"Public Intellectualism" Is Largely A Whore House Supported By The Oligarchs Today - To Declare Yourself One Is Absurd, To Be Called One Should Be Insulting

THE SECTIONS OF THIS "PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL" BULLSHIT invoking things like "cognitive psychology" are things I'd very much like to go into but that would take background reading and analysis that there isn't time for.  I'd give some general advice to be on your guard when someone makes recourse to  the ideological sciences such as that or anythings with the prefixes "cog" or "neuro" unless what they are claiming is purely and demonstrably physiological - though, since they are very highly susceptible to manipulation to get the response desired, anything resorting to MRI in that area of speculation is probably unsafe.   That's especially true when it's a right-winger doing it for political or legalistic purposes.  I'm hard pressed to remember one of those who isn't a liar to start with.

Wehner: You were a key figure in the same-sex marriage debate in the 1990s. How did you see your role in the same-sex-marriage debate at the time?

I would jump in there and say that that isn't something I recall and I was reading and taking an active interest in that issue from before 1990.   I think both of these "public intellectuals" are highly devoted to the creation and promotion of their own personal mythology.  If either of them were "key figures" of anything it somehow escaped my notice. 

Rauch: One is that I thought I had the right answer. I realized right away that this was an issue for me because I was, by that point, a social conservative and said: This is a conservative movement. This is gay people saying, “We’ve had it with being isolated individuals who live in our own separate world and are alienated from norms like marriage and family. That failed us in the AIDS crisis.” And I said, Here’s a case where all my core beliefs come together—equality for gay people; better lives for young people, who need the prospect of marriage; and joining, upholding, and strengthening possibly society’s most important nonpolitical institution. So I saw myself as having something to say that only a few other people were saying, and doing it in a more systematic way.

Another thing I thought I was doing was just more political, which is helping the public understand that the case for gay marriage is a conservative case. That’s why progressive gay and lesbian people and leaders were at best ambivalent about marriage, especially at first. A lot of them were against it because they perceived it, rightly, to be an embrace of this bourgeois norm that they didn’t want. So I thought I could have a public and political role in explaining that this was a conservative movement.

This is absolute, ahistorical bullshit that starts in the assumption that marriage is properly the property of conservatives - look at who among which party remained married and whose marriages split among presidents and presidential candidates as an exercise.  

What is most outrageous of this statement for me is that I don't remember conservatives being the ones struggling for gay marriage, I remember them using the issue to attack Democrats - IN EVERY CASE IT WAS LIBERAL DEMOCRATS PUTTING THEMSELVES ON THE LINE FOR MARRIAGE EQUALITY IN THOSE YEARS - it was conservatives who wrote DOMA and it was Republicans and Democrats who knew how Republicans were setting up gay marriage as a wedge issue to use in elections against them who voted for it,  Bill Clinton, though having opposed it, signed it into law for that purpose IT WAS LIBERAL DEMOCRATS WHO OPPOSED IT.   The court cases, even the Windsor case that pointed out that the law violated the Constitution allowing states to nullify the same-sex marriages recognized in other states - all of those states in which gay marriage was early made legal were liberal states, with conservatives opposing those changes - Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia wrote or joined in dissents opposing even that clearly constitutional relief to those so denied their rights explicitly recognized by the Constitution.   That Roberts got cold feet or, more likely someone he knows or was related to him (or was him)  got to him and persuaded him that "people like them" had their rights violated by DOMA is all that accounts for it being overturned.

These two right-wingers are trying to change recent history so blatantly in the Atlantic magazine that it was going to be the entire focus of my dealing with it before I realized the whole thing was dishonest bullshit.  It is outrageous that any magazine that publishes such not only ahistorical nonsense but nonsense known by people who were paying attention to the issue those years and not suffer a complete loss of face.  The Atlantic should be mocked and ridiculed into publishing a retraction of this crap and firing the idiot who wrote it.  

I also co-founded a group call the Independent Gay Forum, which was a network of conservative, center-right, and libertarian writers and thinkers who are gay, and we wanted to take back at least the gay intellectual world from the monotonal progressives, extreme leftists in many cases who had basically commanded it to that point. These were people who thought if you were gay, it meant you had to be pro-choice and anti-capitalist. And we thought that was nonsense. Marriage was also a good way to open up a new front and take back the agenda from the left. And it succeeded in that, but unfortunately only for a while.

Just to show the kind of double-speak, two-faced intellectualism this is an example of.   While my preference for handling the issue would have been for the government to ONLY involve itself with civil union for any couple, leaving the question of marriage up to couples - whether or not churches wanted to "bless" them or not being a non-governmental thing, if that was not going to happen, as I knew it wasn't because straight people would never give up governmental recognition of their marriages,  to oppose marriage equality while gay was to accept inequality in every way.  

I will point out that the idea that he was making common cause against a woman's ownership of her body with "libertarians" in this way would be quite funny if that issue were not so fraught.  Is the state nationalizing a woman's body ever a position compatible with "libertarianism?"   Well, maybe for a white gay man of privilege. 

That is exactly what he is,  a white male faggot of privilege like all of those gay and lesbian and bisexual Republicans from those years till today, including Lindsay Graham, Denny Hastert, Larry Craig and others who supported and voted for DOMA and other anti-LGBTQ laws.   Not to mention the likes of Ken Mehlman.  It's been a common enough feature of LGBTQ history (Senator Joe McCarthy, likely, Roy Cohn, certainly was an example) that there are many such hypocritical scumbags in our midst.  Such people apparently can live in the billionaire-millionaire financed whore house that is the "public intellectualism" of raised-pinky magazine publishing, institutes, foundations, etc.  But I'll be damned if I'll let them lie like this over the record of who was publicly fighting for and who was against LGBTQ equality.   Get a load of this, remembering just who it was who finally overturned the right-wing, Republican ban on equality, including against LGBTQ members of the military remaining there AND WHO IT WAS NOT WHO DID THAT AND TOOK THE POLITICAL HIT FOR IT. 

Wehner: What do you mean by that? What’s happening now?

Rauch: For 15 or 20 years, the focus of gay and lesbian equality was more about responsibilities than rights. It was about service to our country in the military, service to each other in our communities in marriage, and service to children as mentors and parents. And that was a transformative thing for how the world saw gay and lesbian people. It allowed the flourishing of a gay center. But then we won all those things. And so people like me said, Okay, good, we can hang up our spurs and focus on something else. I went off and did polarization and now the epistemic crisis, and other people went off and did other things. And meanwhile, the progressives hadn’t gone anywhere. If anything, a lot of them got even more rabidly left-wing, and they just swooped down from the hills and retook all the villages. So unfortunately, with very important exceptions, intellectually speaking, the movement is now very left-wing and a lot of the people in the driver’s seats are gender radicals. Which is a very different point of view than gay and lesbian marriage advocates had. So it’s a different world now.

I've known lots of white, conservative gay men who were totally OK with leaving other people in the rainbow flag out of it, to which I say they are jerks and are idiots because without a united insistence on equality, there are not enough gay men to secure it for us.  Even if that were possible, I'd be with the ones who insisted on full equality on an equal basis because it is a moral imperative.   

Most of the section dealing with religion is banal and unremarkable but I will comment on this because it's another distortion of the history. 

Rauch: I would like Christians, especially evangelicals, to understand that we are not a threat to your moral order. That the Bible, properly understood, does not condemn the loving, permanent, binding commitment of two same-sex individuals to each other and to their community. I want them to understand that vast numbers of gay people are religious. I want them very much to come to grips honestly with the fact that the evangelical world and much of mainstream Christianity turned its back on gay people, not only condemned us and singled us out for condemnation as if homosexuality were the worst sin in the world—they did that, of course, for centuries—but when the AIDS crisis came, they turned away. We had to open our own churches in order to do the job of ministering to the spiritual and physical needs of the gay community. That’s disgraceful. And we still haven’t seen the Christian world face up to that. So I want them to look into their souls and do better.

Only a lot of them did, some of the hardest working, hardest caring were not from the gay community,  some of them were straight people or celibate religious from liberal and mainstream Protestant religious efforts, Catholic religious, even clergy.   A lot of the gay men I knew who died of AIDS had most of their care given to them by people from outside of what was called "the gay community" much of the solidarity in what would develop as LGBTQ came from Lesbians who took care of and advocated for gay men who were infected and died from AIDS.  Since these white boys seem to not think them worth considering, many of those I know of, especially one who I am sure would be one of this guys conservative buddies if he had lived till today, was cared for by People of Color who were not gay men or Lesbians.  I think his revision of history is self-serving and dishonest, in the same line with his revision of recent history generally.  Such is the way of such "public intellectualism."   

I have decided to let it go with this because most of what they say is tedious as it is odious and I've got things to do.  Wouldn't you really rather be listening to Brueggemann than this?  I know I would.