By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Some time around the sixth season of Will & Grace,
a funny thing happened: The love that dare not speak its name became the love
that could not shut up for a second and maybe talk about something else for a
while.
Mike Pence has been cast as the purse-lipped Roger
Chillingsworth of the Trump administration — the narrative of every Republican
administration must include at least one grim puritan (John Ashcroft, Dan
Quayle, Gary Bauer) and even the New York Times cannot transmute Donald
J. Trump into one of those. And so the vice president has been made into the
personification of one of the silliest purported scandals of the Trump
administration.
This is Pride Month, during which organized homosexuality
does its very best to remind the nation that some people have nonstandard
sexual proclivities, that for some reason some people choose to organize both
their personal identities and their communities around this fact, and to demand
. . . well, that turns out to be a moving target, as surely is understood by
anybody who remembers how fast we went from “Nobody is talking about gay
marriage, you hysterical ninnies!” to “Gay marriage is a constitutionally
mandatory thing, as James Madison obviously intended!” In the pre-Lawrence
era, the urgent question was whether states could (and would) enforce the
sodomy laws that made a crime of certain consensual sexual acts.
In 2019, the urgent question is whether U.S. embassies
around the world will run the rainbow flag up the pole and see who salutes it.
Mike Pence said no. Not that anybody asked him, really.
The matter was resolved within the State Department, through the usual
processes. A few ambassadors asked for permission to fly the pride flag, and
State declined to grant that permission. Others simply flew the flag on their
own authority, acting in accord with the proverbial wisdom that it is easier to
beg forgiveness than secure permission. But NBC News asked the vice president
about the situation, and he affirmed that he believed the decision to have been
correct. His argument contained no reference to scripture or moral theology,
but rather relied on the straightforward belief that where sovereign U.S.
diplomatic outposts are concerned, the only flag that should be flown is the
one with the 50 stars and 13 stripes.
The Trump administration itself observes Pride Month, and
Pence insisted that “we’re proud to be able to serve every American.” But: “The
State Department indicated that on the flagpole of our American embassies that
one flag should fly, and that’s the American flag, and I support that.” Not
exactly Savonarola, there.
But, of course, there is outrage, and the outrage is
directed at Pence, because that is what he is there for. So it’s “Pence backs
ban” at the Washington Blade and “Pence defends Trump’s ban on pride
flags at U.S. embassies” in the Guardian. Neither of those headlines is
quite true, inasmuch as pride flags have not been banned, categorically. They
simply will not be flown from the flagpole designed for the American flag,
which is entirely appropriate.
The question of social attitudes and political
arrangements regarding gay people (and the others represented by the rainbow
flag) is an inherently political question, and embassies abroad are not a
fitting venue for advertising, adjudicating, and contesting domestic political
controversies. This would be as true if the ambassadors had requested to fly a
banner advertising the right to life or the Second Amendment. Some things are
properly reserved to other purposes.
The United States is a remarkably tolerant society; even
before they were struck down by the Supreme Court, the laws criminalizing
homosexual relations were an anachronism in a society which is broadly
welcoming and accommodating of sexual differences. It is not universally so —
the homicide rate among transgender African Americans is astounding. But
the broad movement oriented toward advocacy for sexual minorities has become
more hysterical and more insistent as the stakes have in general declined. This
is characteristic of many similar political movements: We have much cleaner air
and water today than we did a generation ago, but the environmental movement is
six times as hysterical as it once was. It is a curious thing.
The gay-rights movement conceives of itself as a
civil-rights movement patterned on the one that grew to prominence in the
United States in the postwar era. It is not entirely wrong to do so. But there
were, in effect, two civil-rights movements: The one led by the Reverend Martin
Luther King Jr. demanded the full integration of African Americans as Americans
and an end to the social, economic, and political separation that had marked
American society and marks it still; the other one, led by Malcolm X, conceived
of African Americans as a separate people with separate aspirations, a loosely
nationalistic movement that not only accepted separation but demanded more of
it. The more fruitful of those movements recognized one flag and demanded that
the republic for which it stands live up to its best principles. The less
productive one flew many other flags.
Perhaps pride in one flag is enough, for all of our
failures, as we move toward a still more perfect union.
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