Heroes in Unexpected Places

And here you thought all that talk about how homosexuality wasn’t a choice, meant it wasn’t a choice for the homosexuals!

Brent Bozell nicely captures the moral dimension, the heroism, of what Ms. California did in giving a straight answer to Perez Hilton’s demand she endorse “gay marriages” for all fifty states:

Miss California was a little surprised to be thrown this curveball. Did any other contestant get a question like this? No. She stumbled into an answer: "I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage." But then, still thinking aloud, she made a decision. She decided to take a stand for traditional values. More to the point, she decided to stay true to her principles: "You know what, in my country and in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman -- no offense to anyone out there -- but that's how I was raised, and that's how I think it should be, between a man and a woman."

Boom! The dream was dead. Carrie Prejean had proclaimed she would rather be "biblically correct" than politically correct. There is now a religion test for Miss USA: Christians need not apply.

Hilton, who laid this trap for Ms. Prejean, then "marched over to a camera to record a rant for the Internet. "She lost, not because she doesn't believe in gay marriage, Miss California lost because she's a dumb [B-word], OK?" The next day on MSNBC, Hilton issued a fake apology: "I was thinking the c-word, and I didn't say it," he said, laughing."

Obviously, Hilton is the dumb bitch, not Ms. California. But if Hilton weren’t queer, but a normal (that’s right—a normal) male, there isn’t a chance in hell he’d be allowed to get away with saying this about any woman, not even Sarah Palin. That is the advantage of homo-immunity, and he knows it.

The only advantage Prejean had was her faith.

There is only one reason why America is standing by and watching this happen to people instead of being up in arms about it: fear. Americans haven’t really changed their minds about whether the homosexual lifestyle is wrong. They’ve changed their minds about what will happen if they voice that opinion out loud.

This isn’t about persuasion, but force. Grandmothers aren’t attending their grandson’s queer weddings because they’ve learned in old age to appreciate the true beauty of fisting and the pipe. They’re doing it because it’s either that or be driven out of the family into the woods—because gays have rights that grandmas don’t—starting with the right to hold the whole family up for blackmail. You can bet any queer bold enough to demand his family attend his gay wedding has been threatening for years to out them as “homophobes.” (“We have a gay son and we’re just as proud of him as all our children!”).

People don’t act like Perez Hilton because they want power. They act that way because they already have it, and they know they have it--a cowed society is giving it to them. Giving them the power of knowing that, whatever they may say or do, or demand, or how they misbehave, society will rip to shreds anyone who dares to criticize them. Freedom to act without consequences is the ultimate power.

I actually don’t get that emotional about the whole gay-rights thing. My main interest is the role it's played degrading free speech rights, which has been profound.

The bullying and intimidation tactics developed by gay-rights activists and their hey-boys in the media were already honed and perfected and easily adapted by the Islamists who grabbed them up and started wielding them after 9/11. All that Queer Nation/Act Up yelling and blackmail in the eighties and nineties had trained Americans to duck and cover reflexively at the sound of the suffix "phobe," as in, "homophobes." But the now strictly-enforced cultural taboo forbidding criticism that it took years for homosexual activists to achieve was won by Islamists within only a few months after the World Trade Center attacks. Once the first charges of "Islamophobia" were flung, we Americans were already trained in what to do: go along and keep your mouth shut, except maybe you might volunteer something harmless like, "Terrorism no more represents Islam than the KKK represents Christianity."

Thought control ends up controlling thoughts but it starts by controlling words, which is much easier. And it doesn’t start out telling you what you must say, but what you cannot say. That's 90% of it. Control the words, and even if people think what you don't want them to, it stays bottled up where it isn't going to hurt anything. Once everybody has stopped saying something the controllers don't want said, that leaves the forum quiet for the sort of one-sided arguments that are the only kind the bullies and activists and blackmailers can ever win. That's how come Al Gore has to spend so much time repeating that the scientific inquiries about global warming are closed, and those who dissent are equivalent to moon-landing deniers.

The alternatives are stark. It’s either, agree with us, or you’re stupid; agree with us, or you’re an evil bigot.