That”s So Gay

So follow this link and watch the three television commercials that are there. (HT: Frank Golubski) Okay, all set?

In the first place, I am almost tempted to give my whole-hearted endorsement to such an ad campaign just for the pleasure of hearing modern adults tell teenagers to “knock it off.” No qualifications, no poor buddying, just straight up the middle. Here we see an avuncular, grown-up assessment of something that is wrong among the youth of today and needs correcting, and then just corrects it, no apologies. Just imagine the partnership for a drug-free America talking that way. “Smoking weed, you poor sap? Knock it off.” Or an ad campaign addressing teen illegitimacy . . . “Look, sweetheart, you are just fifteen. Knock it off.” Ah, well. One has one’s dreams.

But this is not just a minor inconsistency. Every society enforces its standards fiercely. The fact that older standards — that pertained when your parents were children — are no longer enforced does not refute this; it simply means that an older society has been replaced with a newer one. In this new society, homosexual behavior and practice must be honored, praised, and protected. And in this setting, American young people have risen to the challenge, and have begun using gay as a term of contempt.

Now the ads are directed at the use of such a term as an all-purpose insult, directed at anything you don’t like, for whatever reason. In the ads, the one administering the rebuke does so on the basis of how inaccurate the epithet is. But that is not how I have generally heard it used. So gay is an insult, but it is an insult usually directed against anything that is effeminate, or metrosexual, or swishy, or limpwristed — something down those lines. In other words, what do we do when something really should be tagged, and it really is gay? The word purist nazi in me likes it when there is resistance to the deterioration-into-uselessness in any word’s usage, and that makes me agree with the ads thus far. If a teenager objects to the way his mother seasons the potatos, and he says, apropos of nothing, that her seasoning methods are so gay, then of course he should be told to “knock it off,” and the more people who take him in hand, the better. But if his friend John shows up at school in a hot pink satin shirt, gay is the word for it. The word gay is fitly spoken (Prov. 25:11).

We are surrounded on every hand with contemptible behavior that needs a word to describe it. The kids have found one, and so let them run with it. Not only have they found a word for it, but they confiscated it from the Official Peecee Lexicon, which I get a kick out of.

An incidental point should be made also. Intelligent homosexuals must have begun to realize by now that the enforcement of all homosexuality-is-normal propaganda is actually a frontal assault on their identity. If a large part of the kick and attraction of this perversion lies in the fact that it is prohibitied, taboo, disgusting, what are you to do when Mrs Grundy of the Community Women’s Council wants to give you awards for doing it? There goes all your tormented angst over where your little friend is supposed to go. That, and all your unpublished poetry. Peeved homosexuals might be forgiven for believing that the whole gay pride thing, marriages included, is nothing more than a nefarious hetero trick.

In the meantime, someone might say that my line of reasoning is harsh and insensitive — the objector being a Christian, say, who has allowed his conscience to be massaged, shaped and formed by its secular fussers and handlers. But let it ride. Such objections are . . . just gay.