consensual, are equal and dignified.
Second, that society’s binary, heteronormative gender identity is an iron cage, hampering individual expression and happiness.

The Queer Constitution honors all manner of sex. Laws restricting contraception, sodomy, and fornication are, by its lights, unconstitutional. These changes in law are but the first part of an effort to normalize and then celebrate premarital sex, recreational sex, men who have sex with men, childhood immodesty, masturbation, lesbianism, and all conceptions of transgenderism.

The live-and-let-live attitude, hoped for by conservatives and
promised by revolutionaries, cannot in principle hold.

Indeed, the move from legal tolerance to public celebration is perfectly logical. Human beings are social and political animals. Many parts of their lives take place in private, but society nevertheless recognizes and applauds public manifestations of private acts. Under the Straight Constitution, no one watches a husband and wife having sex, but the public celebrates their weddings and their births, and the public recognizes their common property. Weddings themselves are a recognition of the importance of the marriage for the couple and for society as such.

Advocates of the Queer Constitution wanted and needed
such public affirmation for their private acts.

From the private protection or tolerance of “gay rights,” advocates moved on to taking pride in “coming out of the closet.” Failure to show a similar pride is a public insult, punishable through social opprobrium, as violations of hate speech codes, or worse. Advocates sought and won legal recognition for same-sex marriage, visitation rights for same-sex partners, and the right to adopt children, but they did not stop at such a legal infrastructure. That is because the Queer Constitution demands public celebration of queerness. School curricula must be queered, the better to educate children before“homophobia” sets in. Men dressed as sexualized women must read children’s books to children in public libraries, lest they grow up to think transgenderism is abnormal. “Love makes the family”—rather than a mother and a father—must become the morality of every generation. Christian bakers must be made to bake the wedding cake for gay couples, lest failure to bake the cake insult the gay couple.

As to the next frontiers: strictures against adult sex with children are being “problematized” and are now eroding. Calls to lower the age of consent and to embrace pedophilia chic are beginning, including among politicians. Incest taboos are already being subjected to critical questions. “Live and let live” turns into “comply or else.”

Many pro-family activists pretend dishes of the Queer Constitution
can be accepted à la carte without ordering the whole Queer menu.

Beyond the law and public morality, the Queer Constitution rules in the scientific professions, our major corporations, our education system, the Boy Scouts, the American military, and countless other commanding heights in our culture and within our families. Even churches openly support it. What had been considered bad under the Straight Constitution must now be considered good under the Queer Constitution, and vice versa. Many conservatives refused to see the Queer Constitution as the Left’s imperial project, one aimed at subverting and dishonoring the Straight Constitution. Now this imperial project has gone international.

Conservatives can no longer indulge in libertarian fantasies.
Peaceful coexistence between a queer and a straight constitution is not sustainable.

At its deepest level, the Queer Constitution elevates sexual pleasure and sexual self-expression as the goods of adults that have a dominant hold on the human heart, instead of procreation, familial duties, and parental responsibility. One’s sexual identity becomes who one is. Expressing sex in whatever way becomes a crucial right. All eros becomes sexual eros. Dealing with the consequences of sex—including, most crucially, children—becomes someone else’s problem or not a problem at all, since there are fewer kids.

In contrast, under the Straight Constitution, sex is something one does, not who one is. Life under this constitution encourages individuals to make sex serve something higher, like the duties of parenthood or finding its place within a marital regime. When people are taught that sex is who they are, they are less likely to see beyond sex to higher duties.

The duties associated with marriage and parenthood necessarily
wither as the Straight Constitution shapes fewer and fewer lives.

This social contagion has profound effects on individual happiness and social health. Indeed, sexual constitutions do not create human desires, but they play a large part in shaping them. Like a command-and-control economy, our reengineered ways work poorly, damaging men and women. Suicide rates and rates of drug abuse have spiked. People are more and more medicated. Health crises proliferate, depending on the lifestyle. Life expectancy sinks. A sense of personal mission, centered on family life, fades, and with it fades human ambition and purpose. Children mutilate themselves, at parental, medical, or teacher suggestion. Damage to transgender children is irreversible. Society as a whole is less happy, less trusting, less confident.

A rejuvenated conservatism would recognize, as did leftist activists a generation ago, that easygoing coexistence between a decent Straight Constitution and the Queer Constitution is not possible. As a result, the family must be self-consciously repoliticized. Given the centrality of politics, as the New Right appreciates, the Queer Constitution must be rejected root and branch and replaced with a new Straight Constitution, duly changed for our circumstances, supporting man-woman marriage, enduring marriage, procreative sex, and parental responsibility. From the perspective of the New Right, the Old Right may have hoped to achieve the goal of a decent family life, but the Old Right did not will the means to achieve it.

The Old Right is correct in seeing that nature provides materials from which decent family life might arise, but the manner of guiding nature is crucial. The queer revolutionaries long ago recognized that sexual passions and priorities could be bent away from enduring marriage—and they built a queering ethic to accomplish it. The New Right must work with the building blocks of nature, but it must also show that our Queer Constitution is a source of misery and social decline, and that a new Straight Constitution is more humane, fosters happiness, and creates an enduring social fabric with lasting man-woman marriage at its heart.

What are these natural building blocks? Differences between men and women are natural. It is a natural fact that only man-woman sex can produce children. Sexual impulses are natural in the sense that they are spontaneous; and they are mostly, absent a countervailing cultural tendency, toward man-woman relations. Men and women in the main have crucially different psychologies, fitting them for life together and raising kids and reflecting something like checks and balances. Childhood is naturally a state of helplessness for human beings. The family, like the sex integrated into it, is based in nature but it is always mediated by laws. A decent sexual constitution would take all these facts into account, while pointing to better, sturdier relations to make them serve human happiness, personal excellence, and the social good.

The Old Right could not conserve a decent society, though many knew the stakes. Eventually conservatives compromised, hoping for the best, which resulted in the step-by-step adoption of the Queer Constitution. Perhaps they could do no different, given the class arrangements of our new managerial elite. Becoming elite meant acquiescing in the Sexual Revolution. Resisting that revolution meant irrelevance. But this bargain is up: conservatives are now outside the ruling classes and inconsequential. For society, embracing the Queer Constitution combines the costs of having weak, adult-focused marriage customs with all the costs associated directly with this constitution. The result has been individual misery, social decline, and a barren future. The perversities will keep mounting, as advocates for the Queer Constitution are clearly coming for the children, a fact they themselves now openly admit.

All civilizational founders recognized the importance of promoting a straight constitution and stigmatizing its alternatives. The New Right must follow the deep wisdom of such founders where it leads. Only a return to an uncompromising Straight Constitution can reverse our decline.

 

 

 

Update on the cultural war for America’s soul comes from the heart of California reported by Breitbart Bar Patrons Standing for National Anthem Sparks Outrage: ‘The Most Dangerous Situation’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

At Rainbow Oaks Restaurant — just an hour outside of San Diego — a TikTok user shared that she had faced the most “dangerous” situation she had ever been in. At noon, while she was eating her stack of pancakes, about a dozen people stood up for the Star-Spangled Banner being played on the bar’s TVs.

As first reported by Fox News, the TikTok user who goes by the screen name @Paulinaappa_0 recorded the patriotic display and included the caption: “By far the most dangerous situation I’ve ever been in #godblessamerica #getout #illegal #whitepeoplethings.”

The Tik Tok video racked up 3.1 million views and over 19,000 comments with the vast majority affirming Paulina’s feelings of fear and disgust.

For the past six years, the restaurant has played the National Anthem every day at noon, according to the restaurant’s Facebook page.

Patriotism has suffered a steep decline in the last couple of decades. A March 2023 survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal found that 38 percent of respondents said patriotism was “very important” to them. When this same question was asked in 1998, 70 percent of people said it was “very important,” the newspaper reported.

This phobia towards the National Anthem or the American flag
is not a new phenomenon.

Two years ago, the New York Post reported that a California school teacher, Kristin Pitzen, removed the American flag from her classroom and put the LGBTQ pride flag in its place. Echoing the same cry of Paulina and her thousands of commenters, Pitzen said the American flag made her feel “uncomfortable.”

As for Hollywood actor and evangelist Kirk Cameron, neither the American flag nor the National Anthem strike fear into his eyes but rather hope in his heart. A viral video from February, shows Cameron leading a room full of children and parents in the National Anthem at a public library in Savannah, Georgia, in February. Cameron is on a 14-city book tour to combat the “wokeness” being pushed on children.

“We don’t want this woke garbage,” Cameron said in an interview with the Daily Signal. “It leads to brokenness and bondage and leads to misery. What we want is what our country was built on, which was the Bible and faith and family and love for country.”

Based on a non-fiction book of the same name by historian Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far is a 1977 epic war film depicting Operation Market Garden, a failed Allied operation using paratroopers to secure three bridges over three key rivers in Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II.  The phrase has come to mean “a long shot”, or an overly ambitious plan.

America’s institutions currently have been invaded increasingly by Progressive Jihadists, i.e. true believers in global socialist ideology under the guise of rainbow flags and DIE protocols.  So far, it has been a cultural warfare, with educational and governmental institutions surrendering with token, or no resistance.  However, since the Washington D.C. takeover by the prog regime (so-called Biden administration) more often firearms are involved, as symbolized by the military perimeter around the US Capital lest anyone object to the new governance.

Some of this move to kinetic warfare was evident in the 2020 Antifa insurrections in places like Portland and Seattle.  Guns are also used by criminals in blue cities like Chicago, NYC and SF.  As well the fentanyl trade at the Southern US border is empowered by guns. But a new bridge was just crossed in Nashville, Tennessee, when a transgender soldier fired 150 bullets inside a Christian school, murdering six innocents, including three children, two teachers and the principal.  That terrorist event followed Tennessee laws enacted in March protecting children against drag shows and from gender transition surgery and treatments.

Another bridge was crossed with the Trumped-up indictment of the former President in NYC.  It signifies that the Justice System has also been taken over and put into service of the prog ideology.  Like Sharia law imposed anywhere in the world that Islam prevails, now US Federal Justice distinguishes between true believers (the Ummah) who enjoy full citizenship rights, versus the infidels (Kafir) who, if allowed to co-exist at all, are an underclass with few privileges other than working in service of their overlords.  In Manhattan, as in other blue states,  people who are the right skin color, gender, or sexual preference are not prosecuted for felonies like stealing, vandalism, battery, or even murder, while the Kafir-in-Chief, Donald Trump (“Rich old white guy”–DA Bragg) is arrested on imaginary charges.

How far can they go with these perversions against American heritage and ideals?  One answer comes from Arkansas where Brandon Meeks writes Middle Americans at American Mind.  Go Brandon!  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

What might it actually look like to represent the real interests and values of most voters?

One reason I rarely venture into the realm of American politics is because I am not in the habit of going places I do not belong, much less where I am not wanted. And I am as out of place among both Republicans and Democrats as a country ham at a synagogue.

I see no value in hitching my wagon to an elephant with neither sense of direction nor recollection of where he came from. Neither do I welcome the prospect of hooking myself to an ass that can’t plow in a straight line and tries to bite me at every turn.

I’d wager that I’m not the only one who thinks this way. In fact, if there exist out there any politicians with the pie-eyed hope of unifying the country behind a saner program than what’s currently on offer, they might do well to think about how people like me see the world.

I can’t remember the last time I trusted a politician of any stripe. Most are so crooked that when they die, the undertaker will have to screw them into the ground with a torque wrench. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them, blue and red, should be handed a pink slip and told to get further and smell better.

One party prides itself on being “conservative,” while having nothing to conserve but the madness of five minutes ago. The other gloats about being “progressive,” which seems to mean careening off the edge of a cliff like a gaggle of over-eager lemmings. Neither sounds very appealing to me.

I was born into a family of traditionalist Southern Democrats—a breed of political animal that has gone the way of the Dodo Bird in my lifetime. I live in a red state that was once a blue state. But this is because the Democratic Party sold its soul to the Devil and now worships at the blackened altar of Molech. It certainly isn’t because the folks in Toad Suck, Arkansas finally got around to reading Hayek or started subscribing to National Review.

I know this isn’t true everywhere, but in some ways my state
still feels like it is peopled by that extinct species of Democrat.
But then again, I don’t live in America: I live in Arkansas.

When I was growing up, folks in our family went to church on Sundays, to work on Mondays, and to union meetings on Thursdays. They believed in the sacred nature of the traditional family, the supremacy of the Christian religion and its outworking in society, the inviolability of the First Amendment, and the necessity of the Second Amendment to protect all of that.

We were taught that honorable folks worked hard to earn a living and that the government should only help if and when they couldn’t. Republicans were encouraging everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but we understood that it’s mighty hard to do that when the straps rotted off months ago during a long hard winter. Even so, the business of government was to give those people a leg up—never a hand out.

In much of the South, the New Deal was viewed as a late answer to the Reconstruction question. At the time, half-measures laden with problems seemed better than none. Folks too poor to make it could at least get by on surplus commodities. Those too proud to stand in line at the courthouse or the national guard armory for peanut butter and cheese could slip over and get it from a relative with a little less shame.

While this describes many in general, it describes my great-grandmother in particular. “We weren’t really all that political,” she said, “but we were hungry, and Roosevelt was sending the bread.” “That’s not ‘conservative,’” some will say. Perhaps not. But if it hadn’t been for such measures, my family wouldn’t have been “conserved” at all.

Does this make me “fiscally liberal”? Not necessarily. I seem to be for less ludicrous spending than either major party. For instance, I am not in favor of bailing out banksters, funding sexual re-education seminars with public money at either the state or local level, or footing the bill for foreign wars. In other words: I don’t belong.

So for politicians or interest groups hoping to earn the allegiance of anyone like me: don’t ask me to do anything “for my party.” Tell me to do it for my family. Am I “patriotic”? Who knows. I figure my patriotism is like bursitis: it flares up a couple times a year, usually in hot weather. I love my home and try to love my neighbor, but if you’re asking if I think we need to spread the gospel of Exxon Mobil to the four corners of the world, then no. If that’s what patriotism really is then I’m the erstwhile Queen of the Hottentots.

I haven’t watched the news (except for the local weather) since 2020. If you put a gun to my head and said, “Name six popular political pundits or I’m pulling the trigger,” there’s a good chance I’d be conversing with St. Peter in a matter of minutes. Somehow I suspect that being under-informed after that fashion is preferable to being ill-informed by partisan hacks.

But there’s one thing about which I am certain—whatever it is that Washington is doing now isn’t working. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seem to know beans from apple butter about how to run a country, but both seem adept at being able to run one into the ground.

What few proposals I have to offer seem both simple and impossible.

Republicans should concern themselves with protecting our republic and the laws and lives which constitute it, rather than faceless corporations, technocracies, or some divinized notion of The Market. Democrats should heed once again the voices of all the people, eschewing exotic ideological experiments in order to embrace the totality of Americans from sea to shining sea.

Though I am not altogether sanguine about the future of party politics (at least the major parties as they exist at present), I haven’t yet stocked the basement with dry beans and powdered milk against an impending Armageddon. I still have faith in ordinary Americans. I am hoping against hope that common, workaday men and women will assert their right to live in reality and insist on a politics to match. For one thing, there are so many of us. For another thing, God loves us.

There is enough discontent and hunger at the local level to make me feel that a constituency exists to support a program of patriotism and virtue against the venal manias of our elite uniparty. Any national leader who can give that constituency the drive and direction they need will have my vote. If such a leader should prove himself, we have a fighting chance.

As it stands, I belong to neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. I belong to God, my family, and to the Arkansas dirt forever mingled with my own blood. But without any trace of irony, I think it is precisely that kind of sentiment that can make a person a decent American. By the grace of God, there might still be quite a lot of us out there.

 

Thomas Adamo and Josiah Joner report at Stanford Review Stanford’s Dark Hand in Twitter Censorship.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Matt Taibbi’s two latest “Twitter Files” drops revealed that Stanford played a direct role in this gross violation of online free speech. Emails revealed that the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) actively collaborated with Twitter to suppress information they knew was factually true. Taibbi’s investigation revealed that Stanford’s Virality Project “recommends that multiple platforms take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”

The project succeeded in getting big tech companies to take down about 35% of the content they flagged. They reviewed content en masse from almost every major social media company: Twitter, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest were all monitored by SIO. The questionable censorship decisions by the group all seemed to go in one direction—shutting down the now-vindicated Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, while taking direct guidance from Anthony Fauci about the supposed falsehood of the lab leak theory.

In short, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project had countless people—mostly Stanford students—reporting millions of Twitter posts that didn’t comply with their standards. Even posts that were factually true faced censorship if they didn’t conform to the subjective whims of SIO officials.

The evidence points to a para-governmental fusion of universities,
social media companies,and the federal government,
all working to censor free speech.

We at the Review take Stanford’s actions to suppress speech very seriously. Stanford cannot be allowed to sweep this gross violation of fundamental freedoms under the rug. The University must answer for their actions.

It appears Stanford’s Virality Project took issues with anyone who was an enemy of the state’s, and more explicitly Fauci’s, narrative about the coronavirus and subsequent vaccines. Any posts that brought up the “lab leak” theory (now the primary COVID origin thesis), were dubbed by SIO as “keen to foment distrust in Fauci’s expert guidance and in American public health officials and institutions.” People who dared question the Fauci-manufactured ‘status quo’ narrative were censored. SIO even branded “reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway” and “natural immunity,” as troublesome violations of ‘disinformation’ policies.

If this is truly what the term ‘disinformation’ means, perhaps we should no longer define it in terms of what is and isn’t true. Instead when we hear the word we should think of it as anything that isn’t in the federal government’s formal narrative: thought crime. The Virality Project stated that because the post-vaccine death of a Virginia woman named Drene Keyes inspired “anti-vaccine” comments, it became a “disinformation” event. They warned against people “asking questions,” alleging it was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.” Doubting, or even just examining, the prevailing narratives on COVID got citizens repressed by a para-governmental entity.

The Stanford Internet Observatory and Project Virality wanted to cover that up—not because it wasn’t true… it was and they knew it. They covered up the truth because they wanted to preserve their narrative. The truth would “exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci,” too much for SIO. When given the choice between truth and Fauci, Stanford chose Fauci.

Projects like SIO’s project Virality are deeply insidious and set
a dangerous precedent for the future of online discourse.

Stanford’s hand in them and the extent to which they censored important, relevant and true information is deeply disappointing and troubling. When an extra-governmental institution acts with impunity against the First Amendment rights of Americans and suppresses information that resulted in the deaths of American citizens, one might expect a dark and shady underground alliance of evil to be behind it. In 2023, it seems all roads lead to Palo Alto.

With free speech on campus recently under attack at the law school, the university censoring faculty that wouldn’t go along with the lockdown narrative, and now their role in censorship on social media, it is fair to question if the winds of freedom still blow at Stanford. It is up to the University to take concrete steps to reassert that freedom of speech is a bedrock principle.