The Myth of the Neutral Public Square

In an almost unbelievable new twist to the Margaret Court/Israel Folau saga, Tennis Australia has managed the impossible – to invite Margaret Court to a celebration of her tennis achievements next January, and simultaneously to give her the middle finger by labelling her religious views as hurtful, demeaning and degrading.  All because she thinks marriage is between a man and a woman (to the exclusion of all others, for life).  This is the view of a large minority of the Australian population which most of the world shared until about eight minutes ago.

Like all Australia’s bleeding heart corporate sporting bodies, who endlessly confuse their role – in this case running tennis tournaments – with moral philosophising and lecturing the rest of us as to what we should think on matters of sexual ethics.

Has anyone done any real social science on whether homosexuals are actually “demeaned” and degraded” by religious people who, like the 40 per cent of Australians who voted “no” in the same sex marriage plebiscite?  Or even if they feel demeaned and degraded.

Perhaps they are, and perhaps they do.  It would be a tad surprising for someone to be personally “offended” or “demeaned” just because there are people who have different views, or even views that are antithetical.  It would be interesting to see some numbers.  After all, this claim about offence is made ad nauseum as if it were self-evidently true. Know what, it just might be total BS.

In the current debates, what you generally find is that common or garden-variety homosexuals aren’t the ones chirruping noisily from the sidelines about “antediluvian views”, “this is 2019”, the “embarrassing racist grandpa at Christmas dinner” (that from Gideon Haigh, of all people), and so on, or suggesting that the views of people like Margaret Court “have no place in society” (an alleged comedian on Triple M).  Hence my suspicion that the claim about gays being mortally offended by the existence of traditionalists is overblown.

No, most of the chirruping is done, not even by the surrogates of homosexual activism acting on instructions, but rather by two distinct cadres in the vanguard of the Great Awokening.  The first, the left liberal shills in the media.  The second, those cowed organisations of our time who fear above all else being thought of (by customers or stakeholders) as homophobic or whatever.  The first are ideologues, the second useful idiots of the homo fascist activists.  Tennis Australia is a node of useful idiocy.  The docile actions of corporate sporting bodies provide content and a platform for the media and academic ideologues to air their own morality tales and gambits.

There are certainly those who have a far broader, moral relativist agenda that is not born of any especial liking for homosexuality in theory or practice.  What they specifically and slyly seek is to make stick the claim that Christians and others who believe in the traditional family as the foundation of Western civilisation are beyond the pale.  They are to be beaten up in the public square, prior to being escorted from the premises. 

Yes, these two groups of megaphonic agents are indeed virtue signallers, conspicuously displaying their (selective) tolerance, but they are also in the business of being seen as signed up to a particular view of the world, and the very practical actions they implement – like Tennis Australia’s committing of considerable resources towards “education” programs on diversity – shows that they are deadly serious.

These groups, whether from Tennis Australia, Rugby Australia or the media, are, in effect, agents for the homo fascists who are using soft power to try to eradicate all traditional views from society. 

Conservapedia has defined homo fascism as follows:

Homo-fascism is the phenomenon when homosexual activists strive for advancing themselves beyond favored status to supremacy. In line with instructions in After the Ball (the LGBTI equivalent to Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto), the homosexual movement avoids using such terms as “favored status” or “supremacy”, but rather outwardly pretend their goal is “tolerance” or “acceptance”. Supremacy is then the stage in which the homosexual movement and its allies take effective control of most or all of the centers of power of a government or other organization. When they have achieved this level of control they use and abuse their power to suppress and/or punish those who openly disapprove of the homosexual lifestyle or its agenda.

Forever and a day, leftists have branded conservatives and Christians as “behind the times”.  Here they are merely embracing presentism on steroids.  It is as if, on a planet around four billion years old, what matters most is what a bunch of people think in calendar year 2019.  What is different now, though, is the new tactic of branding old school views on core social issues as “hurtful”.  That is harder to rebut, because almost any answer will land the holder of those views in even deeper poo. But it is likely based on a myth.  And it wilfully misrepresents the views and impugns the intentions of those who happen to think that marriage is, was and should be between a man and a woman.

Meanwhile, in the US, Chick-fil-A has withdrawn sponsorship from some charitable organisations in the face of hostility and blackmail by homosexual activists and advocates.  What the activists who have been intimidating the well known Christian chicken sandwich making company are demanding is that organisations like them not support any third organisation that does not “affirm” homosexuals and homosexuality.  Wow.

Now I was a bit unsure what “affirm” means, in this context.  Half a minute’s online research reveals that, when it comes to churches, for example, there is a world of difference between “welcoming” and “affirming”.  Affirming means accepting the substance of the homosexual lifestyle, not merely tolerating difference and avoiding being judgemental. We have to like it!  And, in the religious context, it also must be acknowledged that homosexual lifestyles are not sinful.  End of discussion.  The demand that all “affirm” homosexuality is taking things even further than the activist charge that conservative social views “hurt”, “offend” or “demean”.

So Chick-fil-A cannot support (sponsor, donate to, etc) any organisation that does not embrace the homosexual lifestyle as fine, OK, normal, whatever.  Or we will make you pay. 

There is more than a hint of similarity here with what Martina Navratilova recently said about Court, that she was offended because Court regarded her as a lesser person for her lesbianism.  This claim is patently absurd, but it not just a casual piece of absurdity. It is all of a piece with the homo fascists’ core strategy. We cannot (yet) control what you think, but we sure as hell can control what you say.

And if you dare to have a publicly expressed different view to us, we will brand you unfit to have a public voice.  (This is  what the Triple M gnome mentioned above, the alleged gagster, Lawrence Mooney, actually said.  “There is no place in public life” for the homophobic Court – who he labelled as “criminal” for being said homophobe, further noting, “It has been legislated against”.  Gosh!  He of course then threw in the “this is 2019” bit.  He said Court’s utterly mislabelled views were “abhorrent” and she should be “thrown out of the sport until she falls into line”.  Of course the oldest trick in the book is that if you simply “say” homophobia often enough, people will believe that support for traditional marriage is, indeed, homophobic.  Mooney should get an award.  Homo fascism with a gold star.  A very useful idiot indeed).

All of this has been wonderfully deconstructed by Douglas Murray in his epic new book, The Madness of Crowds, a sort of update for the age of woke bootcampery on Charles McKay’s 1840s classic of the same name.  Murray, not unreasonably (whether because of his own homosexuality or not), suggests that the early wins for gay rights and African-American rights, indeed women’s rights, were moving society in a good direction and eliminating embarrassingly bad and unfair rules and cultures.  Most conservatives and indeed most people generally agree.  What Murray calls out is the activists’ going too far. Why couldn’t they just stop when they got to “equality”, or at least an approximation of it?  Why assume superiority?

What has happened, though, is not merely a pendulum swinging too far, but rather a sinister new attempt to use extra-parliamentary means to wipe out opponents who have different views on issues that each group regards as sacred.  A massive upping of the ante.  Perhaps Murray, as an atheist, understandably doesn’t clearly see the anti-Christian aspect of the agenda and so under-emphasises this wilful, though hidden, underpinning of the woke movement.

Murray rather optimistically, perhaps even a tad whimsically, sees all this as “madness”.  What he is really saying is that the dumb punters who fall for the homo fascists, #MeTooers, the transgenders of life and other assorted social activists, who either dismiss the activists as crazy or who are cowed into silence in the face of the relentlessness of it all, are themselves the ones who are suffering from a form of madness for falling for all the woke propaganda.  Murray thinks this will all pass in twenty or so years, and that we will all move on to something else.

I am not so sure.

Margaret Court may or may not come to Melbourne to celebrate her tennis achievements.  She may or may not be booed by the homo fascists.  Israel Folau may or may not win his legal battle over his right to hold and express unfashionable religious views.  But each effort at chipping away the rights of traditionalists to express publicly their views on issues core to their being is a further step down the road towards the virtual extradition of the silent minority from their own country.  Even though they still live here.  They won’t get public recognition.  They may be forced out of a job, even a career, hence a future. They will be unplatformed. 

Mainstream conservatives in the US, like the right-liberals David French, Jonah Goldberg and various other anti-Trumpers, like to think, and say, that we have a “neutral” (liberal) public square.  In such an environment, where all views have a right to be aired and where everyone gets a go, so what if public libraries are used for transvestites to lecture children?  As Sohrab Ahmari has pointed out, though, this claim is rubbish on stilts.

The myth of the neutral public square which (according to the French view) every good liberal and conservative should welcome, is dangerous.  The public square is rigged.  It is a minefield for the believers in tradition and the believers in the Jewish and Christian God.  Those who would do harm to the beliefs and the public expression of them use the so-called neutral public square to their decided advantage.  And, what is more in Australia, they get a mighty (one billion dollar plus) leg-up from the public broadcaster, whose blatant (and ceaseless) anti-conservative and anti-Christian bias is a national disgrace.  Ditto the publicly funded universities.

Soft power indeed.  Well played Tennis Australia.