Pride Month Goeth Before the Fall

Dan Proft Commentary

 

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It’s June. Happy Holidays.

The other 120 or so odd days—and I do mean odd—designated to see and hear the many flowers that have blossomed in the West’s man-made LGBTQIA2S++++++++++++++ garden are important…or with trans ascendancy is it more proper to call it the TLGBTQIA2S+++ garden? I’m old enough to remember when it was the more modest GLSEN. That was when I was a GDI looking to graduate from NU ASAP to start paying down my IOUs.

Anyway, as I was saying, the calendar is chock-full of days we honor those for their heroism in the fields of carnal relations and cosplay, but June is special.

In this month, we stand as one nation under Barack Obama, divisible by our political identities with libertinism and lawfare for all.

We fly our flags. We post our yard signs demanding kindness or else. We parade around our graffiti-ed streets enjoying the local Village People impersonators simulate sex acts for the kids, perhaps even on the kids. We attend retrospectives of Robert Mapplethorpe’s groundbreaking artistry to remind ourselves how far we’ve come since the bad old days when some people didn’t think taking pictures of a naked dude with a bullwhip up his anus was worthy of a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. Can you believe we were ever so bigoted, hard-hearted, parsimonious, mean-spirited, hateful, ignorant, intolerant and exclusionary?

And we take the Mayor London Breed Challenge to name and offer thanks for at least three magical drag queens in our community just as she does in San Francisco.

The whole month is an end-to-end bacchanal of love, inclusion and tolerance.

The sarcasm here is mine but the caricature of the LGBTQIA2S++++ movement is actually theirs.

I don’t consider gay people, for example, to be one-dimensional human beings whose only value is with whom they sleep. They do.

The “they” of whom I speak are the identitarian political ideologues and their apparatchiks who use sex and identity the same way the Jesse Jackson used race and the same way Marx used class which is to undermine a free society.

I understand millions of useful idiots who fly the rainbow flag and adorn their social media profiles with Human Rights Campaign-approved emojis do not understand the gay and trans “rights” movement to be a fundamentally political movement because, well, they are useful idiots.

They are the intersection of arrogance which manifests itself as moral superiority and ignorance which manifests itself as not knowing anything about which they speak.

Look, I am not a prude. And the next time I present myself as some paragon of moral virtue will be the first time. But let’s get past the sentimental sophistry and take a sober look here, shall we?

The sexual identity political movement as a revolutionary one in the west is more than a century old. Some of you who have heard of the Frankfort School or were philosophy or psych majors may have heard of or be familiar with the names Marcuse and Foucault.

But for the purposes of this brief discussion, let me focus on Sigmund Freud’s prized student, Wilhelm Reich.

It was Reich who coined the term “sexual revolution” four decades before Hippies were calling for it at Woodstock. In so doing, Reich was not offering social commentary but rather marketing a plan for the future.

Like Marx, Reich knew that the advance of Marxism began with atheism. The church must be destroyed.

Like Marx, Reich said that Christianity only survives through tradition, being passed down from one generation to the next through the family. This is why Marxists everywhere have always targeted the family first and still do. It has worked quite well for their purposes, hasn’t it?

As my friend Doug Johnson, the editor of Touchstone magazine wrote, “Reich correctly surmised that the way to knock the props out from underneath the American family would be to condition Western man to see contraception, fornication, adultery, pornography, sodomy, etc., as perfectly normal and not unhealthy things. And he saw sex education in schools as the best way to ‘divest parents of their moral authority.’ The late Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce described Reich’s book The Sexual Revolution as ‘the Mein Kampf of permissivism.’”

How about that for a book jacket blurb?

In his review over for the far left Slate.com of Christopher Turner’s 2011 book about Reich’s legacy entitled, “Adventures in Orgasmatron,” psychiatrist Peter Kramer properly observed, “When Wilhelm Reich coined the phrase ‘the sexual revolution,’ he meant transformation in every sphere: health, marriage, economics, morality, and government. It was in sex, he believed, that we found the integrated self, liberated…”

Transformation in every sphere which is necessarily and fundamentally a political exercise, isn’t it?
Kramer essentially conceded the point when he suggested the following in his assessment of how Reich’s influence lives on writing, “It is largely in Oprah, in the broad dissemination of advice about intimacy and self-fulfillment. The culture of confession has not led to political nirvana, but we may—I do—see a link between Oprah’s investment in emotional connection and her endorsement, and our election, of Obama…”

Perhaps America did not embrace Reich’s psychological revolution as quickly or starkly as he desired, but we’re flying his flags now.