Free speech on Queer Street

There’s a good article by Steven Tucker at Daily Sceptic on the sinister connotations of Queer Theory, which I first wrote about here in 2018. In this piece I want to add how, whether or not “queering” is intended to destroy society, nevertheless it will inevitably do so if permitted to continue. I add a few thoughts on how freedom of speech relates to that.

First, for those too idle to follow the link to the article, a brief reminder that “queering” can be traced back primarily to that dreadful man, Michel Foucault. Essentially, you take some pair of societal givens, such as man and woman, and strive to confuse them in order to obliterate the distinction. This is done in the name of freedom, creativity, justice, and so on, but as the article argues, its real intention is to undermine society in the hope that something better emerges from the ashes, or can be engineered. Or in some nihilistic cases, that the whole thing ends in disaster, so that you can cynically blame God, nature or humanity for the universe’s absurdity.

The utopian version of this is well demonstrated to be just a part of a wider conspiracy by this flow chart from Ivor Cummins, which almost amounts to a theory of everything rotten in the world today. It’s hard to disagree with it.

The thing to understand about the inevitably destructive nature of Queer Theory, regardless of the motives of its perpetrators, is that its whole character is transgressive, because from the start it has been intended to demolish all the supposedly authoritarian boundaries in society by the process of “queering” them. That means that it never actually suggests a better alternative beyond the present bounds of a culture (which has its own term: “innovation”) but simply puts a bomb under those bounds because they are bounds – the very essence of transgression. To offend sensibilities is the whole point. You cannot transgress by doing what everybody thinks unexceptionable.

Tucker’s article majors on the woke Boots Christmas TV ad, but mentions as another example the now infamous Jaguar (or I should say JaGUaR) Teletubby model ad. The boss of the car firm, stung by the utterly predictable negative public response, has taken to deriding the “vile hatred and intolerance” of his potential clientele in mocking the freaks models dressed freakishly, acting freakishly, and not advertising cars. The seriousness of his tone suggests that he has somehow missed the fact that the the whole advertising campaign revolves around offending taste by transgressing norms, in order to show, presumably, how “out there” the brand is.

In the unlikely event that jAguAr doesn’t go broke, and that the advertising attracts a market that encourages further ads in the same vein, they will find that androgynous mixed-race models in primary-coloured silly clothes have by then become tolerated and acceptable. And that means the next campaign, in order to continue to break boundaries, will have to queer things even more. At some stage, perhaps, they would have to have naked decomposing corpses strewn around, with their bizarre costumes hanged on nooses, impaled on stakes, or whatever else would enable a shocked corporate response to the public outcry.

In other words, queering must always shock and offend norms, and so is a one way street to the eventual destruction of everything human, just as LSD, by destroying the boundaries of thought, eventually destroys the mind altogether. A quick historical survey of the sexual revolution will demonstrate the truth of this. When I were a lad, there was a thing called “the New Morality” which advocated (shock, horror) sex before marriage. Though it preceded Foucault, this can be seen as a queering of the distinction between singleness and marriage as a societal norm (for fornication and adultery have, of course, always existed). It led, inevitably, to the marginalisation of marriage itself, to no-fault divorce, and more. To assess its effect on society, simply consider the sociological disadvantages of children raised in single-parent homes.

We next got feminism which, in Simone de Beauvoir, was not about the rights of women, but about eradicating the distinction between the sexes, which by relativising women’s reproductive role, increased contraception and abortion (and the Western demographic collapse). Transgenderism (a direct descendant of de Beauvoir’s theories, via John Money and others) abolishes the sexes altogether, even though that directly contradicts biology.

Homosexuality and the rest of the MGBGT+ soup (once more, promoted as a societal norm rather than as a known aberration) similarly queer the relationship between the sexes, but have followed their own inevitable progression along the transgressive path into bisexuality, incest, paedophilia and whatever else is represented on the Pride flag. Transhumanism will soon have to be found a place on the banner.

All of these are deliberately provocative – witness the escalating degeneracy of public Pride parades – in order to be able condemn the majority provoked by the transgressive as bigots. But since, up until now, the mainstream has shown pathological degrees of tolerance, it has become necessary for queering to become ever more extravagant. And so it is necessary to queer beauty and ugliness, health and disease, and even life and death, until all useful distinctions are lost.

Tucker is right to call the whole phenomenon the spread of a societal cancer. Ivor Cummins’s graphic reminds us that there is every appearance that the cancer has been spread deliberately by those whose aim is not just to push the culture’s boundaries, but to declare it a free festival of anarchy (while all the decent bands and the food vendors flee).

One thing absent from Cummins’s diagram is a specific role for the undermining of religion, though it might overlap with “eroding fundamental truths” (creation, for example) or “undermining the family” (which includes, of course, the Fatherhood of God and the obedience of the Son). The queering of religion comes in many forms, from heresy to syncretism with Marxism, Critical Theory or New Age. It is also apparent in the Islamisation of the West, which was perhaps first perhaps promoted to confuse the old believer-unbeliever distinction, and now threatens not only the old order, but apparently Cummins’s Globalist Utopia as well. For Islam has a long history of dealing with tolerance by the sword.

This leads me to ask how advocates of free speech might help reverse the malignant spread of Queer Theory without undermining their own position by autocratic suppression of opinion. Somewhere today, for example, I saw mentioned some woke Christmas mockery of the Virgin Mary. We’ve suffered a century of such crude undermining of our national religion, which has served to make its life-giving message of hope appear a tired relic of the bad old days before we all had fun playing with our pronouns, when there were still such things as virgins. Yet Christianity has also been the source, forged on the anvil of religious warfare, for our freedom of speech and conscience. In what way, then, is the queering of the Virgin Mary different from the mockery of Islam in the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, and should we allow both, or neither?

To me, there is a difference, and it is the difference between satire, intended to clarify the distinction of good and evil, and queering, intended to demolish that distinction. The Charlie Hebdo cartoons might have been intended simply to denigrate Muslims and their prophet, but I think not. Rather, they were published to draw attention to evils the magazine perceived in Islam. Now, one might dispute the validity of those evils, or one might criticize their taste, but the intention was to build up society, not tear it down.

I’ve not seen details of the Virgin Mary sacrilege, but I do know that lady never waged holy war, or advocate genocide, or did anything even arguably evil that we know of. It would therefore appear that it is yet another attempt to damage the “believer-unbeliever” dipole, and so weaken religion, and so destroy the religious foundations of our society.

Therefore, I would suggest that tolerance should be limited not by what is said, but by the careful assessment of whether the speech or action is intended to strengthen the foundations of society, or to queer them and so weaken society. Society has a right to defend itself from destruction. Gauging motive may indeed be difficult – but no more so than the woke movement’s apparent ability to attribute “hate” to a care-worker filming a local protest on her way home.