Sex is Politics

"But surely you do not favor the publishing of pornography?"

When you hear someone say do not instead of don't, you know that you are either in court or on television. I was on television, being interviewed by two men--or persons, as they say nowadays. One was a conservative, representing the decent opinion of half a nation. One was a reactionary, representing the decent opinion of half a nation.

"Of course, I favor the publishing of----"

"You favor pornography?" The reactionary was distressed, appalled, sickened.

"I said the publishing of pornography, yes...."

"But what's the difference? I mean between being in favor of publishing pornography and pornography?"

The conservative was troubled. "Whether or not I personally like or dislike pornography is immaterial." Television is a great leveler. You always end up sounding like the people who ask the questions. "The freedom to publish anything is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. That is the law. Whether you or I or anyone likes what is published is"--repetition coming up. I was tired--"is, uh, immaterial. The First Amendment guarantees us the right to say and write and publish what we want...."

Before I could make the usual exemptions for libel and for the reporting of troop movements during wartime and for that man or person who falsely yells fire in a crowded theater (all absolutes are relative beneath the sun), the conservative struck. "But," he said, eyes agleam with what looked to be deep feeling but was actually collyrium, "the founders of the United States"--he paused, reverently; looked at me, sincerely; realized, unhappily, that I was staring at the lacing to his hairpiece (half the men who appear on television professionally are bald; why?). Nervously, he touched his forehead, and continued--"of America intended freedom of speech only for ... uh, politics."

"But sex is politics," I began ... and ended.

I got two blank stares. I might just as well have said that the Pelagian heresy will never take root in south Amish country. Neither the conservative nor the reactionary had ever heard anyone say anything like that before and I knew that I could never explain myself in the seven remaining in-depth minutes of air time. I was also distracted by that toupee. Mentally, I rearranged it. Pushed it farther back on his head. Didn't like the result. Tried it lower down. All the while, we spoke of Important Matters. I said that I did not think it a good idea for people to molest children. This was disingenuous. My secret hero is the late King Herod.

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Sex is politics.

In the year or two since that encounter on television, I have been reminded almost daily of the fact that not only is sex politics but sex both directly and indirectly has been a major issue in this year's elections. The Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, homosexuality are hot issues that affect not only the political process but the private lives of millions of people.

The sexual attitudes of any given society are the result of political decisions. In certain militaristic societies, homosexual relationships were encouraged on the ground that pairs of dedicated lovers (Thebes's Sacred Legion, the Spartan buddy system) would fight more vigorously than reluctant draftees. In societies where it is necessary to force great masses of people to do work that they don't want to do (building pyramids, working on the Detroit assembly line), marriage at an early age is encouraged on the sensible ground that if a married man is fired, his wife and children are going to starve, too. That grim knowledge makes for docility.

Although our notions about what constitutes correct sexual behavior are usually based on religious texts, those texts are invariably interpreted by the rulers in order to keep control over the ruled. Any sexual or intellectual or recreational or political activity that might decrease the amount of coal mined, the number of pyramids built, the quantity of junk food confected will be proscribed through laws that, in turn, are based on divine revelations handed down by whatever god or gods happen to be in fashion at the moment. Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around. This is a brand-new thought to most Americans, whether once or twice or never bathed in the blood of the Lamb.

Traditionally, Judaeo-Christianity approved of sex only between men and women who had been married in a religious ceremony. The newlyweds were then instructed to have children who would, in turn, grow up and have more children (the Reverend Malthus worried about this inverted pyramid), who would continue to serve the society as loyal workers and dutiful consumers.

For the married couple, sexual activity outside marriage is still a taboo. Although sexual activity before marriage is equally taboo, it is more or less accepted if the two parties are really and truly serious and sincere and mature ... in other words, if they are prepared to do their duty by one day getting married in order to bring forth new worker-consumers in obedience to God's law, which tends to resemble with suspicious niceness the will of the society's owners.

Fortunately, nothing human is constant. Today civil marriages outnumber religious marriages; divorce is commonplace; contraception is universally practiced, while abortion is legal for those with money. But our rulers have given ground on these sexual-social issues with great reluctance, and it is no secret that there is a good deal of frustration in the board rooms of the republic.

For one thing, workers are less obedient than they used to be. If fired, they can go on welfare--the Devil's invention. Also, the fact that most jobs men do women can do and do do has endangered the old patriarchal order. A woman who can support herself and her child is a threat to marriage, and marriage is the central institution whereby the owners of the world control those who do the work. Homosexuality also threatens that ancient domination, because men who don't have wives or children to worry about are not as easily dominated as those men who do.

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At any given moment in a society's life, there are certain hot buttons that a politician can push in order to get a predictably hot response. A decade ago, if you asked President Nixon what he intended to do about unemployment, he was apt to answer, "Marijuana is a halfway house to something worse." It is good politics to talk against sin--and don't worry about non sequiturs. In fact, it is positively un-American--even Communist--to discuss a real issue such as unemployment or who is stealing all that money at the Pentagon.

To divert the electorate, the unscrupulous American politician will go after those groups not regarded benignly by Old or New Testament. The descendants of Ham are permanently unpopular with white Americans. Unhappily for the hot-button pusher, it is considered bad taste to go after blacks openly. But code phrases may be used. Everyone knows that "welfare chiseler" means nigger, as does "law and order." The first on the ground that the majority of those on welfare are black (actually, they are white); the second because it is generally believed that most urban crimes are committed by blacks against whites (actually they are committed by jobless blacks against other blacks). But poor blacks are not the only target. Many Christers and some Jews don't like poor white people very much, on the old Puritan ground that if you're good, God will make you rich. This is a familiar evangelical Christian line, recently unfurled by born-again millionaire Walter Hoving. When he found himself short $2,400,000 of the amount he needed to buy Bonwit Teller, Mr. Hoving "opened himself up to the Lord," who promptly came through with the money. "It was completely a miracle." Now we know why the rich are always with us. God likes them.

Jews are permanently unpopular with American Christers because they are forever responsible for Jesus' murder, no matter what those idolatrous wine-soaked Roman Catholics at the Second Vatican Council said. It is true that with the establishment of Israel, the Christers now have a grudging admiration for the Jew as bully. Nevertheless, in once-and-twice-born land, it is an article of faith that America's mass media are owned by Jews who mean to overthrow God's country. Consequently, "mass media" is this year's code phrase for get the kikes, while "Save Our Children" means get the fags.

But politics, like sex, often makes for odd alliances. This year, militant Christers in tandem with militant Jews are pushing the sort of hot buttons that they think will strengthen the country's ownership by firming up the family. Apparently, the family can be strengthened only by depriving women of equal status not only in the market place but also in relation to their own bodies (Thou shalt not abort). That is why the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution is of great symbolic importance.

Family Saviors also favor strong laws designed, ostensibly, to curtail pornography but actually intended to deny freedom of speech to those that they dislike.

Now, it is not possible for a governing class to maintain its power if there are not hot buttons to push. A few months ago, the "Giveaway of the Panama Canal" issue looked as though it were going to be a very hot button, indeed. It was thought that if, somehow, American manhood could be made to seem at stake in Panama, there was a chance that a sort of subliminal sexual button might be pushed, triggering throughout the land a howl of manly rage, particularly from ladies at church receptions: American manhood has never been an exclusively masculine preserve. But, ultimately, American manhood (so recently kneed by the Viet Cong) did not feel endangered by the partial loss of a fairly dull canal, and so that button jammed.

The issue of Cuban imperialism also seemed warm to the touch. Apparently, Castro's invincible troops are now on the march from one end of Africa to the other. If Somalia falls, Mali falls; if Mali falls.... No one cares. Africa is too far away, while Cuba is too small and too near to be dangerous.

In desperation, the nation's ownership has now gone back to the tried-and-true hot buttons: Save our children, our fetuses, our ladies' rooms from the godless enemy. As usual, the sex buttons have proved satisfyingly hot.

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But what do Americans actually think about sex when no one is pressing a button? Recently, Time magazine polled a cross section of the populace. Not surprisingly, 61 percent felt that "it's getting harder and harder to know what's right and what's wrong these days." Most confused were people over 50 and under 25. Meanwhile, 76 percent said that they believed that it was "morally wrong" for a married man to be unfaithful to his wife, while 79 percent thought it wrong to cheat on her husband.

Sexual relations between teenagers were condemned by 63 percent while 34 percent felt that a young man should be a virgin on his wedding night or afternoon. Nevertheless, what people consider to be morally objectionable does not seem to have much effect on what they actually do: 55 percent of unmarried women and 85 percent of unmarried men admit to having had sex by the age (continued on page 214)Sex is Politics(continued from page 178) of 19 ... no doubt, while jointly deploring teenage immorality. A worldly 52 percent think it is not morally wrong for an unmarried couple to live together.

Forty-seven percent thought that homosexual relations were morally wrong; 43 percent thought that they were all right: ten percent didn't know. Yet 56 percent "would vote for legislation guaranteeing the civil rights of homosexuals." Although a clear majority thought that fags should be allowed to serve in the Army, run for office, live where they choose, Anita Bryant has done her work sufficiently well to deny them the right to teach school (48 percent against, 44 percent for) or be ministers (47 percent against, 44 percent for).

Pornography continues to be the hottest of buttons: Seventy-four percent want the Government to crack down on pornographers. Meanwhile, 76 percent think that that old devil permissiveness "has led to a lot of things that are wrong with the country these days."

Finally, 70 percent thought that "there should be no laws, either Federal or state, regulating sexual practice." Either this can be interpreted as a remarkable demonstration of live and let live (an attitude notoriously not shared by the current Supreme Court) or it can be nothing more than the cynical wisdom of our people who know from experience that any area the Government involves itself in will be hopelessly messed up.

Despite the tolerance of the 70 percent, some 20 percent to 40 percent of the population are moral absolutists, according to the Kinsey Institute's soon-to be-published American Sexual Standards. Fiercely, these zealots condemn promiscuity, adultery, homosexuality, masturbation, long hair and fluoride. Out there in the countryside (and in cities such as St. Paul and Wichita), they are the ones who most promptly respond to the politician who pushes a sex button in order to ... what? Create an authoritarian society? Keep the workers docile within the confines of immutable marriage? Punish sin? Make money? Money! There is a lot of money out there on the evangelical Christian circuit and much of it is tax-exempt.

In the fall of 1977, the journalist Andrew Kopkind visited Bensenville, Illinois, in the heart of the heart of the country, in order to study those roots of grass that are now not only as high as an elephant's eye but definitely swaying to the right. Save the Family is this year's rallying cry. Since hardly anyone ever openly questions the value of the family in human affairs, any group that wants to save this allegedly endangered institution is warmly supported.

But to the zealots of what Kopkind calls the New Right, saving the family means all sorts of things not exactly connected with the nuclear family. Kopkind discovered that Family Saviors support "the death penalty, Laetrile, nuclear power, local police, Panama Canal, saccharine, FBI, CIA, defense budget, public prayer and real-estate growth."

Family Saviors view darkly "busing, welfare, public-employee unions, affirmative action, amnesty, marijuana, communes, gun control, pornography, the 55-mph speed limit, day-care centers, religious ecumenism, sex education, car pools and the Environmental Protection Agency." Kopkind believes that those attitudes are fairly spontaneous. He is probably right--up to a point. To get Americans to vote constantly against their own interests, however, requires manipulation of the highest order, and it starts at birth in these remarkably United States and never ends.

Until recently, it had not occurred to anyone that a profamily movement might be politically attractive. Our demagogs usually concentrate on communism versus Americanism. But Nixon's jaunts to Peking and Moscow diminished communism as an issue. Those trips also served to remind Americans that we are a fragile minority in a world where the majority is Marxist. Although communism is still a button to be pressed, it tends to tepidity.

On the other hand, to accuse your opponent of favoring any of those vicious forces that endanger the family is to do him real harm. In the past 18 months, Family Saviors have been remarkably effective. They have defeated equal-rights ordinances for homosexualists in Dade County, St. Paul, Wichita, Eugene; obliged the House of Representatives to reverse itself on an anti-abortion bill; stalled (for a time) the Equal Rights Amendment, and so on. Sex is the ultimate politics and very soon, one way or another, every politician is going to get--as it were--into the act.

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Officially, our attitudes toward sex derive from the Old and New Testaments. Even to this day, Christian fundamentalists like to say that since every single word in the good book is absolutely true, every one of God's injunctions must be absolutely obeyed if we don't want the great plains of the republic to be studded with pillars of salt or worse. Actually, even the most rigorously literal of fundamentalists pick and choose from Biblical texts. The authors of Leviticus proscribe homosexuality--and so do all good Christers. But Leviticus also proscribes rare meat, bacon, shellfish and the wearing of nylon mixed with wool. If Leviticus were to be obeyed in every instance, the garment trade would collapse.

The authors of the Old and New Testaments created not only a religious anthology but also a political order in which man is woman's eternal master (Jewish men used to pray, "I thank thee, Lord, that thou hast not created me a woman"). The hatred and fear of women that runs through the Old Testament (not to mention in the pages of our justly admired Jewish novelists) suggests that the patriarchal principle so carefully built into the Jewish notion of God must have been at one time opposed to a powerful and perhaps competitive matriarchal system. Whatever the original reasons for the total subordination of woman to man, the result has been an unusually ugly religion that has caused a good deal of suffering not only in its original form but also through its later heresy Christianity, which in due, and ironic, course was to spin off yet another heresy, communism.

The current wave of Christian religiosity that is flowing across the republic like an oil slick has served as a reminder to women that they must submit to their husbands. This is not easy, as twice-born Anita Bryant admits. She confesses to a tendency to "dump her garbage" all over her husband and master and employee, Bob Green. But she must control herself: "For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church." Ephesians 5:23. Anita also knows that because of woman's disobedience, the prototypes of the human race were excluded from the Garden of Eden.

Brooding on the Old Testament's dislike of women, Freud theorized that an original patriarchal tribe was for a time replaced by a matriarchal tribe that was then overthrown by the patriarchal Jews: The consequent "re-establishment of the primal father in his historic rights was a great step forward." This speculative nonsense is highly indicative of the way that a mind as shrewd and as original as Freud's could not conceive of a good (virtuous?) society that was not dominated by man the father.

"What do women want?" Freud once asked, plaintively. Well, Sigmund, they want equality with men. But that (continued on page 344)Sex is Politics(continued from page 214) equality was not acceptable either to the authors of the Old Testament or to Freud himself. Today, almost 3000 years after Moses came down from Sinai, women are approaching equality with men in the United States. But the war against woman's equality still goes on; at the moment, it is being conducted in the name of The Family.

The New Testament's Christ is a somewhat milder figure than the Jehovah of the Old Testament. Yet one is very much the son of the other, and so, presumably, nothing basic was supposed to change in the relations between the sexes. In fact, at one point, Jesus displays a positively Portnoyesque exasperation with the traditional Jewish mother. "Woman," he says to Mary, "what art thou to me?" Mary's no doubt lengthy answer has not been recorded.

As a Jew, Jesus took seriously the Ten Commandments. But he totally confused the whole business of adultery by saying that even to entertain so much as a Carterlike lust for a woman is the equivalent of actually committing adultery. Jesus also went on record as saying that whores had as good a chance of getting to heaven as IRS men. It is possible that he meant this as a joke. If so, it is the only joke in the New Testament.

To an adulteress, Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn thee," before suggesting that she stop playing around. Jesus had nothing to say about homosexuality, masturbation or the Equal Rights Amendment; but he did think the absolute world of eunuchs (Matthew 19:10--12). Finally, Jesus believed that the world was about to end. "But I tell you of a truth, there are some standing here, who shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:27). As far as we can tell, the world did not end in the First Century A.D., and all those standing there died without having seen the kingdom.

A few years later, Saint Paul had his vision on the road to Damascus. "Both Jews and gentiles all are under sin," he--what is that best-seller verb?--shrilled. Since Paul was also convinced that the world was about to end, he believed that man must keep himself ritually pure for the day of judgment, and ritual purity required a total abstention from sex. For those who could not remain heroically chaste (to "abide even as I"), Paul rather sourly agreed that "it is better to marry than to burn"--burn with lust, by the way, not hell-fire, as some primitive Christers like to interpret that passage.

Paul also advised married men to live with their wives "as though they had none.... For the form of this world is passing away." Although this world's form did not pass away, Paul's loathing of sexuality did not pass away, either. As a result, anyone brought up in a Christian-dominated society will be taught from birth to regard his natural sexual desires as sinful, or worse.

A state of constant guilt in the citizenry is a good thing for rulers who tend not to take very seriously the religions that they impose on their subjects. Since marriage was the only admissible outlet for the sexual drive, that institution was used as a means of channeling the sexual drive in a way that would make docile the man, while the woman, humanly speaking, existed only as the repository of the sacred sperm (regarded as a manifestation of the Holy Ghost).

Woman was commanded to serve and obey her husband as totally as he, in turn, served and obeyed his temporal, Bible-quoting master. If one had set out deliberately to invent a religion that would effectively enslave a population, one could not have done much better than Judaeo-Christianity.

Curiously enough, Paul is the only Old or New Testament maven to condemn lesbianism, an activity that Queen Victoria did not believe existed and Jesus ignored. But Paul knew better. Why, even as he spoke, Roman ladies were burning "in their lust one toward another ... !" Whenever Paul gets onto the subject of burning lust, he shows every sign of acute migraine.

Now, what is all this nonsense really about? Why should natural sexual desires be condemned in the name of religion? Paul would have said that since judgment day was scheduled for early next year, you should keep yourself ritually clean and ritual cleanliness amongst the Jews involved not only sexual abstinence but an eschewal of shellfish. But Paul's hatred of the flesh is somewhat hard to understand in the light of Jesus' fairly relaxed attitude. On the other hand, Paul's dislike of homosexuality is a bit easier to understand (though never properly understood by American Christers). It derives from the Old Testament book Leviticus, the so-called Holiness Code.

Homosexual relations between heroes were often celebrated in the ancient world. The oldest of religious texts tells of the love between two men, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. When Enkidu died, Gilgamesh challenged death itself in order to bring his lover back to life. In the Iliad, Gilgamesh's rage is echoed by Achilles when his lover Patroclus dies before the walls of Troy. So intense was the love between the heroes David and Jonathan that David noted in his obituary of Jonathan, "Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." Elsewhere in the Old Testament, the love that Ruth felt for Naomi was of a sort that today might well end in the joint ownership of a ceramics kiln at Laguna Beach. Why, then, the extraordinary fuss about homosexuality in Leviticus?

Leviticus was written either during or shortly after the Jewish exile in Babylon (586--538 B.C.). The exile ended when Persia's Great King Cyrus conquered Babylon. Tolerant of all religions, Cyrus let the Jews go home to Jerusalem, where they began to rebuild the temple that had been destroyed in 586. Since it was thought that the disasters of 586 might have been averted had the Jews been a bit more strait-laced in their deportment, Leviticus was drafted. It contained a very stern list of dos and don'ts. Adultery, which had been proscribed by Moses, was now not only proscribed but the adulterers were to be put to death, while "If a man ... lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination" and must be put to death.

What is all this about? In earlier days, Jonathan and David were much admired. Was their celebrated love for each other an abomination? Obviously not. The clue to the mystery is the word abomination, which derives from the Hebrew word to'ebah, meaning idolatrous. At the time of Leviticus (and long before), the Great Goddess was worshiped throughout the Middle East. She had many names: Cybele, Astarte, Diana, Anahita. Since the Jews thought that the Great Goddess was in direct competition with their Great God, they denounced her worshipers as idolatrous, or to'ebah, or abominable; and particularly disapproved of the ritual sex associated with her worship. Many of Cybele's admirers castrated themselves for her glory while male and female prostitutes crowded the temple precincts, ready for action.

In Babylon, every respectable woman was obliged to go at least once in a lifetime to the temple and prostitute herself to the first pilgrim who was willing to pay her. According to Herodotus, ill-favored women were obliged to spend an awful lot of time at the temple, trying to turn that reluctant trick that would make them blessed in the eyes of the goddess.

No doubt, many Jews in Babylon were attracted, if not to the goddess' worship, to the sexual games that went on in her temples. Therefore, the authors of Leviticus made it clear that any Jew who went with a male or female temple prostitute was guilty of an idolatrous or abominable act in the eyes of the Great God Jehovah--a notoriously jealous god by his own admission. As a result, the abominations in Leviticus refer not to sexual acts as such but to sexual acts associated with the cult of the Great Goddess.

Elsewhere in the Old Testament, Sodom was destroyed not because the inhabitants were homosexualists but because a number of local men wanted to gang-rape a pair of male angels who were guests of the town. That was a violation of the most sacred of ancient taboos: the law of hospitality. Also, gang rape, whether homosexual or heterosexual, is seldom agreeable in the eyes of any deity.

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Human beings take a long time to grow up. This fact means that the tribe or the family or the commune is obliged to protect and train the young in those skills that will be needed for him to achieve a physical maturity whose sole purpose seems to be the passing on to a new generation of the sacred DNA code. The nature of life is more life. This is not very inspiring, but it is all that we know for certain that we have. That is why our religiopolitical leaders have always glorified the tribe or the family or the state at the expense of the individual. But societies change and when they do, seemingly eternal laws are superseded. Flat earth proves to be a sphere. Last year's wisdom is this year's folly.

In an overpopulated world, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply is less and less heeded. Thanks to increased automation and incontinent breeding, every industrial society in the world now has more workers than it needs. Meanwhile, housing has become so expensive that it is no longer possible for three generations of a family to live in the same house, the ideal of most Christers and strict Jews. Today the nuclear family consists of a boy for you and a girl for me in a housing development ... hardly an ideal setting for either children or parents.

At this point, it would seem sensible to evolve a different set of arrangements for the human race. Certainly, fewer families would mean fewer children, and that is a good thing. Those who have a gift for parenthood (an infinitely small minority) ought to be encouraged to have children. Those without the gift ought to be discouraged. People would still live in pairs if that pleased them, but the social pressure to produce babies would be lifted.

Unhappily, the thrust of our society is still Judaeo-Christian. As a result, the single American male and the working woman are second-class citizens. A single man's median income is $11,069, while his married brother's income is $14,268 and his working sister's salary is $9231. This is calculated discrimination. Plainly, it is better to marry than to be ill-paid.

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After tax reform, this year's major political issue is Save the Family. Predictably, the Christers have been gunning for women's libbers and fags, two minorities that appear to endanger the family. Not so predictably, a number of Jews are now joining in the attack. This is odd, to say the least. Traditionally, Jews tend to a live-and-let-live attitude on the sensible ground that whenever things go wrong in any society where Jews are a minority, they will get it in the neck. So why make enemies? Unfortunately, Jewish tolerance has never really extended to homosexuality, that permanent abomination. Fag baiting by American Jewish journalists has always been not only fashionable but, in a covert way, antigoyim.

Eighteen years ago, the busy journalist Alfred Kazin announced that homosexuality was a dead end for a writer. Apparently, fags couldn't make great literature. Today he is no longer quite so certain. In a recent issue of Esquire, Kazin accepted the genius of Gertrude Stein, but he could not resist mocking her lesbianism; he also felt it necessary to tell us that she was "fat, queer-looking," while her lover Alice B. Toklas was equally ugly. Although Kazin can accept--barely--the genius of an occasional fag writer, he detests what he calls "the gay mob." He is distressed that "homosexuality is being politicized and is becoming a social fact and a form of social pressure. Does the increasing impatience on all sides with the family, the oldest human institution, explain the widespread growth or emergence of homosexuality amidst so much anxiety about overpopulation?" This is one of those confused rhetorical questions whose answer is meant to be implicit in the polemical tone.

Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. Those sexual acts are entirely natural; if they were not, no one would perform them. But since Judaism proscribes the abominable, the irrational rage that Kazin and his kind feel toward homosexualists has triggered an opposing rage. Gay militants now assert that there is something called gay sensibility, the outward and visible sign of a new kind of human being. Thus madness begets madness.

I have often thought that the reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about.

Today Americans are in a state of terminal hysteria on the subject of sex in general and of homosexuality in particular because the owners of the country (buttressed by a religion that they have shrewdly adapted to their own ends) regard the family as their last means of control over those who work and consume. For two millennia, women have been treated as chattel, while homosexuality has been made to seem a crime, a vice, an illness.

In the Symposium, Plato defined the problem: "In Ionia and other places, and generally in countries which are subject to the barbarians [Plato is referring to the Persians, who were the masters of the Jews at the time Leviticus was written], the custom [homosexuality] is held to be dishonorable; loves of youths share the evil repute in which philosophy and gymnastics are held, because they are inimical to tyranny; the interests of rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, which love, above all other motives, is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants learned by experience; for the love of Aristogeiton and the constancy of Harmodius had a strength which undid their power." This last refers to a pair of lovers who helped overthrow the tyrants at Athens.

To this, our American Jews would respond: So what else would you expect from an uncircumcised Greek? While our American Christers would remind us of all those scorching letters that Saint Paul sent off to the residents of Corinth and Athens.

Although the founders of our republic intended the state to be entirely secular in its laws and institutions, in actual fact, our laws are a mishmash of Judaeo-Christian superstitions. One ought never to be surprised by the intolerant vehemence of our fundamentalist Christers. After all, they started the country, and the 17th Century bigot Cotton Mather is more central to their beliefs than the 18th Century liberal George Mason, who fathered the Bill of Rights. But it is odd to observe Jews making common cause with Christian bigots.

I have yet to read anything by a Christer with an I.Q. above 95 that is as virulent as the journalist Joseph Epstein's statement (in Harper's magazine): "If I had the power to do so. I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth. I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it," etc. Surely, Epstein must realize that if the word Jewry were substituted for homosexuality, a majority of American Christers would be in full agreement. No Jew ought ever to mention the removal of any minority "from the face of this earth." It is unkind. It is also unwise in a Christer-dominated society where a pogrom is never not a possibility.

In a recent issue of Partisan Review, what I take to be a Catskill hotel called the Hilton Kramer wants to know why the New York intellectuals are not offering the national culture anything "in the way of wisdom about marriage and the family, for example? Anything but attacks, and often vicious attacks, on the most elementary fealties of family life?"

The hotel is worried that for the nation at large, the New York intellectual world is represented in the pages of The New York Review of Books "by the likes of Gore Vidal and Garry Wills." I assume that the hotel disapproves of Wills and me because we are not Jewish. The hotel then goes on to characterize me as "proselytizing for the joys of buggery." Needless to say, I have never done such a thing, but I can see how to a superstitious and ill-run hotel anyone who has worked hard to remove consenting sexual relations from the statute books (and politics) must automatically be a salesman for abominable vices, as well as a destroyer of the family and an eater of shellfish.

Finally, dizziest of all, we have the deep thoughts of Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, a magazine subsidized by the American Jewish Congress. In the Sixties, Podhoretz wrote a celebrated piece in which he confessed that he didn't like niggers. Now, in the Seventies, he has discovered that he doesn't like fags, either--on geopolitical rather than rabbinical grounds.

In an article called "The Culture of Appeasement" (again in Harper's), Podhoretz tells us that the Vietnam caper had a bad effect on Americans because we now seem not to like war at all. Of course, "The idea of war has never been as natural or as glamorous to Americans as it used to be to the English or the Germans or the French." Podhoretz obviously knows very little American history. As recently as Theodore Roosevelt, war was celebrated as the highest of all human activities. Sadly, Podhoretz compares this year's United States to England in the Thirties when, he assures us, a powerful homosexual movement made England pacifist because the fags did not want beautiful (or even ugly?) boys killed in the trenches.

Aside from the fact that quite as many faggots like war as heterosexualists (Cardinal Spellman, Senator Joe McCarthy, General Walker), the argument makes no sense. When the English were ready to fight Hitler, they fought. As for Vietnam, if we learned anything from our defeat so far from home, it was that we have no right to intervene militarily in the affairs of another nation.

But Podhoretz is not exactly disinterested. As an agent for Israel, he fears that a craven United States might one day refuse to go to war to protect Israel from its numerous enemies. Although I don't think that he has much to worry about, it does his cause no good to attribute our country's alleged pacifism to a homosexual conspiracy. After all, that is the sort of mad thinking that inspired Hitler to kill not only 6,000,000 Jews but also 600,000 homosexualists.

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In the late Sixties and early Seventies, the enemies of the Equal Rights Amendment set out to smear the movement as lesbian. All sorts of militant right-wing groups have since got into the act: the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, The Conservative Caucus and dozens of other like-minded groups. Their aim is to deny equal rights to women through scare tactics. If the amendment is accepted, they warn us that lesbians will be able to marry each other, rape will be common, men will use women's toilets. This nonsense has been remarkably effective.

But then, as The Conservative Caucus' Howard Phillips told The New Republic with engaging candor, "We're going after people on the basis of their hot buttons." In the past year, the two hottest buttons have proved to be sexual: E.R.A. and gay rights legislation. Or "Save the Family" and "Save Our Children."

Elsewhere in the badlands of the nation, one Richard Viguerie is now the chief money raiser for the powers of darkness. In 1977, Viguerie told the Congressional Quarterly, "I'm willing to compromise to come to power. There aren't 50 percent of the people that share my view, and I'm willing to make concessions to come to power." That has a familiar Nuremberg ring.

Viguerie is said to have at least 10,000,000 names and addresses on file. He sends out mailings and raises large sums for all sorts of far-right political candidates and organizations. But Viguerie is not just a hustler. He is also an ideologue. "I have raised millions of dollars for the conservative movement over the years and I am not happy with the results. I decided to become more concerned with how the money is spent." He is now beginning to discuss the creation of a new political party.

Among groups that Viguerie works for and with is Gun Owners of America. He also works closely with Phyllis Schlafly, who dates back to Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater; currently, she leads the battle against the E.R.A. Another of Viguerie's clients is Utah's Senator Orrin Hatch, a proud and ignorant man who is often mentioned as a possible candidate for President if the far right should start a new political party.

Viguerie has vowed that "the organized conservative community is going to put in many times more than 3,000,000 (sic).... I want a massive assault on Congress in 1978. I don't want any token efforts. We now have the talent and resources to move in a bold, massive way. I think we can move against Congress in 1978 in a way that's never been conceived of."

"Move against Congress." That sounds like revolution. Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether or not Congress was overwhelmed in November; to see whether or not those children will actually be saved; to see whether or not fealty will be sworn by all right-thinking persons to the endangered family.

"There is a lot of money out there on the evangelical Christian circuit and much of it is tax-exempt."

"Curiously enough, Paul is the only Old or New Testament maven to condemn lesbianism."