As I have carefully documented in my new book, Strained Relations, not only do most people not give a rip about homosexual marriage, but nor do most homosexuals. It was never even on the radar until just recently, but now it seems to be the most pressing item there is, at least according to the mainstream media.
It is not just the flavour of the month, but the campaign of the century it seems. Yet most homosexuals are quite uninterested in marriage, and when nations have legalised SSM, only a small minority of homosexuals have even bothered to avail themselves of it.
And most people do not have homosexual marriage high up on their must-do lists, let alone their bucket lists. It really is a non-issue for well over 99 per cent of the world’s population. Yet it seems to have become the most pressing issue of the day. Just why is this?
The answer is simple. Just take a handful of militant activists, and toss in a MSM which is overwhelmingly dominated by secular lefties, and presto: you have SSM rocketing to the number one social issue of the decade, if not all times. We of course expect the activists to push their harmful agendas.
But when the media becomes complicit in all this, then it has a lot to answer for. The media is meant to report the news. It is meant to cover the news. But far too often today the media invents the news. It creates the news. Where a story did not exist, the MSM will happily bring it into existence.
And all the hype about SSM is surely one of the biggest creations of the MSM. But don’t take my word for it. Consider the comments of someone who can hardly be described as a religious conservative, or a card-carrying member of the religious right.
I refer to British journalist and commentator Brendan O’Neil who has just recently penned two brilliant articles on SSM. Both are well worth reading in their entirety, but I will here offer large slabs from each. First is his March 6 article, “Gay marriage is now the issue through which the elite advertises its superiority over the redneck masses”.
He begins this way: “A question rarely asked about gay marriage is how it became such a massive flashpoint issue. In America and Britain, gay marriage has become one of the key issues of our time, with everyone from bishops to hacks feeling the need to tell the world where they stand on it. And yet the remarkable thing is that gay marriage has achieved this hot-potato status without the benefit of a mass movement demanding it, far less any public streetfighting or serious civil unrest by homosexuals determined to get hitched.
“For all the self-flattering comparisons made by gay activists between their demand for gay marriage and black Americans’ demand for civil rights in the 1950s and 60s, it is the differences between these two things that are most striking. Gay-marriage activists have not had to march for years on end, carry out mass boycotts, face water cannons, get attacked by dogs or run the risk of being thrown in jail for their campaign to achieve almost saintly status, winning the backing of leading politicians and commentators. The speed and ease with which gay marriage has gone from being a tiny minority concern to become the No 1 battle in the modern culture wars has been truly remarkable – and revealing.
“What it suggests is that gay marriage is more a tool of the elite than it is a demand of the demos. The thing motoring the gay-marriage campaign, its political engine, is not any longstanding desire among homosexuals to get married or an active, passionate demand from below for the right of men to marry men and women to marry women. No, its driving force, the reason it has been so speedily and heartily embraced by the political and media classes, is because it is so very useful as a litmus test of liberal, cosmopolitan values. Supporting gay marriage has become a kind of shorthand way of indicating one’s superiority over the hordes, particularly those of a religious or redneck persuasion.”
And he concludes as follows: “The bizarre emptying-out of political debate from the issue of gay marriage, and its transformation instead into a clear-cut moral matter that separates the good from the bad, shows what its backers really get out of it – a moral buzz, a rush of superiority as they declare, to anyone who will listen, that they are For Gay Marriage. In this sense, supporting gay marriage has become less a declaration of truly democratic instincts and more a kind of provocation. In declaring your support for gay marriage, you can provoke both fusty old religionists and the backward masses into expressions of disagreement or disgruntlement, and then bask in the glow of your own superior, better-informed outlook.
“This is the reason gay marriage has become so central to modern political debate in America and Britain, despite there being almost no societal drive or urge behind it – because it lends itself brilliantly to expressions of a very elitist sensibility. It allows the upper echelons of society both to distance themselves from the old and the thick and to advertise their own mental, cultural and moral superiority.”
Exactly right. And on March 22 he wrote “Why gay marriage is a very bad idea” He begins: “Gay marriage: what the hell is that all about? Anyone who asks himself the simple question of how gay marriage came to be a massive talking point in both America and Europe will surely conclude that it is the most surreal political issue of our age. There is no mass campaign for it; historically, gays haven’t been interested in getting married; and according to a recent opinion poll, while 45 per cent of Britons support gay marriage, 78 per cent think that making it legal should not be a parliamentary priority. And yet somehow, seemingly without logic or reason, gay marriage has become the issue of 2012 and is now more hotly debated in commentary circles than just about any other thing on Earth.
He continues, “One of the most striking things about gay marriage is the disparity between mass feeling for the issue (which is best described as weak to non-existent) and elite passion for it (which is intense). All sorts of elite institutions, from political parties to massive corporations, are lining up to back the gay-marriage ‘cause’, clearly having sensed that it is the issue through which their kind can now make a display of their sanctity. So not only are old-world, conservative media institutions such as The Times and right-wing parties like the Conservatives declaring their support for gay marriage, so is the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein. He has become a spokesman for one of America’s largest gay-rights group, appearing in its adverts to say ‘I support marriage equality’.
“The intervention of Goldman Sachs makes no sense, other than as part of a process of strange and instinctive elite reformulation around this issue. Gay marriage has become the great cleanser of discredited or at-sea institutions, so that even a hated investment bank sees value in signing up for it. What we have here is effectively the formation of a new clique through a handpicked issue. At a time when traditional political dividing lines count for little, and when the old taken-for-granted morality has withered, there is an instinctive feel-around for something, anything, through which moral seriousness and cultural superiority can once again be asserted. And in recent years, gay marriage has become the prime platform for such elite preening….
“The transformation of gay marriage into a barometer of moral decency explains why the debate about it is so shot through with censoriousness and condemnation. That is another striking difference between the old genuinely democratic reformers and today’s gay-marriage supporters – where the proper reformers were in favour of openness and debate, the gay-marriage lobby seems far more keen to stifle dissent. As a writer for the Guardian put it, ‘There are some subjects that should be discussed in shades of grey, with acknowledgement of subtleties and cultural differences. Same-sex marriage is not one of those.”
And he concludes: “Now, perhaps you think the institution of marriage should be devalued, that it is stuffy and conservative and in need of an overhaul. Fine. Then argue for that, openly and honestly. But no one benefits from the charade of gay marriage. The fact is that marriage is not simply about co-habitation or partnership; it is not even simply about having an intense relationship. It has historically been about much more – about creating a unit, with its own rules, that is recognised by the state and society as a distinctive union often entered into for the purpose of raising a new generation.
“Yes, some couples enter into it for other reasons – for companionship, larks, a party or whatever – but we are not talking about individuals’ motives here; we are talking about the meaning of an institution. Collapsing together every human relationship, so that everything from gay love to a Christian couple who want to have five kids is homogenised under the term ‘marriage’, benefits no one. It doesn’t benefit gay couples, whose ‘marriage’ will have little historic depth or meaning, and it doesn’t benefit currently married couples, some of whom may feel a corrosion of their identity.”
Wow, that is a lot of insight and wisdom from someone who certainly cannot be dismissed as some religious nutter. His is one of the few voices of sanity in what has become a non-debate. There just is no proper discussion of this in the MSM. The lefties there have decided that there is only one side to this story, and no other viewpoints will be allowed.
It reminds me of a line uttered long ago by William F Buckley: “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100141828/gay-marriage-is-now-the-issue-through-which-the-elite-advertises-its-superiority-over-the-redneck-masses/
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/12273/
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