The forces of “tolerance” are intolerant of anything less than full-blown
celebratory approval
By Mark Steyn
Last week, following the public apology of an English comedian and the
arrest of a fellow British subject both for making somewhat feeble Mandela
gags, I noted that supposedly free societies were increasingly perilous places
for those who make an infelicitous remark. So let’s pick up where we left off:
Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you
can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement
Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First,
Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975
Consenting Adult Sex Bill:
“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”
For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of
the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the
enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily
accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according
to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less
than full-blown celebratory approval.
Second joke from the archives: Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept this one
in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to have a bit of business
where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?”
And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dean
would say, “Be nice to him.”
But no matter how nice you are, it’s never enough. Duck Dynasty’s
Phil Robertson, in his career-detonating interview with GQ, gave a
rather thoughtful vernacular exegesis of the Bible’s line on sin, while
carefully insisting that he and other Christians are obligated to love all
sinners and leave it to the Almighty to adjudicate the competing charms of
drunkards, fornicators, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, GLAAD — “the gatekeepers
of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered
— saw their opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star,
they would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres —
that espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible
with American celebrity.
Some of my comrades, who really should know better, wonder why, instead of
insisting Robertson be defenestrated, GLAAD wouldn’t rather “start a
conversation.” But, if you don’t need to, why bother? Most Christian opponents
of gay marriage oppose gay marriage; they don’t oppose the right of gays to
advocate it. Yet thug groups like GLAAD increasingly oppose the right of
Christians even to argue their corner. It’s quicker and more effective to
silence them.
As Christian bakers ordered to provide wedding cakes for gay nuptials and
many others well understand, America’s much-vaunted “freedom of religion” is
dwindling down to something you can exercise behind closed doors in the privacy
of your own abode or at a specialist venue for those of such tastes for an hour
or so on Sunday morning, but when you enter the public square you have to leave
your faith back home hanging in the closet. Yet even this reductive consolation
is not permitted to Robertson: GLAAD spokesgay Wilson Cruz declared that “Phil
and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community
fly in the face of what true Christians believe.” Robertson was quoting the New
Testament, but hey, what do those guys know? In today’s America, land of the
Obamacare Pajama Boy, Jesus is basically Nightshirt Boy, a fey non-judgmental
dweeb who’s cool with whatever. What GLAAD is attempting would be called, were
it applied to any other identity group, “cultural appropriation.”
In the broader sense, it’s totalitarian. While American gays were stuffing
and mounting the duck hunter in their trophy room, the Prince of Wales was
celebrating Advent with Christian refugees from the Middle East, and noting
that the land in which Christ and Christianity were born is now the region
boasting “the lowest concentration of Christians in the world — just four
percent of the population.” It will be three, and two, and one percent soon enough,
for there is a totalitarian impulse in resurgent Islam — and not just in Araby.
A few miles from Buckingham Palace, Muslims in London’s East End are now
sufficiently confident to go around warning local shopkeepers to cease selling
alcohol. In theory, you might still enjoy the right to sell beer in Tower
Hamlets or be a practicing Christian in Iraq, but in reality not so much. The
asphyxiating embrace of ideological conformity was famously captured by Nikolai
Krylenko, the People’s Commissar for Justice, in a speech to the Soviet
Congress of Chess Players in 1932, at which he attacked the very concept of
“the neutrality of chess.” It was necessary for chess to be Sovietized like
everything else. “We must organize shock brigades of chess players, and begin
immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess,” he declared.
Six years later, the political winds having shifted, Krylenko was executed
as an enemy of the people. But his spirit lives on among the Commissars of Gay
Compliance at GLAAD. It is not enough to have gay marriage for gays. Everything
must be gayed. There must be Five-Year Gay Plans for American bakeries, and the
Christian church, and reality TV. There must be shock brigades of gay
duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the backwoods of the
proletariat. Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be
dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to
communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor
heterosexuality is in contemporary America.
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