And all men kill the thing they love,By all let this be heard,Some do it with a bitter look,Some with a flattering word,The coward does it with a kiss,The brave man with a sword!—Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
Before it’s anything else, the culture war is a word
war. A war of words; a war over words.
In a sense, control over the language is control over
thought: if you have the ability to impose your preferred words and definitions
on the rest of the culture, you can control how
things are said and, eventually, what
is said. No-no words become no-no
thoughts, which become no-no attitudes, values and beliefs.
This is certainly true of the battle against same-sex
marriage. Consider the three theologians
who accused Cdl. Timothy Dolan and the USCCB of “misrepresenting Catholic
teaching”: former
priest Daniel Maguire of Marquette told The Beast, “The bishops will stand
with Dolan and the US Catholic Conference, but on this issue, they are in moral
schism since most in the Church have
moved on [to] a more humane view on the rights of those whom God has made gay.”[*] A little later, writer Matthew DeLuca tells
us that the most recent Gallup polling data says 51 percent of Catholics said gay marriage should be
legal. Which brings up the obvious
question: When did 51% become “most”?
More important is what’s happening to the word marriage itself. DB
of Omnia Vincit Veritas puts the matter bluntly:
To be sure, it would be nice if everyone in the world understood and accepted the true meaning of marriage, but …, sadly, the trend is moving toward fewer and fewer people accepting the true and more traditional meaning of marriage. As a result, the lone term marriage is also no longer being used as a shorthand for true marriage by much of the world. This is the reality that we must confront and overcome; not simply whine about a misappropriated shorthand and all that goes with it.
In “What
would Jesus say?”, I argued that any theory which would have the apostles
or later Church removing gay-positive elements from Jesus’ teaching must presume
the Church to be selectively queasy. In
the middle of the rhetoric, I pointed out that Mary the sister of Martha
sitting at Jesus’ feet while he taught (Lk 10:38-42) — a
position reserved to male disciples — is everything anyone could mean by “transgressing
boundaries”. How, I asked rhetorically,
had that example of gender-bending slip past the Church’s red pencil “when
Our Lord’s exposition of queer theory didn’t?”
Enter my friend Richard Evans of Catholic Boy Richard. If you don’t already know his story (and if
you don’t read his blog, shame on you), Richard is a revert, a former
Assemblies of God minister and LGBT activist who came back to the Church in ’05. Richard has chosen to pick up his cross, and
he carries it with grace. But he also
objects to the term “queer
theory” because queer has been
used as a term of hatred and abuse:
… [Some] within the actively LGBT world think we should “take back” the formerly unacceptable words such as “queer” and name TV shows after them. But it presents a caricature of who we were then or are now. Most of the males I know from my background object to that word. Showtime and Bravo did not ask us first when they each decided to make millions on the pain of others.
I agree with Richard in that the deliberate use of queer by homosexuals themselves is as
self-undermining as is the use of nigger
by African-Americans, that it makes no sense to use inside the community a name
that’s painful and demeaning when it comes from outside. Even within the black community, nigger remains a put-down; it can be a
gentle reminder to “get over yourself”, or a trashcan in which to dump a lazy or
criminous fool, or the words of one crab pulling another crab back into the
bucket (“You don’t get out unless we all get out!”).
There are many ways, though, in which the homosexual experience
fails comparison with the black experience, and this is one of them. Within the
Wonderland world of “queer theory”, you don’t have to be homosexually
oriented or even bi-curious to be queer
… you just have to believe gender and sexual identities are social
constructs. “Queer” and “gay”, in this use, don’t overlap;
this isn’t just flying a pejorative as a flag of honor, as Americans did with
the word “Yankee” during the Revolution, but rather redefining it to create
another enclave of oppressed minorities. By comparison, blackness is an almost essential
precondition to being a “nigger”.[†]
If it were up to me, I’d call QT “gendersilly theory”. Besides not including a name some
SSA-afflicted people get upset about, it perfectly describes a meta-narrative born
of narcissism and misunderstood social science concepts. You don’t give people dignity by building
their identities on lies; QT does people with gender-identity and intersex
disorders a disservice by pretending their issues can be solved by changing social
definitions. They kill by a flattering
word.
If anything, the recycling of queer encapsulates not only the hypocrisy of the culture of death
but also their success in controlling the terms of the debate. For at the end of the day, telling the truth
means taking the risk of offending others.
Or, as
I’ve said before, “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is
worse than revolutionary: it’s uncivilized.”
We fight over the meaning of words because words are all we
have to express the inherent, intrinsic dignity of the human person as a child
of God. Words are all we have to paint
the picture of the broken angel Man became after the Fall. Only in the universality of sin can we
finally recognize equality of dignity — that moment when “I’m as ‘Good As You’”
becomes “I too am a sinner.”
[*] This is why I want to earn a doctorate and teach at a university: once you get tenure, you can say the dumbest damn things without fear of losing your job
due to incompetence.
[†]
Black people have told me that “white people can be niggers, too,” and there is
historical precedent: many people in the middle of the 19th century referred to
Irish immigrants as “the white niggers of the North”. Now, though, can anyone truly tell me they've heard this usage any time in the last fifty years?
