Bringing Out the Best in Americans

The task of the historian is not to compile mere sequences of facts, dates and events, but to interpret them, to make sense of them, to explain consequences and implications – why these facts matter. And so history isn’t just a transcript of the past, but an explanation of today. How did these past facts change who we are and what we care about now?

I used to believe that the genius of Martin Luther King Jr. was to state the obvious, and then hold us to it. He didn’t invent equality and fairness, after all. We already believed in it, or thought we did.

When he said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” that was a paraphrase of an 1853 sermon by white preacher Theodore Parker. It implied the bedrock assumption of American exceptionalism, that we are on the right side of history.

King identified our most cherished beliefs about ourselves as Americans, then challenged us to do the hard work of living up to our own exalted self-image. It seemed obvious, before he ever said it, that Americans should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

But it turns out that was not obvious at all. In 2019, very few Democrats still believe in color-blind government or politics.

There were lofty, noble lessons to take away from King’s teaching, and from the Civil Rights movement’s hard-won refinement of American equality: that we Americans owe one another a fair shake, that we can’t rightly turn a blind eye to the government’s habitual mistreatment of our fellow citizens.

Machiavelli, Meet Martin Luther King

But there were other lessons, not so lofty, not so noble: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. White guilt can be lucrative for professional victims. Identity politics can be a cottage industry for activists and unsavory hustlers until they gather enough momentum of influence to dictate public policy.

These toxic lessons are at odds with the lessons based on our aspirational American exceptionalism. The culture of grievance has, unfortunately, shaped the civic engagement of several other ethnic groups that eagerly imitated Black identity politics. This led to grotesque alliances that empowered genocidal abortion of more than 18 million Black American youngsters since I graduated from high school. This same alliance has barricaded the exits for Black and Hispanic children from failed urban school systems.

Eventually even vanilla white males learned how to harness the techniques of exaggerated victimhood to obscure and excuse the content of their character.

The Gay Agenda

The sophisticated psychological strategy to transform American culture and public policy on homosexual behavior, the so-called “gay agenda,” was laid out in “After the Ball,” a 1989 book by two Harvard-educated homosexuals, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. Kirk, who died at 47 of undisclosed causes, was a neuropsychiatric researcher. Madsen’s expertise was in political messaging.

Kirk and Madsen proposed a three-part strategy: desensitization, jamming and conversion. It has been described as Orwellian. Without rehearsing the triumph of homosexuals following Kirk’s and Madsen’s blueprint, suffice it to say that their techniques work. Homosexual activists are in the driver’s seat now.

But will that be good for rank-and-file homosexuals? Or will they be victims of their apparent victory, like the aborted Black children? Will they be deprived of the legal right to seek therapy for their condition? Will lesbian athletes be deprived of scholarships and recognition in their sports by male homosexual intruders?

Will boys with same-sex attractions be deprived of safe havens like Boy Scouts in which to grow out of it, shielded from predatory adults? Will confused, vulnerable adolescent girls be able to fully participate in school and extracurricular activities without being subtly groomed by lesbian talent scouts on faculty? This appears to be a matter of indifference to many of our elites. The only child seduction that stirs them to outrage is by priests.

Pandering to the Implacable

We basically have a culture of appeasement now. We seem to think that if we capitulate, that will end the siege, and we’ll no longer be under attack. But the Sexual Revolution is ultimately totalitarian. Predatory libertines will not be appeased.

Kirk and Madsen urged pederasts at the North America Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) to drop out of Gay Pride parades and keep a low profile while mainstream gays established incremental gains by desensitization, jamming and conversion.

Parade organizers only excluded NAMBLA after exasperated lesbian participants laid down an us-or-them ultimatum. Gay rights founding father Harry Hay protested when the Los Angeles parade organizers excluded the child molesters. He carried a sign that said “NAMBLA Walks With Me.” Even Kirk and Madsen intimated in their book that the broader Gay movement might revisit issues of sex between men and boys after establishing enough political gains for mainstream gays.

Even some gay sympathizers recognize that, as cities and major corporations celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall homosexual riots this week, the stars have aligned for neo-pederasts to have another go at legalization.

“The taboo against sexualized children may very well be challenged by adults who grew up desensitized to explicit sexuality,” writes Rod Dreher in The American Conservative. “If so, then all of us — even those who believe the “After the Ball” strategy was deployed in the service of a good and just cause — had better be ready for the propaganda campaign.”

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE