In debate last year with Germaine Greer, the editor of national review observed that women’s liberation and the women’s liberation movement are not synonymous. So too with homosexual liberation and its apparatus. NR’s response to various liberation causes in flower over the past few years has been one of initial hostility, tempered later by a mellowing, a more sober consideration of the group’s aspiration, and then (at least with the Negro and female causes) refined into intelligent, forthright acceptance of the legitimacy of certain aspects of those thrusts for legal and societal equality, albeit still resisting outrageousness within this liberation group and that.
I would contend that the time when NR’s hostility to all but “discreet” homosexuals should be customary in these pages has passed. I urge this not out of contempt for heterosexuality, marriage, or Western civilization, although I wonder if someone sometime might paraphrase Dr. Johnson’s quip about patriotism and scoundrels, to the effect that ritualistic appeal to “Western civilization” is the last line of defense for agitated conservatives. Nor is my view occasioned by unreserved approval of homosexual liberationism. Unlike my friend Bill Buckley, who doesn’t claim the attribute for himself, I think I do possess the conservative temperament; not infrequently I am appalled by the radical temperament, one required for unreserved enthusiasm for the movement under examination.
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