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Apple
Pie, Beware
By Stanley Kurtz, fellow, the Hudson Institute. |
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so as to protect the feelings of children of gay couples and single parents is more than another isolated bit of P.C. silliness. It's a portent of things to come. Not fifteen years ago, the loony ideas of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin about the effective equivalence of consensual heterosexual intercourse and rape were dismissed as extremist nonsense, even in the New York Times. Today, while the intercourse-rape equation would still be dismissed by most everyone (except the New York Times) MacKinnon is the leader of a prestigious school of legal theory, and has effectively written her ideas about sex into our nation's laws on sexual harassment. Mother's Day may or may not be around fifteen years from now, but there's every chance that by then, the attack on motherhood will have grown and, in some form or another, institutionalized itself. An attempt to abolish Mother's Day may seem absurd, but in a sense, the effort's been around for some time now. Feminist academics have long cherished the utopian fantasy of an androgynous society — a world in which the differences between men and women will have been effectively eliminated. Many feminists draw on Nancy Chodorow's book, The Reproduction of Mothering, which argues that, if men and women spend equal amounts of time nurturing children, the differences between the sexes will disappear. And Chodorow's ideas have been popularized by author's like Carol Gilligan and William Pollack, who cooked up a phony "girl crisis" and "boy crisis" to save adolescents from the supposed oppressiveness of their own sexual identities (as fearless feminist critic Christina Hoff Sommers has shown). Even so-called mainstream feminists, when they lament the continuing numerical dominance of men in legislatures and executive suites, are really asking for an end to motherhood as a distinctive social role. For it's only women's disproportionate desire to be the primary caretakers of their children that makes them shun the career fast track preferred by men. And now, of course, there's the movement for gay marriage, which claims that it will only strengthen the family, but which is destined to undermine it. As the New York Post reports, the celebration of Mother's Day at Rodeph Sholem school was banned shortly after a man who had adopted his son with a male partner boasted that he had persuaded administrators to remove Mother's Day from the school's holiday list. This is not an anomaly, but reflects the hope and expectation of many gay thinkers that same-sex marriage will "subvert" society's respect for the complementarity of the sexes. The other day I argued in a piece on gays in Hollywood that the best interests of cultural majorities and minorities sometimes conflict. It certainly is important that the government not enshrine one particular religious belief over others, so that all of us can continue to feel like equal citizens. But complete neutrality about everything of cultural interest by all institutions, public and private, would mean the death of culture itself. No majority could affirm or celebrate anything, for fear of offending some smaller group. I once attended a conference of historians of religion where it was announced that speakers were no longer allowed to use the word "feminist" in their presentations. Instead they had to substitute for "feminist" the phrase "feminist/womanist/mujerista" (i.e. white feminists, black feminists, Hispanic feminists). And each of those groups had a tendency to splinter as well. Now our country as a whole risks being dragged into this same Leftist splintering and paralysis. For fear of "leaving out" the few, we're leaving out the many. But intellectuals aren't always as stupid as they seem. When academic feminists and "queer theorists" rant and rave against motherhood, they look like silly extremists unlikely to threaten or convince anyone beyond a few susceptible undergraduates. But when the policy reforms supported by seemingly more moderate feminists and gay-rights activists come to pass, sure enough, it's motherhood that's under attack. What happened to Mother's Day in New York this week is no fluke. Once gay marriage becomes a reality — once the reality of sexual complementarity is deprived of any legal standing whatsoever — more and more of the taken-for-granted underpinnings of our world will come under attack: monogamy, the very existence of marriage as a privileged state, and of course, the differences between mothers and fathers. It is simply not going to be possible to create complete equivalence between homosexuality and heterosexuality without undermining the family, an institution necessarily build around the overwhelming predominance of heterosexuality. But the battle is sure to expand. Proponents of apple pie beware. |
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he
news that a prestigious private school in Manhattan has banned the
celebration of Mother's Day (and Father's Day)
