28 March 2013
The Deconstruction of Marriage
By Daniel Greenfield
March 28, 2013
The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn’t come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution.
Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the
deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed.
The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family is a flickering light in the evening of the West.
The deconstruction is destruction. Entire countries are fading away, their populations being replaced by emigrants from more traditional lands whose understanding of the male-female relationship is positively reactionary. These emigrants may lack technology or the virtues of civilization, and their idea of marriage resembles slavery more than any modern ideal, but it fulfills the minimum purpose of any group, tribe or country– it produces its next generation.
The deconstruction of marriage is not a mere matter of front page photos of men kissing. It began with the deconstruction of the family. Gay marriage is only one small stop on a tour that includes rising divorce rates, falling childbirth rates and the abandonment of responsibility by twenty and even thirty-somethings.
Each step on the tour takes apart the definition and structure of marriage until there is nothing left. Gay marriage is not inclusive, it is yet another attempt at eliminating marriage as a social institution by deconstructing it until it no longer exists.
There are two ways to destroy a thing. You can either run it at while swinging a hammer with both hands or you can attack its structure until it no longer means anything.
The left hasn’t gone all out by outlawing marriage, instead it has deconstructed it, taking apart each of its assumptions, from the economic to the cooperative to the emotional to the social, until it no longer means anything at all. Until there is no way to distinguish marriage from a temporary liaison between members of uncertain sexes for reasons that due to their vagueness cannot be held to have any solemn and meaningful purpose.
Every aspect of marriage is deconstructed and then eliminated until it no longer means anything. And once marriage is no longer a lifetime commitment between a man and a woman, but a ceremony with no deeper meaning than most modern ceremonies, then the deconstruction and destruction will be complete.
The deconstruction of marriage eroded it as an enduring institution and then as an exclusive institution and finally as a meaningful institution. The trendy folk who claim to be holding off on getting married until gay marriage is enacted are not eager for marriage equality, they are using it as an excuse for an ongoing rejection of marriage.
Gay marriage was never the issue. It was always marriage.
In the world that the deconstructionists are striving to build, there will be marriage, but it will mean nothing. Like a greeting card holiday, it will be an event, but not an institution. An old ritual with no further meaning. An egotistical exercise in attention-seeking and self-celebration with no deeper purpose. It will be a display every bit as hollow as the churches and synagogues it takes place in.
The deconstruction of marriage is only a subset of the deconstruction of gender from a state of being to a state of mind. The decline of marriage was preceded by the deconstruction of gender roles and gay marriage is being succeeded by the destruction of gender as anything other than a voluntary identity, a costume that one puts on and takes off.
Destroying gender roles was a prerequisite to destroying gender. Each deconstruction leads naturally to the next deconstruction with no final destination except total deconstruction.
Gay marriage is not a stopping point, just as men in women’s clothing using the ladies room is not a stopping point. There is no stopping point at all.
The left’s deconstruction of social institutions is not a quest for equality, but for destruction. As long as the institutions that preceded it exist, it will go on deconstructing them until there is nothing left but a blank canvas, an unthinking anarchy, on which it can impose its perfect and ideal conception of how everyone should live.
Equality is merely a pretext for deconstruction. Change the parameters of a thing and it ceases to function. Redefine it and expand it and it no longer means anything at all. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but if you change ‘rose’ to mean anything that sticks out of the ground, then the entire notion of what is being discussed has gone and cannot be reclaimed without also reclaiming language.
The left’s social deconstruction program is a war of ideas and concepts. Claims of equality are used to expand institutions and ways of living until they are so broad as to encompass everything and nothing. And once a thing encompasses everything, once a rose represents everything rising out of the ground, then it also represents nothing at all.
Deconstruction is a war against definitions, borders and parameters. It is a war against defining things by criminalizing the limitation of definitions. With inclusivity as the mandate, exclusivity, in marriage, or any other realm, quickly meets with social disapproval and then becomes a hate crime. If the social good is achieved only through maximum inclusivity and infinite tolerance, then any form of exclusivity, from property to person to ideas, is a selfish act that refuses the collective impulse to make all things into a common property with no lasting meaning or value.
As Orwell understood in 1984, tyranny is essentially about definitions. It is hard to fight for freedom if you lack the word. It is hard to maintain a marriage if the idea no longer exists. Orwell’s Oceania made basic human ideas into contradictory things. The left’s deconstruction of social values does the same thing to such essential institutions as marriage; which becomes an important impermanent thing of no fixed nature or value.
The left’s greatest trick is making things mean the opposite of what they do. Stealing is sharing. Crime is justice. Property is theft. Each deconstruction is accompanied by an inversion so that a thing, once examined, comes to seem the opposite of what it is, and once that is done, it no longer has the old innate value, but a new enlightened one.
To deconstruct man, you deconstruct his beliefs and then his way of living. You deconstruct freedom until it means slavery. You deconstruct peace until it means war. You deconstruct property until it means theft. And you deconstruct marriage until it means a physical relationship between any group of people for any duration. And that is the opposite of what marriage is.
The deconstruction of marriage is part of the deconstruction of gender and family and those are part of the long program of deconstructing man. Once each basic value has been rendered null and void, inverted and revealed to be random and meaningless, then man is likewise revealed to be a random and meaningless creature whose existence requires shaping by those who know better.
The final deconstruction eliminates nation, religion, family and even gender to reduce the soul of man to a blank slate waiting to be written on.
That is what is at stake here. This is not a struggle about the right of equality, but the right of definition. It is not about whether men can get married, but whether marriage will mean anything at all. It is about preserving the shapes and structures of basic social concepts that define our identities in order to preserve those very concepts, rather than accepting their deconstruction into nullification.
The question on the table is whether the institutions that give us meaning will be allowed to retain that meaning. And that question is a matter of survival. Societies cannot survive without definitions. Peoples do not go on existing through the act of occupying space. The deconstruction of identity is also the destruction of identity.
And that is what we are truly fighting against.
Rottener and Rottener in Denmark
By
March 28, 2013
If the February 5 murder attempt on Lars Hedegaard in Copenhagen didn’t make it clear what Europe’s Islam critics are up against, the aftermath of this monstrous crime has certainly done so. I’ve already written here about the morally challenged Ekstra Bladet journalists who, when Lars felt compelled to find a new place to live after the attempt on his life, followed his moving van in an obvious effort to be able to report his new address. Then there was Danish TV host Martin Krasnik, who in a March 17 interview with Lars played prosecutor, comparing Lars’s book on Islam, In the House of War, to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and trying to paint him as a man whose purported extremism had isolated him even from his fellow Islam critics.
Krasnik got a lot of heat for that sleazy display. Now comes another Danish journalist, Klaus Wivel, who has chosen to take this occasion not only to get in a few kicks at Lars but to smack around several of those (myself included) who have responded to Lars’s close shave with shows of solidarity. To be sure, Wivel, writing in Weekendavisen, admits that Islam is not a thoroughly innocuous phenomenon and that Krasnik acted like a thug. But the thrust of his article is that Lars and his friends and defenders have gone too far. After the Krasnik interview, Wivel notes, some of the thousands of reader comments at the Free Press Society’s website were anti-Semitic. (Krasnik is Jewish.) While acknowledging that Lars and company despise anti-Semitism, Wivel finds it “significant that these weeds are growing in their backyards.” Meaning what? That Lars is responsible for the prejudices of every commenter on the Free Press Society’s site?
Wivel says that in Lars’s view, the argument about Islam isn’t a “parish-council debate”: it’s “war.” This mentality, Wivel insists, can only lead to defeat. About which I can only ask: is Wivel serious? Let me get this straight: when people are coming to the door of your home and trying to kill you, and the media, in the aftermath, treat you like the perpetrator, you shouldn’t feel that you’re at war? Does Wivel sincerely expect that Islam critics who have been subject to murder attempts and death threats, all the while being systematically, heartlessly, and mendaciously vilified in the media – people like Robert Redeker and Geert Wilders, who have to live with round-the-clock bodyguards because of would-be assassins, and people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Fiamma Nirenstein, who lived with bodyguards and ended up leaving Europe entirely – should treat the whole matter like a parish-council debate?
Wivel talks about Jews. What about all the Jews who are fleeing France and other European countries because Islam has made their lives unlivable? Is it excessive, in Wivel’s view, for them to think or speak of themselves as being at war? “If one is in the House of War,” Wivel warns, apropos of the anti-Semitism of those commenters at the Free Press Society site, “one takes on the attributes of the enemy.” But Wivel’s solution, it would appear, is to pretend that we’re not at war. He mocks Lars for believing that “we’re standing…at the gates of Vienna.” Wivel seems already to have forgotten that a few weeks ago Lars was almost standing at the Pearly Gates. Which of these two men is more out of touch with reality?
Earth to Wivel: it wasn’t we Islam critics who took the question of the Islamization of Europe out of the realm of civilized, parish-council-style debate. It was our opponents in politics, the academy, and the media – who, from the very beginning, have chosen to respond to our rational arguments not with rational arguments of their own, but, rather, by demonizing us, misrepresenting us, trying to destroy our reputations, and, in more and more cases, putting us on trial. And after the Breivik atrocities on July 22, 2011, their war – yes, war – against critics of Islam shifted into an even higher gear as they rushed to link us to the mass murderer. Wivel himself, ten days after Breivik’s atrocities, e-mailed me a battery of questions, asking if Breivik’s actions had caused me to reconsider what I’d written about Islam or to regret any metaphors or language I’d used. Did I worry now, he wondered, that my rhetoric about Islam had helped drive Breivik to his extreme actions? Would those actions change the way I wrote in the future?
Wivel had given a positive review to my Islam book While Europe Slept, but now, post-Breivik, it seemed that he, like many others in Scandinavia who had ever dared to breathe a critical word about Islam, felt pressured to change his tune – or, at least, to dramatically moderate his tone. “You, like so many other journalists in Scandinavia in the wake of this atrocity,” I wrote in a reply to his e-mail, “are allowing yourself to be led down a very dangerous road.” I noted that what had been true about Islam before July 22 was still true now. “Why is everybody over there [i.e., in Scandinavia; I was in the U.S. at the time] suddenly so scared? Why are serious and responsible writers being pressured to defend themselves from the insane charge of having contributed to unspeakable actions that are entirely at odds with everything they have ever written? I find all this very terrifying.” As for the charge that my criticism of Islam in two articles published in The Wall Street Journal and at Pajamas (now PJ) Media in the days after July 22 was somehow “indecent,” I wrote that
I have never wept so much as I did on July 22 and in the days afterwards. But I am not about to enter into a sensitivity competition….It is possible to be weeping constantly and still write a cogent, unsentimental article….That is what it means to be a responsible adult.
When I wrote those articles in PJM and WSJ, I feared that Norway would turn away from worrying about the threat of Islamization. Everything that has happened since July 22 has intensified that fear.
As it turned out, I was right to be worried about the direction in which things were heading. A few months later, I found myself being ordered to appear at Breivik’s trial – technically as an “expert witness,” but really as a co-defendant. The idea, plainly, was to use the trial to discredit the criticism of Islam once and for all, by linking it irrevocably with Breivik’s mad murder spree. In the end, my lawyer kept me out of court by pointing out to the judges that, in their eagerness to put Islam critics on trial, they’d overlooked the fact that Norwegian law forbids forcing anyone to testify as an expert witness. Meanwhile, in Denmark, Lars was busy fighting a hate-speech charge all the way to the Supreme Court.
No, Klaus, this is no parish-council debate.
Which brings us back to Wivel’s Weekendavisen piece, at the
end of which he has a few things to say about me. Noting that in 2009 I
had publicly criticized Lars’s association with Vlaams Belang – a
Belgian political party that not only opposes Islam but also loathes
secular liberalism – Wivel expressed bafflement over my support and
praise for Lars after last month’s murder attempt. He just can’t figure
out why, given my 2009 statements about Vlaams Belang, I would stand up
for Lars now. The very fact that Wivel can ask the question is sadly
illuminating. If such an assassination attempt had taken place – what? –
thirty years ago, things would’ve been different. But there have been
so many murders and murder attempts since – from the near-fatal 1993
shooting of the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, to
the 2002 gunning down of Pim Fortuyn, to the 2004 butchering of Theo van
Gogh, to the mass mayhem over the Danish cartoons – that the shock has
worn off. Today, many Europeans simply take it as a given that anyone
who criticizes Islam risks extra-judiciary execution. To criticize Islam
is like jumping off a cliff or stepping into heavy traffic – it’s a
stupid, reckless move, period. Such people don’t see somebody like Lars
as a champion of their own freedom, and don’t see themselves as having a
moral obligation to rally to his side when his life has been
threatened. Alas, Wivel is apparently now of this number. Vlaams Belang?
What? Sorry, but everything that’s happened since 2009 – above all, the
broad-based post-Breivik effort in Norway to stifle Islam critics and
crush free speech – has made Vlaams Belang very much a secondary issue.
But Wivel doesn’t get it. In his piece, he actually refers, in a
sneering tone, to “Bawer and his war buddies.” This is what it’s come
to: a leading journalist genuinely can’t make sense of the solidarity of
principled people in the face of a cold-blooded jihadist assassination
attempt, and is capable of making snide references to “war buddies” and
the like, as if would-be murderers – men with real guns who are out to
end people’s lives – are figments of our imaginations.
March 28, 2013
If the February 5 murder attempt on Lars Hedegaard in Copenhagen didn’t make it clear what Europe’s Islam critics are up against, the aftermath of this monstrous crime has certainly done so. I’ve already written here about the morally challenged Ekstra Bladet journalists who, when Lars felt compelled to find a new place to live after the attempt on his life, followed his moving van in an obvious effort to be able to report his new address. Then there was Danish TV host Martin Krasnik, who in a March 17 interview with Lars played prosecutor, comparing Lars’s book on Islam, In the House of War, to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and trying to paint him as a man whose purported extremism had isolated him even from his fellow Islam critics.
Krasnik got a lot of heat for that sleazy display. Now comes another Danish journalist, Klaus Wivel, who has chosen to take this occasion not only to get in a few kicks at Lars but to smack around several of those (myself included) who have responded to Lars’s close shave with shows of solidarity. To be sure, Wivel, writing in Weekendavisen, admits that Islam is not a thoroughly innocuous phenomenon and that Krasnik acted like a thug. But the thrust of his article is that Lars and his friends and defenders have gone too far. After the Krasnik interview, Wivel notes, some of the thousands of reader comments at the Free Press Society’s website were anti-Semitic. (Krasnik is Jewish.) While acknowledging that Lars and company despise anti-Semitism, Wivel finds it “significant that these weeds are growing in their backyards.” Meaning what? That Lars is responsible for the prejudices of every commenter on the Free Press Society’s site?
Wivel says that in Lars’s view, the argument about Islam isn’t a “parish-council debate”: it’s “war.” This mentality, Wivel insists, can only lead to defeat. About which I can only ask: is Wivel serious? Let me get this straight: when people are coming to the door of your home and trying to kill you, and the media, in the aftermath, treat you like the perpetrator, you shouldn’t feel that you’re at war? Does Wivel sincerely expect that Islam critics who have been subject to murder attempts and death threats, all the while being systematically, heartlessly, and mendaciously vilified in the media – people like Robert Redeker and Geert Wilders, who have to live with round-the-clock bodyguards because of would-be assassins, and people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Fiamma Nirenstein, who lived with bodyguards and ended up leaving Europe entirely – should treat the whole matter like a parish-council debate?
Wivel talks about Jews. What about all the Jews who are fleeing France and other European countries because Islam has made their lives unlivable? Is it excessive, in Wivel’s view, for them to think or speak of themselves as being at war? “If one is in the House of War,” Wivel warns, apropos of the anti-Semitism of those commenters at the Free Press Society site, “one takes on the attributes of the enemy.” But Wivel’s solution, it would appear, is to pretend that we’re not at war. He mocks Lars for believing that “we’re standing…at the gates of Vienna.” Wivel seems already to have forgotten that a few weeks ago Lars was almost standing at the Pearly Gates. Which of these two men is more out of touch with reality?
Earth to Wivel: it wasn’t we Islam critics who took the question of the Islamization of Europe out of the realm of civilized, parish-council-style debate. It was our opponents in politics, the academy, and the media – who, from the very beginning, have chosen to respond to our rational arguments not with rational arguments of their own, but, rather, by demonizing us, misrepresenting us, trying to destroy our reputations, and, in more and more cases, putting us on trial. And after the Breivik atrocities on July 22, 2011, their war – yes, war – against critics of Islam shifted into an even higher gear as they rushed to link us to the mass murderer. Wivel himself, ten days after Breivik’s atrocities, e-mailed me a battery of questions, asking if Breivik’s actions had caused me to reconsider what I’d written about Islam or to regret any metaphors or language I’d used. Did I worry now, he wondered, that my rhetoric about Islam had helped drive Breivik to his extreme actions? Would those actions change the way I wrote in the future?
Wivel had given a positive review to my Islam book While Europe Slept, but now, post-Breivik, it seemed that he, like many others in Scandinavia who had ever dared to breathe a critical word about Islam, felt pressured to change his tune – or, at least, to dramatically moderate his tone. “You, like so many other journalists in Scandinavia in the wake of this atrocity,” I wrote in a reply to his e-mail, “are allowing yourself to be led down a very dangerous road.” I noted that what had been true about Islam before July 22 was still true now. “Why is everybody over there [i.e., in Scandinavia; I was in the U.S. at the time] suddenly so scared? Why are serious and responsible writers being pressured to defend themselves from the insane charge of having contributed to unspeakable actions that are entirely at odds with everything they have ever written? I find all this very terrifying.” As for the charge that my criticism of Islam in two articles published in The Wall Street Journal and at Pajamas (now PJ) Media in the days after July 22 was somehow “indecent,” I wrote that
I have never wept so much as I did on July 22 and in the days afterwards. But I am not about to enter into a sensitivity competition….It is possible to be weeping constantly and still write a cogent, unsentimental article….That is what it means to be a responsible adult.
When I wrote those articles in PJM and WSJ, I feared that Norway would turn away from worrying about the threat of Islamization. Everything that has happened since July 22 has intensified that fear.
As it turned out, I was right to be worried about the direction in which things were heading. A few months later, I found myself being ordered to appear at Breivik’s trial – technically as an “expert witness,” but really as a co-defendant. The idea, plainly, was to use the trial to discredit the criticism of Islam once and for all, by linking it irrevocably with Breivik’s mad murder spree. In the end, my lawyer kept me out of court by pointing out to the judges that, in their eagerness to put Islam critics on trial, they’d overlooked the fact that Norwegian law forbids forcing anyone to testify as an expert witness. Meanwhile, in Denmark, Lars was busy fighting a hate-speech charge all the way to the Supreme Court.
No, Klaus, this is no parish-council debate.
[ed. There is a pure evil in this world where freedom is no longer demanded, rights are no longer defended and patriotism is no longer encouraged. This world belongs to the subversives...]
27 March 2013
Law would fire sheriffs for defying gun control measures
Paul Bedard
March 27, 2013
Supporters of the 380 sheriffs in 15 states who so far have vowed to defy new state and federal gun control laws claim that legislation is starting to pop up around the nation to fire any state elected or appointed law enforcement official who doesn't obey federal orders.
The first effort emerged in Texas. Legislation proposed by Dallas Democratic Rep. Yvonne Davis would remove any sheriff or law enforcement officer who refuses to enforce state or federal laws.
What's more, it would remove any elected or appointed law enforcement officer for simply stating or signing any document stating that they will not obey federal orders.
A gun lobbyist told Secrets, "Beware because once something like this is introduced in one state, it will be followed very quickly in several other states."
Secrets has charted the growing group of sheriffs opposed to new gun control initiatives. They argue that citizens should be allowed by buy the types of weapons they want to defend themselves. They also claim that there is no way to tell the difference between old rifle and pistol magazines and new ones that President Obama wants to ban.
March 27, 2013
Supporters of the 380 sheriffs in 15 states who so far have vowed to defy new state and federal gun control laws claim that legislation is starting to pop up around the nation to fire any state elected or appointed law enforcement official who doesn't obey federal orders.
The first effort emerged in Texas. Legislation proposed by Dallas Democratic Rep. Yvonne Davis would remove any sheriff or law enforcement officer who refuses to enforce state or federal laws.
What's more, it would remove any elected or appointed law enforcement officer for simply stating or signing any document stating that they will not obey federal orders.
A gun lobbyist told Secrets, "Beware because once something like this is introduced in one state, it will be followed very quickly in several other states."
Secrets has charted the growing group of sheriffs opposed to new gun control initiatives. They argue that citizens should be allowed by buy the types of weapons they want to defend themselves. They also claim that there is no way to tell the difference between old rifle and pistol magazines and new ones that President Obama wants to ban.
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