“Gay Marriage: A Case Study in Conformism” is an amazing article by Brendan O’Neill in the British online magazine Spiked. It was published over a year ago, but its content is timeless. I haven’t yet figured out what to make of O’Neill since he seems to have connected himself with the label of Marxism. Perhaps its a “brand” that would draw some unlikely folks in to consider and accept what he writes. Provides some cognitive dissonance, perhaps. I don’t know. But Marxism is a philosophy so conducive to terror and conformity that I personally don’t think O’Neill should mess with it if he believes what he writes. “Broadly libertarian” is a more suitable description. In any event, “Gay Marriage: A Case Study in Conformism” is truly worth reading. It’s passionate and compelling and contains so much truth about the squashing of independent thought. The subtitle reads as follows:
"Anyone who values diversity of thought and tolerance of dissent should find the sweeping consensus on gay marriage terrifying."
Indeed, whenever there is a "seismic shift" in public opinion, particularly about a deeply embedded tradition such as marriage, our antennae should go up. This is even truer when an agenda is pushed and engineered primarily by an elite that has a virtual monopoly on most outlets of communication -- the media, Hollywood, academia. The clincher in identifying a fake, manufactured opinion cascade is to look at the treatment of those who are opposed to the agenda. To what extent are they allowed to speak freely? During the period of "debate" have they been allowed to speak without being ostracized or fear losing their livelihood? Are dissenters allowed to express an opinion without being routinely and summarily smeared and cast out of society? If the answer to these questions is no, then you certainly have a mass scale push for tyranny on your hands. All along, the agenda was just a front for a power grab.
Below are two excerpts from O'Neill's essay, which you can read in full by clicking the link above:
In truth, the extraordinary rise of gay marriage speaks, not to a new spirit of liberty or equality on a par with the civil-rights movements of the 1960s, but rather to the political and moral conformism of our age; to the weirdly judgmental non-judgmentalism of our PC times; to the way in which, in an uncritical era such as ours, ideas can become dogma with alarming ease and speed; to the difficulty of speaking one’s mind or sticking with one’s beliefs at a time when doubt and disagreement are pathologised. Gay marriage brilliantly shows how political narratives are forged these days, and how people are made to accept them. This is a campaign that is elitist in nature, in the sense that, in direct contrast to those civil-rights agitators of old, it came from the top of society down; and it is a campaign which is extremely unforgiving of dissent or disagreement, implicitly, softly demanding acquiescence to its agenda. With gay marriage turned into ‘a kind of common sense’, opposing it became more difficult, potentially even threatening one’s social and moral standing. The ‘common sense’ of gay marriage has been turned into something like a dogma of gay marriage, in a very subtle way. So the very act of debating gay marriage has been implicitly demonised, since in the words of one observer , ‘The fact that there is a debate over whether to deny a group of people their civil rights is unacceptable’. Here, through further linking gay marriage to the old civil-rights movement, even discussion itself can be branded ‘unacceptable’.
Kommentare