Breath-stealing social pressure to conform to just-thought-up norms may, arguably, be the ugliest dangling tentacle in an otherwise beautiful contemporary life.
It never washed with Mom to argue that “everybody else is going.” You are not everybody, she rejoined. You are my son, my responsibility.
But then Mom was a traditionalist. As every good progressive is taught, tradition is just a discounted euphemism for old-fashioned, and that is the harshest opprobrium this side of obscenity.
Those tinged-with-sadness-and-regret thoughts, like a lazy river, were flowing through my mind last Friday morning when I read in the newspapers the pathetic gotta-justify words of the president of the Boy Scouts of America.
Normal-looking, calm-speaking Bob Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, sounded so ringingly Kennedyesque when he stood up at the annual Scouts meeting in Atlanta. He said so 1960s’ishly:
“We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.”
In that moment, a century’s worth of shimmering Boy Scout principles thunderingly crashed to the ground in a ring of fierce orange and blue blazes, never to be rekindled.
Gay Boy Scout leaders instantly became not only fashionable but in demand, obligatory.
That is the way the bully-boy gay movement works in modern times. Admit publicly that you not only accept but adore gay boys and girls. Otherwise, I will play ISIS and behead you.
Who cares if some Boy Scouts are gay?
Who cares if some Boy Scout leaders are gay?
Who cares that I am straight?
Traditional people don’t.
But this is not what the incurably insecure bully-boy movement demands.
Acceptance? Feh.
Embracement? Feh.
Those acknowledgements are too passive. They insist on being seen as superior beings, victims of history who have risen from the dead to become civilization’s ideal.
There may have been gays in the Garden of Eden. They have been sprinkled throughout history. So what? So nothing.
As a Cub Scout and as a Boy Scout, Art and George were my leaders. I don’t remember asking them if they were gay. They never asked me, either. Why would I be curious about less than 2 percent of the population.
Early in this new century, a shrewd PR fella advised the bully-boy movement to attach “equality” to their momentous pronouncements. In short order, he guaranteed, you will win over even the rawest, most-disconnected rubes, who don’t know from gay. Everybody is vulnerable to the fairness argument.
Learning from genuine victims, when the bully-boy movement adopted the phony equality mantra, they won the public relations battle. Mr. Gates merely became the latest to cave to the threat “Say yes or I will kill you.”