Blast of Silence
That’s what’s greeting the latest pinhead eruption from the Republican right, this time in the form of unctuous Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. His comments, widely (and rightly) considered anti-gay, were correctly identified by Andrew Sullivan as more broadly anti-sex and anti-privacy. Like Trent Lott’s ill-concealed discomfort with racial equality, the level of anxiety among some extreme Republicans about what goes on in other people’s bedrooms runs under the conservative “social agenda” like a buried electrical cable. The sparks that fly when it sometimes surfaces cause alarm in Republican political circles because they know that this is one issue that puts them way out of the mainstream, even after enough spinning to dig their way to China.
Gay-bashing is nothing new, of course. But after 30 years of open debate on the subject, most Americans have learned to draw distinctions between their personal feelings about homosexuality (if they happen to be negative) and the rights of their fellow citizens to live as they please. Many have even overcome personal prejudices by thinking about the issue in more detail, or by interacting with openly gay people in their communities or families and coming to an understanding of their basic humanity.
Nevertheless, there remains a hard-core of virulent homophobes who cling to their horror of this “perversion” or “abomination of nature” and won’t rest until everyone else has joined them in marginalizing their gay fellow-citizens. The justifications and excuses they use – from Biblical injunctions (wonderfully debunked by Salonblogs’ own Real Live Preacher among others) to claims that homosexuality is “an unhealthy lifestyle,” presumably because of AIDS – float like a thin crust above a bubbling cauldron of sexual anxiety and repression. Now that we have a language for talking about the psychology of hatred, it’s easy for practically anyone to scrape aside the layer of scum and readily demonstrate the foul brew seething beneath the surface.
Homophobes may be motivated by any number of powerful emotional issues. Most straight men can’t think about male homosexuality without contemplating, in some detail, the mechanics of anal sex. Parents recoil at the idea that their lesbian daughter is unlikely to present them with a grandchild. Often, the scars of youthful sexual repression or some trauma from childhood lay at the root of the adult’s unexamined hatred of all things queer. And then there are the closet cases.
What all these motives have in common is that they are personal and subjective. They have nothing to do with the gay individual and everything to do with the homophobe him- or herself. Trying to conflate them into the basis for a social agenda is like putting makeup on a prize pig and entering it into a beauty contest. Because gay-bashing still enjoys some ideological sanction, some people have no shame about making a spectacle of their prejudices, even at this late date. The problem is, the same anxiety that motivates these people’s profound discomfort with homosexuality often indicates an unhealthy attitude toward all forms of sexuality, and that’s where you really start to slip out of the mainstream.
The psychologist and political theorist Wilhelm Reich made an intriguing link between the dynamics of sexual repression and reactionary politics, arguing that the latter was an externalization of the repressed individual’s lack of control over powerful sexual urges. Essentially, the authoritarian tendencies of political movements on both the far right and far left represent the efforts of sexually repressed individuals and social masses to reproduce the misery of their own repression on everyone else, and it is no accident that sexual Puritanism and “family values” are part of the vocabulary of every historical authoritarian movement. In Reich’s view, the lifting of sexual repression as a feature of social mores will inevitably result in a more progressive politics. (This is a radical simplification, and those interested should consult Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution, both from the early 1930s, for more information.)
Ironically, conservatives seem to have internalized Reich’s message much more than the progressives for whom it was intended. The American right has a very sophisticated understanding of the role that sexual anxiety (and racial anxiety) plays in motivating some of its core supporters, and must walk a fine line between appealing to that base and alienating the much larger number of people who arrive at the conservative viewpoint through more rational and/or self-interested motives.
People with a healthy (or even neutral) view of sexuality recognize puritans for what they are: repressed hysterics with personal agendas. They find the hatred and irrational prejudices of these people to be profoundly repellant, regardless of their political affiliations. Republicans found this out during the Clinton impeachment, when the majority of Americans decided they preferred the philandering POTUS to his blue-nosed persecutors and simply tuned out the rest of the argument.
How the Republicans deal with a moron like Santorum, who has rudely pulled the curtain aside and, for a moment at least, focused attention the messy nexus of sexual anxieties at the root of the right-wing social agenda, will show how well they learned this lesson. So far, they still seem to be looking for the right words.
9:51:14 AM 
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