Beef Supremacy in Portland

Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, June 01, 2018

The world is full of stupid and angry people, and most of them live in Portland.

Women’s soccer player Jaelene Hinkle, a defender for the North Carolina Courage, was booed by angry Portland women’s soccer fans—and is there any other kind, really?—during a match against the Portland Thorns, after the local mutawwi learned via an interview with The 700 Club (which still exists!) that Hinkle had passed up an opportunity to play with the U.S. women’s team because she was not comfortable wearing a jersey celebrating (roll call!) Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer/Questioning (there is some dispute about what the Q stands for; some people insist on LGBTQQ just to cover the bases, but that seems like a lot of Qs, if you ask me) Pride Month.

The public denunciations already have begun. There will be petitions and the like soon enough.

One can understand Portland’s inconsolable rage. It’s a second-rate Seattle, which makes it, by extension, a fourth-rate (22) San Francisco. Which is to say: Austin without the sunshine and higher education and tacos. I’d be angry if I lived in Portland, too.

The inconsolable rage of organized homosexuality is a little more difficult to appreciate. (Come on, guys—you won.) A generation ago, many of the people who proudly described themselves as “queer” reveled in their ability to shock and in their sexual-outlaw status.

Not that every gay person wanted to live like a Hubert Selby character; it was more like the gangsta rap of the early 1990s, with nice kids like Tupac Shakur and Tracy Marrow amping up stereotypes about their communities and selling them back to mainstream society at a healthy markup. (NWA and the Village People were, from that point of view, essentially the same act.)

But the road from Will & Grace to Invasion of the Body-Snatchers is short and straight, like Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, and the order of the day is complete and thoroughgoing conformity. “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” became, “We’re here, we’re queer, and you will do as we say!” When Bradley Manning announced that he wanted henceforth to live his life as a woman called Chelsea, NPR had the bad taste to report the news that Bradley Manning wanted henceforth to live his live as a woman called Chelsea, and was savaged for “misgendering” Manning in the report. (If there is not a drag queen somewhere called Miss Gendering, I will be disappointed.) What followed was a Maoist self-criticism session, at the end of which NPR’s managing editor for Standards and Practice Stu Seidel announced that the organization’s “thinking has evolved.”

I’ll bet.

There’s no logical reason that women’s sports should be an especially uncomfortable place for someone with traditionalist views about homosexuality. But the kulturkampf brigades will have only conformity, abject and absolute. That is part of the doctrine of “inclusion,” which, perversely enough, exists for the purpose of excluding certain people with unpopular political or religious opinions.

I recently spoke at a conference for education journalists, mainly because I was eager to witness the interaction between the best products of America’s colleges of education and those of America’s journalism schools—our least-selective and second-least-selective college majors, respectively.

I expected to hear approximately the sounds of a coconut processing plant as they put their heads together. One young man suggested that to hold nonconforming views on gay marriage ought to be in itself disqualifying from a career in journalism, on the theory that somehow such ideas are categorically incompatible with journalism per se. He also wanted to know how he was supposed to work with people who viewed certain aspects of his life as immoral. I suggested that he consider growing up, but the message was not well received. The moderator insisted that journalists must “respect all people,” without apparently giving a nanosecond’s thought to the silent “except those who disagree with us, who must be exiled” at the end of her sentence.

Of course we can’t just report the news and write columns. Of course we can’t just play soccer. Everything on Earth must be understood not on its own terms but only relative to the sexual politics of the cast of The Boys in the Band.

Maybe Hinkle has some really interesting and well-developed position on the question of homosexuality; maybe she has only the banal and sentimental because-the-Bible-tells-me-so ideas that one might expect from a guest on The 700 Club. It really shouldn’t matter to the question of playing soccer, which is about another kind of scoring altogether.

But of course it must be made to matter. You will wear the jersey celebrating gay pride, or you will not play. Hinkle chose not to play. Fair enough. To her credit, she has not engaged in Colin Kaepernick-level grandstanding or done the usual thing and filed a lawsuit. She only declined to participate, to give her affirmation.

Yet that’s an unforgivable crime for our so-called liberals. That’s what’s really behind the demand for public funding of abortion, contraception, and the like: The strategy is to ensure that everybody is implicated, corporately. The pretense that Sandra Fluke can’t afford a rubber is ridiculous. Nobody really believes that. It’s like Antiochus and the Jews, whose insistence upon their own faith and their own ways offended those who desired to “oblige them to partake of the sacrifices” and “adopt the customs” of their political rulers. It is not enough that gay people should be allowed to organize their own lives as they wish and to follow their interests and their pleasures where they will. You can decline to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but when they raise the rainbow banner, you’d damned well better stand up straight and salute.

It is peculiar that gay people should be among the leaders in the kulturkampf for absolute social conformity, demanding that dissenting voices be silenced and that divergent views be punished as crimes. It wasn’t that long ago that a whisper of homosexuality was enough to end a career in business or in Hollywood, as in the so-called Lavender Scare that accompanied the Red one. The Left believes that it has the upper hand at the moment and intends to make the most of it. That is foolish. From the rise of Donald Trump to Brexit to the growing popularity of European nationalist parties to surging Hindutva in India, there are many indicators that the secular, progressive, purportedly cosmopolitan culture of scolding and shushing has seen its high-water mark for the time being.

Yes, progressive culture-warriors may dominate programming decisions at ABC and personnel decisions at . . . The Atlantic leaps to mind. But atavistic nationalists and anti-cosmopolitans control the governments of the United States, India, and China, and they’ve recently had a pretty good showing in Italy. They are not exactly on the run in the 98 percent of pop culture that isn’t the Oscars. And those who believe that the radical Left will carry forward a Portland-style cultural agenda might want to check in on Venezuela or Zimbabwe.

The prophet Mike Judge (peace be upon him) foresaw this in Idiocracy, a film that seems more relevant with each passing day. In that film, everyman Joe Bauers is subjected to all manner of homophobic torment: His doctor tells him, “you talk like a fag”—which is presented as a serious condition—a sentiment shared by the judge who hears his case, while his would-be executioner, Beef Supreme, mocks him as limp-wristed and effeminate. There is much that is excellent and inspirational in the United States today, and there’s also a lot of Beef Supremacy. The jeering, hectoring crowds cheering on Beef Supreme? That’s you, Portland. (And you, Twitter, and you, ghastly defective thing still calling itself The New Republic.)

It’s peculiar that an all-or-nothing, winner-take-all, might-makes-right ethic should be so appealing to a tiny minority whose members were obliged until the day before yesterday to closet themselves in response to the same kind of vicious conformism when it was practiced by others.

Notice also that the word “tolerance” has come into ill repute.

The subject of other people’s sex lives is almost as dreary as the subject of women’s soccer, but people like what they like. It’s as though they have minds of their own. Those who appreciate the genuine and organic diversity of a complex society such as ours are—assuming they are mentally normal, well-adjusted adults—able to live rich and contented lives among neighbors and colleagues who see the world differently than they do.

For everybody else, there’s Portland.