Gay Marriage in the Church of Progressivism

By Mr. Curmudgeon

During the height of the Bill “Bubba” Clinton scandals, Tonni Morrison, the African-American writer and activist, wrote in The New Yorker magazine:

“White skin notwithstanding, this [Bill Clinton] is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear ‘No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and – who knows? – maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.’”

The latest Newsweek magazine cover trumped Morrison’s claim by declaring President Obama “The First Gay President.”

Before writer Andrew Sullivan began recounting his personal reaction to the president’s new-found support for gay marriage, he first described the dark stage that served as a backdrop to the bright light that followed the president’s pronouncement:

“The interview [Obama on ABC News], by coincidence, came the day after North Carolina voted emphatically to ban all rights for gay couples in the state constitution. For gay Americans and their families, the emotional darkness of Tuesday night became a canvas on which Obama could paint a widening dawn. But I didn’t expect it. Like many others, I braced myself for disappointment. And yet when I watched the interview, the tears came flooding down … To have the president of the United States affirm my humanity – and the humanity of all gay Americans – was, unexpectedly, a watershed. He shifted the mainstream in one interview … Mitt Romney could only stutter.”

Both Tonni Morrison and Andrew Sullivan speak of transformation – turning the white Bill Clinton into the first African-American president, and the nation’s first genuine African-American president into the first homosexual chief executive. I see tangible religious overtones to both declarations of faith.

Among Catholics, it is known as the doctrine of transubstantiation – the moment when the Eucharist transforms into the body of Christ and the sacramental wine transmutes into his blood. This puts the lie to the claim that Progressives have no religion. For Progressives, certain leaders take on a sacramental quality –symbols linking our world with the one that lies beyond, in the realm of unseen truth.

Ideals like individual liberty, the union of one man and one woman, even the definition of life in the womb must change to accommodate the new Progressive faith.

Much to his credit, Sullivan’s journalistic skepticism eventually kicked in. “There was, of course, cold politics behind it,” wrote Sullivan of Obama’s same-sex marriage about-face, “One in six of Obama’s fundraising bundlers is gay, and he needs their money. Wall Street has not backed him financially this year the way it did in 2008. A few Jewish donors have held back over Israel. And when Obama announced recently that he would not issue an executive order barring antigay discrimination for federal contractors, the gay donors all but threatened to leave him high and dry. The unity and intensity of the gay power brokers – absent in the defensive crouch of the Clinton years – proved that FDR’s maxim still applied: ‘I agree with you. I want to do it, now make me do it.’”

In the end, the fuel that propels the new Progressive religion is not faith but money. And their creed is simple and straightforward: “Unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.”

So, can we please get serious for one moment and ask: Who will be the first extraterrestrial president?