July 12, 2005

The Children is Us
by Jeff Langstraat

I started a new job yesterday and I was going to write about that, but this post of Jesse's really got me thinking. (The first day at work wouldn't have been worth writing about anyway; I left at noon, the migraine I woke up with at 4:00 having become too much.) Basically, the Broward County Diversity Committee has nixed use of the "We Are Family" video (the one got James Dobson all hot and bothered). Via the Miami Herald:

Officials with the Broward County Christian Coalition, who viewed the video after hearing from a diversity committee member, said the underlying message of the DVD and accompanying teaching material promoted a homosexual agenda.

''We didn't think it was appropriate for such young children,'' said Barbara Collier, chairwoman of the coalition, which sent an ''e-mail alert'' to members about the matter. ``They wouldn't be able to understand what it was about.''

The controversy stems not from any explicit mention of homosexuality in the video -- there isn't any -- but from its theme that people are all part of one big family, a message that, critics contend, could be construed to include pedophiles and other criminals. They also fear that the video could blunt other important messages for kids of that age, like the importance of being wary of strangers.

Here come the Helen Lovejoys.

After the 1992 Hatefest in Houston (also known as the Republican National Convention) Susie Bright wrote:

I don't know where the Republican Party would be without "The Children."...

...It's a fact-when politicians don't have a clue about what's wrong with grown-ups in America, rich or poor, they turn to the subject of children: children's innocence, their malleability, their unmistakable victimhood.

Go ahead, get out the handkerchiefs, but before your eyes get red with anger or misty with sentiment, get a grip on this new code phrase. "The Children" doesn't mean the little ones who have to be in bed by nine-it means us, the big guys.

Pp. 28-29 in SexWise

Bright's analysis still seems spot on. The rhetorical deployment of "The Children" has only increased since 1992. It's been an effective tool, even if it gets used in some ridiculous ways. The Children become a reason to restrict adequate health information, contraception, sexual information, sexual devices, sexual images, vaccines...all because The Children might somewhere, somehow be exposed to it.

It's not only children's exposure they want to restrict, but everyone's. The whole enterprise, it seems to me, is based in a pre-modern way of thinking that is even deeper than just the anti-science approach of Creationism. It's a mindset that sees society in terms of an organic whole. (Everything is connected, but not in a sociological sense.) Sexual deviance is a cancer that eats away at the social body. It's not only homosexuality, although that seems to be a primary target. When Rick Santorum or John Cornyn compare homosex to bestiality, or when the "good Christians" in Broward County or at the Family Research Council or Concerned Women for America make a link to pedophilia they are, of course, failing to make distinctions that to many of us seem quite commonsensical-issues like adult/child or human/animal distinctions, or consent. For folks in this realm, evil sex is evil sex. None of those other "nuances" matter. If it's bad, it's bad. And it's bad if it don't make babies.

These sexual deviations are, again, pathological to the body social. The toleration of their presence, like the medieval Lustseuche, is an infection eating away at that body. Eventually, society's immune system will wither, the vengeful, jealous Father-God removing his protection or invoking his wrath. Or, as Jerry Fallwell put it after 9/11:

The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I'll hear from them for this, but throwing God...successfully with the help of the federal court system...throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad...I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.

(Public piety is, of course, more important than actual Christ-like compassion.)

Our sexual behavior must be controlled lest it eat away at the core of our society. The evil of non-procreative sex brings disease to the body and the collective. Sex that doesn't lead to babies is a perversion of the "purpose" of sex. It is also, as I have discussed, a sin against the collective (hmmm, maybe Durkheim was onto something). It places self and society in jeopardy.

This happens because we live in a world where spirits battle for control. The forces of God are in constant battle (and yes, the militaristic themes run deep) with the forces of Satan. Our souls are the prize, so we must be on constant alert for those things that might lead one to Satan, and frustrating nature looms pretty large.

This is a worldview I can't help but reject. It completely removes any relational aspects from ethical considerations. Arbitrary rules and false "naturalist" ontologies about gender and sexuality should send this approach to history's trashbin, but it probably won't. It hasn't to date, after all.

Getting back to The Children, I'm gonna get a little Biblical (probably for the first and last time):

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 1 Corinthians 13:11

And that's the point. These folks have not put away childish things, childish understandings, childish thoughts. Their inability, nay refusal, to engage in anything other than either/or and good/bad categories is the height of simplistic childishness. Maybe Susie was off a little. The Children may not be us. It's more likely to be their own childish selves they're trying to protect.

Posted by in Bio-Power, Body, Culture, Culture War, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Homosexuality, Pornography, Privacy, Queer, Religion, Sex, Sexual Politics
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