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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Heteronormativity Smashers

When cultural revolutionaries say they are going to destroy our civilizational foundations, believe them
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Erin Manning writes:

Yesterday a video circulated on Twitter featuring Elly Barnes, a British lesbian who heads the charity “Educate and Celebrate.” Their mission is to transform schools into LGBT-friendly places. In yesterday’s video, in the first couple of minutes, Barnes openly says that the goal is to “…completely smash heteronormativity…” first in the schools, and then in society.

Here’s the video. The quote Erin cites begins just before the one minute mark:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt2bSF2xOVg]

More Erin Manning:

Lest we think that’s some UK aberration, the goal of the LGBT movement for many years now here in America has been exactly the same. People who thought gay marriage was the end goal didn’t realize that redefining marriage so that it would no longer mean the union of a man and a woman was only the beginning. The program aims to remove any and all notions that heterosexuality is the default position for nearly 97% of human beings. Radical takes on sex and gender identity are another tool in the toolbox to achieve this goal: if there are no men or women, no boys or girls, etc. but only people who “identify” one way or the other then there is no longer any way to “privilege” (in their way of thinking) the heterosexual binary.

That means eradicating heteronormative language, such as “husband/wife” “bride/groom” “mother/father” “son/daughter.” It means changing laws so that nobody has a mother and father listed on a birth certificate, just “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”. It means erasing the “privilege” of the presumption of biological parenthood, because it’s unfair for a heterosexual couple to be granted the assumption that the husband is automatically the baby’s father when this presumption of parenthood is not automatically given to partnered lesbians or transgendered couples and so on. It means teaching children that they are not to think of themselves as male or female, only as “people who identify”, with a strong presumption in favor of fluidity (e.g., you may identify as a boy today, but if you decide to be a girl tomorrow and a “neither” on Friday that’s even better). It means reshaping society to think it is rude to assume that there is such a thing as a normal family structure that includes a mother and a father and their own biological children, or that this is in any way a good thing for society or for individual families.

What does all of the above have to do with GQ’s “New Masculinity”? Simple: if anybody and everybody can be masculine, then nobody really is. There’s no such thing, in fact. If you can’t tie masculinity, even as a kind of stereotype, with the biological male sex, then masculinity is a word that means nothing at all.

But that’s what the agenda is: make “masculinity” something a FtM transgender person is better at than actual males, and make “femininity” something that a MtF transgender person is better at than actual females. Being a woman, in the rainbow community, means dressing up in exaggerated feminine clothing, wearing lots of makeup, and choosing stereotypical accessories like high heels and jewelry. A natal woman who dresses simply and who has dealt with her period since age 12 is scolded that this has nothing to do with being a woman; a “trans girl” born male whose artificially constructed breasts fill out his hot pink sequined dress is told he’s much more a woman than she is.

Remember: the goal is to smash heteronormativity, to make anything related to the gender binary seem outdated and prejudiced, to create a new world where your father can be your mother three days out of seven and neither parent may actually have been “AMAB” (e.g., assigned male at birth). The creation of such a world can only lead to even greater isolation of the individual and even more eradication of the community–and the atomized individual, exploited for his labor, controlled for his vote, destroyed for his alleged own good, is the perfect corporate citizen of the brave new world.

Yes. Notice that in the video, Elly Barnes says that smashing heteronormativity makes people happier and “more productive.”

We are a long, long way from merely promoting “tolerance” and creating “safe spaces.” The fact that Elly Barnes can be so open about what her group is after — smashing heteronormativity — is a sign of their strength. No more having to sugarcoat it to convince the middle classes to welcome it into their schools.

The left used to be about economic fairness. Now, as Augusto Del Noce saw back in the 1970s, it has become about revolutionary destruction of social norms. Carlo Lancellotti, in a Commonweal essay about Del Noce, writes:

Under close inspection, the affluent Western consumer of the 1960s looked suspiciously like Marx’s homo economicus. The main difference was that the Marxist dream of a revolutionary catharsis had transmogrified into a bourgeois utopia of liberation from sexual repression and the shackles of traditional morality.

The Marxist dream of a revolutionary catharsis had transmogrified into a bourgeois utopia of liberation from sexual repression and the shackles of traditional morality.

Del Noce also reflected deeply on the political repercussions of the advent of such “post-Marxist bourgeois society.” He believed that, ironically, the enduring influence of Marxist ideas would leave the left ill-equipped to correct the excesses of capitalism. If values like justice and human dignity do not have an objective reality rooted in a metaphysical order knowable by reason, then social criticism becomes purely negative. It can unmask the hypocrisy and contradictions of ideals like religion, family, and country, but there is no conceptual ground for new ideals. Secondly, Del Noce thought that the left itself was doomed to become “bourgeoisified,” by losing its ties to the working classes and becoming focused on causes broadly linked with sexuality. By doing so it would end up embracing an essentially individualistic and secular idea of happiness, which French sociologist Jacques Ellul had called the bourgeois trait par excellence. Conversely, politics would no longer be the expression of a fabric of social life organized around families, churches, ethnic neighborhoods, trade unions, etc., because all of them were being undermined by the individualism of the new culture.

Indeed, Del Noce said, if a society’s only ideal is the expansion of individual “well-being,” the left faces two equally bad options. One is to embrace what he calls the “reality principle,” and to compromise with the realities of late capitalism. Then the left must necessarily become the party of the technocratic elites, and end up pursuing power for power’s sake, because in the vacuum of ideals left behind by Marxism there is no common ground between the elites and the masses. This “realistic left” can only organize itself around two principles: trust in science and technology, and what Del Noce calls “vitalism,” sexual liberation, which provides a “mystified,” bourgeois replacement of the revolution. The second option is what Del Noce calls “unrealism”: dreaming the impossible, rejecting existing reality altogether, and embracing political extremism in various forms, all of which are destined for defeat. Unrealism “becomes an accomplice of the first attitude in the global rejection of all values.”

Elly Barnes makes smashing heteronormativity seem chipper, but this is what it has meant for Elaine Davidson and her daughter. Here is Elaine speaking outside the Supreme Court at its recent hearing. Part of her speech is below, courtesy of the Kelsey Coalition:

How often have you seen stories like Elaine’s in the mainstream media? You haven’t. It doesn’t fit the “smash heteronormativity” narrative.

And it doesn’t stop there. Someone has begun to notice a certain theme in recent New York Times stories:

 

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I know some of you readers don’t like to hear it from me. When I posted yesterday about GQ magazine’s new issue defining the “new masculinity” according to the views of lesbians, gay men, and genderqueers, some of you took it as yet more culture war whining from me. You people are terribly naive. What remains of our culture is being dismantled by these revolutionaries, but you can’t be troubled to notice it. Things are moving so fast now that plenty of us remember how the media campaign for same-sex marriage began not long after the turn of the century. We remember the claims issued. We warned that the ultimate goal was the destruction of marriage itself — this was actually in academic literature published by far-left law professors at the time — and the normalization of transgenderism. We were denounced as bigots and alarmists.

Now look. You’re going take in all this propaganda, and remain in denial about what’s happening right up until the moment when, as in Britain, where all schools have to teach gender ideology by law, there is no ability to resist. And then you will wonder how on earth it happened. Or you will declare that your miserable trans daughter who now has a beard and has cut off her breasts and crowbarred out her womb is an icon of Eden.

Fifty years ago, if an invading army of barbarians had swept in and said they were going to destroy the ideal of the family, of sexual relations, even of male and female, everyone would have risen up to defend these things. Now, in much of our country, we have become too enervated to do so. And I guess this is Paradise.

I want to add one more thing, for my Christian readers. We cannot keep a traditional culture through laws alone. The laws come from the culture itself. If the culture that treats the traditional family as the norm, and that treats heterosexuality as normal, and men as men and women as women — if the cultural basis for that goes away, then it will go away in our laws. This is what is happening. The West is re-paganizing. A friend just e-mailed me a summary of his priest’s sermon from this past Sunday:

He said persecution is coming. He said that it will be up to our children and grandchildren to preserve Christian Culture in an age of anti-Christian hostility in a neopagan civilization. And Christians will have to be as our early ancestors were in the face of implacable hostility.

I believe it. This is why I wrote The Benedict Option. People misread it all the time as some sort of escape from the coming persecution. In fact, it’s about building resilience in the face of it. As I write in the book, there is no ultimate escape from this. If you think you are going to vote and legislate our way out of it, you’re dreaming. It’s all about culture.

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