|
 he
news that a prestigious private school in Manhattan has banned the
celebration of Mother's Day (and Father's Day)
so as to protect
the feelings of children of gay couples and single parents is more
than another isolated bit of P.C. silliness. It's a portent of things
to come.
Not fifteen
years ago, the loony ideas of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin
about the effective equivalence of consensual heterosexual intercourse
and rape were dismissed as extremist nonsense, even in the New
York Times. Today, while the intercourse-rape equation would
still be dismissed by most everyone (except the New York Times)
MacKinnon is the leader of a prestigious school of legal theory,
and has effectively written her ideas about sex into our nation's
laws on sexual harassment. Mother's Day may or may not be around
fifteen years from now, but there's every chance that by then, the
attack on motherhood will have grown and, in some form or another,
institutionalized itself.
An attempt
to abolish Mother's Day may seem absurd, but in a sense, the effort's
been around for some time now. Feminist academics have long cherished
the utopian fantasy of an androgynous society — a world in which
the differences between men and women will have been effectively
eliminated. Many feminists draw on Nancy Chodorow's book, The
Reproduction of Mothering, which argues that, if men and women
spend equal amounts of time nurturing children, the differences
between the sexes will disappear. And Chodorow's ideas have been
popularized by author's like Carol Gilligan and William Pollack,
who cooked up a phony "girl crisis" and "boy crisis"
to save adolescents from the supposed oppressiveness of their own
sexual identities (as fearless feminist critic Christina Hoff Sommers
has shown). Even so-called mainstream feminists, when they lament
the continuing numerical dominance of men in legislatures and executive
suites, are really asking for an end to motherhood as a distinctive
social role. For it's only women's disproportionate desire to be
the primary caretakers of their children that makes them shun the
career fast track preferred by men.
And now, of
course, there's the movement for gay marriage, which claims that
it will only strengthen the family, but which is destined to undermine
it. As the New York Post reports, the celebration of Mother's
Day at Rodeph Sholem school was banned shortly after a man who had
adopted his son with a male partner boasted that he had persuaded
administrators to remove Mother's Day from the school's holiday
list. This is not an anomaly, but reflects the hope and expectation
of many gay thinkers that same-sex marriage will "subvert"
society's respect for the complementarity of the sexes.
The other day
I argued in a
piece on gays in Hollywood that the best interests of cultural
majorities and minorities sometimes conflict. It certainly is important
that the government not enshrine one particular religious belief
over others, so that all of us can continue to feel like equal citizens.
But complete neutrality about everything of cultural interest by
all institutions, public and private, would mean the death of culture
itself. No majority could affirm or celebrate anything, for fear
of offending some smaller group.
I once attended
a conference of historians of religion where it was announced that
speakers were no longer allowed to use the word "feminist"
in their presentations. Instead they had to substitute for "feminist"
the phrase "feminist/womanist/mujerista" (i.e. white feminists,
black feminists, Hispanic feminists). And each of those groups had
a tendency to splinter as well. Now our country as a whole risks
being dragged into this same Leftist splintering and paralysis.
For fear of "leaving out" the few, we're leaving out the
many.
But intellectuals
aren't always as stupid as they seem. When academic feminists and
"queer theorists" rant and rave against motherhood, they
look like silly extremists unlikely to threaten or convince anyone
beyond a few susceptible undergraduates. But when the policy reforms
supported by seemingly more moderate feminists and gay-rights activists
come to pass, sure enough, it's motherhood that's under attack.
What happened to Mother's Day in New York this week is no fluke.
Once gay marriage becomes a reality — once the reality of sexual
complementarity is deprived of any legal standing whatsoever — more
and more of the taken-for-granted underpinnings of our world will
come under attack: monogamy, the very existence of marriage as a
privileged state, and of course, the differences between mothers
and fathers. It is simply not going to be possible to create complete
equivalence between homosexuality and heterosexuality without undermining
the family, an institution necessarily build around the overwhelming
predominance of heterosexuality. But the battle is sure to expand.
Proponents of apple pie beware.
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