This week's Newsweek reproduces today's preferred method of journalism on homosexuals: first-person gay narratives, hermetically sealed from any troublesome opposition. In a long piece entitled "Meet My Real Modern Family," author Andrew Solomon reports on how he and his lover have each fathered two children, although only one of them lives with them. Solomon unsurprisingly expresses pride and demands respect: "We have earned the familial relationships into which others stumble, and there is a veteran’s peace in our mutual devotion." Religious people only surface briefly in their typical role, as villains:
John and I sent out birth announcements that included a picture of us with George. One of John’s cousins returned it with a note that said, “Your lifestyle is against our Christian values. We wish to have no further contact.” Some people scorn the idea of calling five adults and four children in three states a family, or believe that the existence of our family undermines theirs. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones. I espouse reproductive libertarianism, and would propose that when everyone has the broadest choice, love itself expands. I would never want to be smug about the affection we all found in one another. It is not a better love than others, but it is another love, and just as species diversity is crucial to sustain the planet, this diversity strengthens the ecosphere of kindness.
Newsweek highlighted the line about "reproductive libertarianism," and never felt compelled by anyone to defend how "love itself expands" when children live without mothers or fathers on a daily basis. Or how children feel when they were conceived in test tubes and placed in the wombs of people like so much laboratory flotsam. This may be "modern." It's also incredibly artificial. The notion of "sin," as usual, is completely verboten. Newsweek's role is not to question, or challenge: it's to promote. Solomon doesn't have any "sphere of kindness" for his opponents. Conservatives are haters:
Even the most liberal courts note, apparently in approval, that gay people do not make their children gay. If one suggests that black people should be able to reproduce so long as the kids are white, one sees how much prejudice is enmeshed in even ostensibly pro-gay arguments about family. It’s disorienting to recognize that the more conventional our choices are, the more radical we are, that my days of party hopping and sexual adventuring were tolerable, but that our arguing about how much to babyproof, thinking about preschools, buying a swing set, and joining a church constitute an assault on family values. There’s a bizarre and hateful inversion in this. American modernity is built on our liberation from a pernicious 1950s model of the nuclear family that was never true in the first place, and those who attempt to preserve that model are not conservatives, but regressives.
The change has already happened; it’s only the law that lags. The road less traveled, as it turns out, leads to pretty much the same place.
What's inverted here is Solomon's argument. The perfunctory mechanics of family life -- buying a swing set or thinking about preschools -- are not a matter of moral dispute. It's not "more radical" to settle down and raise children. It is "more radical" to expect everyone to surrender to your notion that your sexual immorality is morally equivalent to opposite-sex marriage. For many millions of Americans the traditional heterosexual family has not been "pernicious," and has not been untrue. But when there is no debate, weak arguments just limp across the page. Libertines are every bit as dogmatic as they claim the religious "regressives" are. The decline and fall of the "news" magazines are marked by propagandistic, arrogant narratives like this one.
