How the Rainbow Revolution Won — and How to Overturn It
Same-sex “marriage” and “transgenderism” will seem as bizarre and abhorrent as teenage virginity today. The defeat of the Rainbow Revolution depends on the victory of a renewed Christian culture.
Dear friends and supporters:
It’s another June and therefore another Pride Month, but year by year this celebration of perversity is becoming for most Americans more banal and boring. The routinization of homosexuality in the United States will soon rival Mom, baseball, apple pie and smart phones (most of them Apples of a different sort). The trouble with successful revolutions is that after awhile, you never knew you had one. And the Sexual Revolution (SR) is a successful revolution if there ever was one.
Revolutions become successfully routinized by two chief enforcement mechanisms. The first and most obvious is politics.
The Totalitarian Ideocratic State
Ours is a politicized society, that is, a society in which politics and the state occupy an oversized role, evidenced most graphically perhaps by the 24/7 cable news cycle and Twitter’s ubiquitous political flame-chatter. This political obsession is an infallible mark of Leftism, just as it is the antithesis of conservatism (and Christianity). A hallmark of conservatism is its stress on civil society, defined as that network of pre- and apolitical institutions like the family, church, friendship, and vocation (sometimes known as “private” associations) that command the bulk of our devotion and loyalty. The state is a larger geographical authority, a legitimate demand on our lives also, but less significant and more limited than the civil, non-political institutions.
By contrast, Leftism sees man’s central relationship to be with the state, and political citizenry is the lens through which all of life must be observed. When the old New Left feminists like Hillary Clinton championed, “The personal is the political,” they were simply perpetuating a central assumption of the classic political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle down to moderns like Marx and Lenin. Classical politics is statist; so is most modern politics. Man finds ultimate meaning in the state. All other loyalties like family and church and friendship must bow to the state. In the most fanatically Leftist orders like the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge (1975-1979), society is the state. Conservatism exists largely to make sure those two don’t become synonymous.
What has changed in the modern world — and here is the specific link to the SR — is the merging of statism with ideology, which Kenneth Minogue defines as “the propensity to construct structural explanations of the human world . . . a kind of free creative play of the intellect probing the world.”1 Ideology is a humanly devised comprehensive explanation of the world, almost always conducted by the well-educated (which is not synonymous with “intelligent”). The SR in the last 50 years has become a big part of the Left’s ideology. In other words, they explain the world along secularly sexual lines. Their view of anti-creational sex isn’t just an explanation of primal human behavior; it’s also an explanation of how the world itself should be structured. It’s no surprise, then, that sex must have a political component. You need politics to help structure a society — the right of teens to their own genital mutilation in the pursuit of “self-identification” must be politically enforced.
Every revolution (and every regime) demands an initial or eventual resort to coercion to enforce its aims and gains. Because the state is the only God-authorized institution with a monopoly on coercive violence (Rom. 13), the SR became coercive over the course of the 20th century. Even in the pre-60s years of its gestation period, laws based in the older Christian culture restricting divorce, contraception, abortion, and sodomy were relaxed. This means society was in effect coerced into legally tolerating these practices (see my “The Erotic Regime”). Roe v. Wade in 1973 and recently overturned decriminalized abortion on the federal level, and its recent cancellation in the Dobbs decision does not criminalize abortion anywhere. The effect of its overturning remains to be seen in the battles of state legislatures and judiciaries.
No less momentous for the SR was the 2015 Obergefell decision guaranteeing the legal right of homosexual “marriage.” In these and other developments, the SR is a totalizing ideology (see my Total Revolution) eventually capturing politics; and the United States, like much of the rest of the West, is a spectacle of this politically revolutionary success. It gradually becomes what Daniel J. Mahoney recently called “the totalitarian ideocratic state.”2 The secular ideology must be politically enforced.
The rainbow, a sign originally granted by God to pledge his grace-after-judgment, is transformed by the SR into a logo for radical sexual diversity. But this signification is a lie. Once socially successful, every revolution moves to create a legal monopoly: “diversity” is merely a tool to get there, always to be later discarded. The California legislation being currently considered which would require parents to “affirm” a child’s choice of “sexual identity” is an obvious but not solitary example. The battle line today at the latest edge of the SR is the Rainbow Revolution, the political enforcement of diversity, as oxymoron as that sounds.
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The Totalitarian Ideocratic Culture
Christians and other conservatives alert to the grim successes of the SR are inclined to see its most effective engine as just this political coercion, the statist ideology. This is a widespread but erroneous assumption by many (probably most) conservatives.
The easiest way to prove this point is to think of the emergence of and blowback against the infamous Drag Queen Story Hour. A common response by many conservatives to this reprehensible practice of exposing and routinizing sexual perversion to the youngest children (and other Leftist cultural victories) is to call for a new federal conservative move to crush our culturally Leftist enemies, to give them a taste of their own politically coercive medicine.
Listen to the surprising words of Derek Suszko, editor of a prominent conservative publication, expressing how to combat “women in the military, gay marriage, surrogate parenthood, and the encouragement of ‘diversity’ in public spaces … [and] mutilation of children in the name of gender ideology, ideological takeover of the military and other formerly patriotic institutions, Critical Race Theory in the schools, and all manner of cultural monstrosities that would have appalled anyone in 1980”:
The only deterrent of power is power. To disdain power is not to make it disappear but only to guarantee that those entirely without the scruples of principles acquire it. Principle must fall at times before necessity. When the survival of the nation is at stake, it is necessary for a strong assertion of values and aggressive policies to drive internal enemies from power. In our present situation it is clear that only a strong president can make any headway at curbing the rampant abuses of power of the federal bureaucracies…. Power corrupts, but it corrupts to degrees. Who among us would not trust a leader of the greatness of [George] Washington with absolute authority to remedy our present situation in any manner he saw fit? Such persons do exist, and we must have faith in the ultimate wisdom of the people to find out those with the will to power [a phrase devised by the atheist Friedrich Nietzsche to denote the “transvaluation of all values”] to salvage the integrity and prosperity of the nation. [emphases supplied]
Just a reminder these aren’t the sentiments of a Leftist or Marxist revolutionary but an alleged conservative. Robespierre never said it better.
It’s not occurred to many of these new statists that Drag Queen Story Hour won’t be stamped out by politics for the simple reason that it didn’t show up because of politics. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden didn’t concoct Drag Queen Story Hour, as much as they might agree with it. This is a distinctly cultural phenomenon, reflecting a series of cultural victories in the West over the last 30 years. You won’t overturn widespread cultural victories with panicked political tools. You actually have to do the hard work of changing the culture.
For decades, movies and TV have depicted the clever, winsome “gay” character, often opposed by moralistic religious Neanderthals. Homosexuality and even drag queens are usually portrayed as no different from the norm than lefthanders or redheads. In other words, 21st century America has been culturally conditioned to accept Drag Queen Story Hour as normal. This is not the decision of Congress or the White House but of screenwriters and studio executives. And while local communities as the legal arbiters of standards of decency should forbid these repugnant events, assuming that cultural homosexualization can be purged by coercive politics is a fool’s errand.
Consider also the unabashed celebration of Pride Month by such traditional American institutions as the CIA and that staple of Southern culinary conservatism, Cracker Barrel:
Similarly, the Obergefell decision did not so much legalize same-sex “marriage” as it confirmed by force of law the homosexual cultural victories of the previous three decades.
The totalitarian ideocratic state is possible only because of the previous installation of the the totalitarian ideocratic culture. “The Cultural Tail Wags the Political Dog.”
Conclusion
The swiftness of the revolution’s success has been nothing short of breathtaking. This swiftness might persuade us that an equally swift counter-reaction will suffice to overturn the Rainbow Revolution. But while the success of that revolution was swift, the success of the SR of which it’s only the latest stage wasn’t swift. Since its birth in the 60s and gestation early in the 20th century, the SR as a cultural revolution has been quietly laying the ground for the the Totalitarian Ideocratic State we now live in.
That revolutionary state will be overturned only gradually, and only by the cultural re-routinization of sexual reality. What must this look like? Christians and other conservatives recapture Hollywood and other mainstream cinema (or replace them) and produce films that depicts the beauty and truth and joy of creational standards of marital sexual and the ugliness, lies, and despair of contra-creational standards of sexual perversity and other antinomianism.
We (and our successors) peacefully occupy or replace today’s educational institutions and then inculcate in in students the Christian worldview, notably as it expresses biblical sexuality, such that virtually every student in the nation, homeschooled or not, daily encounters wholesome, joyous sexual truths, which he and she recognize as normal.
Medical professionals (as well as psychiatrists) and hospitals and clinics privilege marriage and the family and encourage all individuals in the healthy living and sexual fulness, avoiding the health- and mind-destroying life of sexual autonomy. Every other cultural fulcrum will act in suit.
At the end of this process, same-sex “marriage” and “transgenderism” will seem as bizarre and abhorrent as teenage virginity and all other sexual fidelity seem in our depraved culture today. The defeat of the Rainbow Revolution depends on the victory of a renewed Christian culture.
When you win culture, politics is easy.
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Yours for the King,
Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership
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Kenneth Minogue, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 2.
In “The Novel Truth,” The New Criterion, 41/9 [May 2023], 17.