Win Ben Stein's Sanity
David Weigel | October 2, 2006, 11:27am
The contest for "worst spin on the Mark Foley scandal" (not counting Foley's own) is over. The winner is Ben Stein.
If there were an Academy Award for Hypocrisy, the surefire favorite for 2006 would be the Democratic Party... We have a Republican man in Congress who sent e-mails to teenage boys asking them what they were wearing, and an entire party, the Democrats, whose primary constituency, besides the teachers' unions, is homosexual men and lesbian women. I hope it won't come as a surprise to anyone that a big part of male homosexual behavior is interest in young boys.
Yes, he says this without even mentioning Gerry Studds. Examples are incidental to his point - the Democrats are creepy homo-lovers, and what's the difference between, like, ensuring partner benefits to monogamous gay couples, and using your office to hunt for teenage kicks?
But what pushes this from the realm of the clueless to Stein's own special Outer Limits is the follow-up.
Don't get me wrong. My very best friend is gay.
Well, of course.
Anonymous | October 2, 2006, 12:47pm | #
"I suppose then it also goes without saying that it should be no surprise to anyone that a big part of male heterosexual behavior is interest in young girls."
As a matter of fact, yes. One of the Big Lies of our times is the enforced belief that women and men are at their most sexy sometime in their later twenties or thirties. Or as a female friend of mine (with man troubles) once put it, "they say Cindy Crawford but they mean Winnie from the Wonder Years."
I don't know about you, but I was better looking at seventeen than today. In fact on those school days we had to dress up I would deliberately wear the blue blazer with the school patch, and red, white, and blue striped tie (rather than just any old suit) because there was no better chick magnet than dressing up as the little schoolboy (and, truth be told: it was the best way to get the stores in the gay part of town to sell you cigarettes, and beer).
I know people believe that the new war on sexual predation is somehow the mark of an enlightened society, but unlike say slavery or child labor there is a biological imperative here, and western civilization has tended to work in cycles on this question. For most of the past 1500 years, Christian civilization tolerated if not enculturated heterosexual ephebophilia (sexual relations with teenagers, as opposed to pedophilia [which by definition involves pre-pubescent minors]), and tolerated if not enculturated homosexual ephebophilia within the Church (do you really think that the fondling of altar boys behind the rectory started sometime during the 1950s?: what is new is the crackdown).
The West goes through long periods of social cohesion (which happen to overlap with cultural golden ages), and long but usually less-long periods of multiculturalism. One of the leading indicators of the transition from an age of cohesion to an age of multiculturalism is an increasing intolerance for sexual relations between adults of adolescents (although there was no such thing as adolescence until the 19th century). When classical Greece became Hellenistic, it wasn't just the death knell for the "Greek miracle" (know any good 3rd century BC Greek tragedies? anyone notice the decline in American culture recently? [don't think it won't continue]) and the city-state (in much the way that we are witnessing the end of the nation-state), but the pederasts were thrown out of the Lyceum (they'd eventually be welcomed into the Catholic Church after centuries of bad treatment).
We're entering a multi-century age of American civilization (call it Empire if you want). It will be a time of stability, prosperity, and complete banality, echoing in many ways the Hellenistic Age and to an even greater extent the Roman Empire that followed. Most of the cultural productivity and genius we take for granted, from Hemingway to the Beatles, will disappear, become relics of a lost golden age. We will have to make due with the Coliseum, reality TV and video games.
But human beings are fickle. And eventually they'll long for a new cohesion. Christendom is crumbling, but a new religion will emerge, and with it a new social order (worldwide, and probably interplanetary). The pederasts will be invited back into the temple, and the wider society. They will look back upon these times with regret.