Response to KK. KK: Cool article and I agree with much of the author's sentiments about the tyrannical nature of Christian marriage. And I now understand your earlier reference of the monster. But isn't the article a bit paranoid and pessimistic about the meta- story of humans? The author concludes with "Life, [diversity], and unrestrained sexuality" as the way out of the beast's grip. Don't you think this would best be served by liberating/ sanctioning/ legalizing these forms of human partnership that bring many of us LGBT happiness?
“Tyrannical nature of Christian marriage.” The description was not only of “Christian” or “western” marriage. Antilife motivations and social structures may be found in any culture, and the imposition of a pyramid-shaped hierarchy bolstered by the smashing of nascent minds through pyramid families is one common across the globe and across religious sentiments.
“Paranoid and pessimistic.” on the planet of mass slaughter delivered by smiling nobles in ten thousand dollar suits, depleted uranium munitions scattered globewide, phosphorous melting skin and little brown corpses ground under the husks of olive trees, there is no paranoia in recognizing a problem. Evil fights life; life yet lives.
“Liberating/ sanctioning…” Look more to the latter half of the last post. Encouraging/supporting/or just tolerating free human partnership, or simply playing fair in an ideal "market," are Life. The opposite behaviors are antilife. This is why they resonate so strongly with impoverished, harassed, abused poor whites (to the average savvy American, these pitiful creatures are “red-staters” or “ignorant” or “conservatives” or “religious wackos”), who cling so desperately to evil (warring, killing, restricting, prejudice) to both lash out and to express their own fear of the changing world. The sad fools who passionately resist different sexualities, along with the smirking elites who stoke those fires of cheap prejudice, are both in the wrong.
The other side of the coin here, and the deeper sorrow, is that working against those sad fools are the necessary, predictable other half of the equation that keeps the death machines grinding. As “blue staters” or “urban Americans” or “educated people” or “modern people” or “liberals” pursue the cheese offered by elites, they think they’re fighting the power by battling the ignorant red-staters and demanding token shifts in “domestic” policy. In actuality, all they’re doing is running next to the red-staters on a different hamster wheel, keeping things moving smoothly.
Yes, anti-gay prejudice is bad. Yes, the red-staters are acting foolishly (rudely, violently, awfully). Yes (as said before), an ideal market economy would provide for similar/identical/substantially equal benefits for couples of all orientations (if any should necessarily be granted to any kinds of “couples” at all that should not be granted to “individuals” or other associations of whatever kind, but that’s a separate argument for the white robed philosophers of the next utopia).
Nonetheless, this is an illusory battle. It is one that was fabricated expressly to distract attention from the next level of questions and problems. Namely: who has the money; who has the power; who has the food, and who is being blown to pieces. (And above even that silly, terrible game, which the elites think is the real one, is Evil’s use of the elites in the ultimate end of the snuffing out of all light and change, forever.)
Consider, in comparison, the ways that the Central Intelligence Agency and other black ops pit various ethnic groups against one another in Iraq. Yes, one ethnic group may be more right than another in their conflict—it may be morally right, or even strictly necessary, for the members of Group 1 to fight against Group 2. But what is the real purpose of the conflict? To keep Group 1 and Group 2 fighting against each other, instead of against the occupying army. Poor dwellers of the American ghetto shoot each other under the façade of this or that gang or ‘hood. In Hitler’s concentration camps, the guards were all too eager to turn Jew prisoners on one another. Read Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.
What gays need to realize is that the awful red staters, for all of their wrongness, are still their brothers and sisters, connected in life throughout this planet and under this sky. They lash out at gays in stupid ways because of their own sadness and desperation, whether through the conduit of a poor, downtrodden individual, or a wealthy one semi-cognizant of why the fight needs to go on.
And the wealthier urban gays and liberals, who spearhead and spokesperson movements against the media-acknowledged prejudice of the moment, lash right back. They beg support for the president who cuts education spending, smiles on Bill Gates the Destroyer of Public Schools, refuses to give health care to all, continues sending the desperate, poor kids of the red states off to die as (non-college-educated, non-officer) grunts responsible for murdering the brown people far away, and they sneer at the ignorant, stupid red-staters who, in desperation, lash out at an easy, pointless target.
Next couple decades, it’ll be a fight over Arabs, or Muslims, or pick the group you like. And as this one asked in the last post, what’s the victory if gays end up getting treated like everyone else in this awful death machine? Show some solidarity with the future generations of whatever subset group that’s next in line for the civil rights struggle.
The powerful ones may be able to force you to eat their pudding, and we all do, because we’d starve otherwise, but if they make you independently like eating it, then they’ve won.
Cut the infighting. The real enemies are the ones in the boardrooms and penthouses. They need just as much help as the rest of us, because they’re only hurting themselves, and their own offspring, life and planet, in the long run. This one can’t personify the source; only see the gravity wells it leaves behind, know the way it works, and try to steer the ship around it.
Evil itself; Antilife itself: these (motivating philosophies? Intangible shadows in the backs of our minds?) are the enemies. Even if it’s a good thing—the teeniest-tiniest of incremental steps toward a subset of a certain generation of people being forced to be more institutionally nice to a different such subset—dancing on the elites’ puppet strings and being pleased at being given a little treat like a marginal increase in the legal framework protecting gay marriage will never do anything but set up the next sad ones to be dumped upon.
When you read that an incremental anti-prejudice step has been taken, then look lower on the page and see that 17 kids in a far-off land got turned into chunks of bone chips and dusty bolognese, it’s not time to cheer, but to get mad at everyone in the media and the leadership who thought that throwing you a little bone would get you distracted from what’s really hurting us all.
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