The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Helpless and Hopeless Creatures’

Posted on | January 24, 2014 | 108 Comments

“Nobody cares about ‘social issues’ anymore, we have been told. Democrats have become the Pervert Party . . . and Republicans are now the Party That Dare Not Disagree. Morality is no longer a matter of the divine ‘thou shalt not’ that Jehovah declared to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. Nowadays, moral authority is determined by Hollywood, Harvard University and the New York Times. In post-Christian America, we have reverted to a sort of neo-heathenism, depending on guidance from secular wizards and a priestly caste of experts who gaze at poll numbers the way ancient astrologers looked for omens in the stars.”
Robert Stacy McCain, “The New Abnormal,” The American Spectator, July 31, 2013

Mike Huckabee gave a speech yesterday at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting that has been treated as scandalously controversial. Chris Moody of Yahoo News provided the full context of Huckabee’s remarks:

“I think it’s time for Republicans to no longer accept listening to Democrats talk about a war on women. Because the fact is, the Republicans don’t have a war on women. They have a war for women. For them to be empowered; to be something other than victims of their gender.
“Women I know are outraged that Democrats think that women are nothing more than helpless and hopeless creatures whose only goal in life is to have a government provide for them birth control medication.
“Women I know are smart, educated, intelligent, capable of doing anything anyone else can do. Our party stands for the recognition of the equality of women and the capacity of women. That’s not a war on women, it’s a war for them. And if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government, then so be it — let’s take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than Democrats have made them to be. And women across America have to stand up and say, enough of that nonsense.”

Huckabee’s use of the word “libido” — a quaintly Freudian term for “sex drive” — was the specific button-pusher here, but let’s face reality: No one can say anything about women that deviates from Official Feminist Dogma without committing Thought Crime and, because Democrats control the terms of what is accepted as Official Feminist Dogma, the Thought Police are always more vigilant in scrutinizing Republicans for deviations from the script. Allahpundit:

Does it really matter what he said? The liberal thought process on this works this way, I think: “Known social conservative + something about women + something about sex and birth control = outrage.” Right? It’s basically Pavlovian.

Allah links Ace’s rant against social conservatives:

The elevation of strictly personal decisions . . . into a major political issue is childish and tribalist.
Yes we all have a preferred mode of living. News at 11. The law is not about preferred modes of living, and neither should we make “political issues” about it.

The problem, of course, is that it was feminists and their Democrat allies who decided that “the personal is political,” so that radical messages about How We Should Live are the constant theme of propaganda from the news media, Hollywood and academia.

Children are being indoctrinated in public schools, at taxpayer expense, about How We Should Live. If you are a parent who doesn’t want your daughters living the Disney Starlet Lifestyle — or if you don’t want your sons performing in “bareback orgy” videoswho is on your side?

Well, certainly not the Republican Party, I guess, because if any Republican so much as mentions the Culture War nowadays, he or she will be denounced not only by the Left, but also by conservative pundits who insist that the GOP must cede the field to Democrats on social issues and never say a word about how The Pervert Party benefits from America’s descent into decadence.

This position of pre-emptive surrender in the Culture War seems to have begun in 1992, when the GOP ran for cover rather than to defend Dan Quayle’s critique of “Murphy Brown.” It seems to have escaped the notice of most Republicans when, a year after that controversy, Dr. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead declared in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, “Dan Quayle Was Right.”

Whitehead developed that article into a fascinating book, The Divorce Culture, but apparently I’m the only conservative blogger who read that book, because I never see Ace or Allah or anyone else acknowledge Whitehead’s critique of the “Love Family” ideology which “liberates sexual, compassionate, and parental love from its institutional and cultural moorings in marriage.” For that matter, have you ever seen any conservative blogger mention Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism or Dana Mack’s The Assault on Parenthood?

My point is that social conservatism is more intellectually respectable than most people imagine, but for 20 years, those who are serious about fighting the Culture War have been shunted aside and told to be quiet, lest they cause Republicans to lose elections.

Oddly, however, the GOP’s active suppression of social conservatism has not translated to Republican electoral dominance. The nomination of John McCain — whose profound contempt for social conservatives is no secret — did not produce a GOP triumph, nor was the Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney able to dodge the remarkably counterfactual Democrat propaganda that painted him as an extremist Trojan Horse, an agent of the Republican Taliban.

The fundamental problem here is probably too large to be reduced to a blog post, and I’m not in a mood to tackle the whole problem today, but let’s say this: Systemic incentives encourage conservative writers to devote themselves to the day-to-day political headlines, and to identify as “important” only those issues which directly and immediately affect the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, liberals — who comprise 80%-90% of journalists and academics — are writing about Everything Else, including sexuality, marriage and parenthood. So it is that, outside of whatever issues bear directly on the daily R-vs.-D political battle, nearly everything you read is written by liberals. This explains how the cultural “mainstream” is dragged steadily leftward, and most people don’t even notice the shift until Phil Robertson creates a firestorm by quoting the Bible, or one day you click an Internet link and find people arguing that high-school boys getting bareback butt-humped in porn videos is no cause for concern.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, says Glenn Beck.

Almost unnoticed, a posture of enlightened non-judgmentalism has become compulsory, because liberal dominance of the intelligentsia means that nearly every articulate person has been indoctrinated in the Egalitarian Orthodoxy, and no critic of the Left’s social agenda has access to a vocabulary of rational dissent.

One afternoon last August, I found myself amid a crowd of feminists marching down the street and chanting about rape, and I was denounced as a misogynist for noticing that several of the marchers were displaying their bare breasts during this political parade.

“Nice tits” is now hate speech, even if the aforesaid tits are brandished naked in broad daylight in downtown D.C. By the same token, a Republican may not suggest a connection between “libido” and the demand for taxpayer-funded contraception.

What we are witnessing is the abolition of common sense and its replacement by a political ideology. Common sense tells us that it is unusual — indeed, the word abnormal is appropriate — for women to parade bare-breasted through the streets. Common sense likewise tells us that the Contraceptive Culture is directly related to the prevalence of licentiousness and promiscuity in society.

Has it been only 10 years since Lawrence v. Texas? Has it been only 15 years since Nina Burleigh said she would cheerfully give Bill Clinton a blow job to thank him for keeping abortion legal?

Am I the only one who has noticed how rapidly the “Emerging Awareness” doctrine has gained a death-grip on our culture?

Huckabee’s use of the word “libido” caught my attention for reasons entirely different than the reasons that made him the object of a leftist Two-Minute Hate. Huckabee is 58 years old. He graduated from Ouchita State University in the mid-1970s, and is therefore old enough to remember when Freudian ideas about “libido” were entirely respectable. Nowadays, Freud’s categories are mocked as obsolete, and neurobiology is made to explain what was once attributed to “Oedipal complexes,” repressed impulses and so forth. Whatever way you are, we’re now told, you were Born That Way, and never mind if this biological determinism is vaguely redolent of Nazi race doctrine.

This is Science with a capital “s,” and Progress with a capital “p,” and no enlightened person is ever supposed to question whether today’s ideas of Scientific Progress are really any more valid than the discarded ideas of yesterday’s Scientific Progress.

Lost somewhere in all this is the old-fashioned understanding that humans are creatures of habit, and that if one gets into the habit of indulging certain unruly appetites, those habits may become the shackles of lifelong slavery, impairing the individual’s capacity for happiness, and inflicting various forms of misery on society at large.

Where did Kathryn Camille Murray get the idea that having sex with a 15-year-old boy was a pleasant and harmless amusement?

Perhaps the answer is to be found somewhere among the penumbras and emanations where Justice Douglas found a “right to privacy” in Griswold v. Connecticut, a few decades before Justice Kennedy invoked the hitherto unknown doctrine of “emerging awareness” in striking down the Texas sodomy statute. And who knows whither the emerging awareness shall henceforth emerge?

 

 


Comments

108 Responses to “‘Helpless and Hopeless Creatures’”

  1. Finrod Felagund
    January 24th, 2014 @ 7:45 pm

    I can’t agree with that. We can’t permanently write off 10 percent of the population if we want to be a majority party. That doesn’t mean that we change who we are or what we fight for, but we do need to be aware of how we present it. Emphasizing social conservatism to the black community can be part of that.

  2. La Pucelle
    January 24th, 2014 @ 7:46 pm

    I’ve always been “uncool”. It’s rather liberating not to be a slave to peer pressure or inane fads.

  3. Finrod Felagund
    January 24th, 2014 @ 7:47 pm

    Bush 41 spit in the face of fiscal conservatives with “Read my lips, no new taxes”. That’s why he lost in 1992.

  4. Finrod Felagund
    January 24th, 2014 @ 7:47 pm

    Bush 41 spit in the face of fiscal conservatives with “Read my lips, no new taxes”. That’s why he lost in 1992.

  5. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    January 24th, 2014 @ 8:07 pm

    The point is for the GOP to fight back. Yes to get the White House and Senate. And yes to disgracing the Democrats who have done so much harm to the country.

  6. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    January 24th, 2014 @ 8:07 pm

    The point is for the GOP to fight back. Yes to get the White House and Senate. And yes to disgracing the Democrats who have done so much harm to the country.

  7. Quartermaster
    January 24th, 2014 @ 8:22 pm

    As long as they are promulgating lies in their churches, you will not recruit them. They won’t listen because the lies are too attractive to them. We don’t have to write them off, they have done that themselves.

  8. Bob Belvedere
    January 24th, 2014 @ 8:53 pm

    Brilliant.

  9. Bob Belvedere
    January 24th, 2014 @ 8:53 pm

    Brilliant.

  10. Bob Belvedere
    January 24th, 2014 @ 8:57 pm

    Spoken like a true Nihilist.

    You’re free to live in your Libertine misery, but I would advise you not to continue to try to drag the rest of us down into you Hell On Earth – especially those of us who are armed.

  11. Bob Belvedere
    January 24th, 2014 @ 9:00 pm

    You read my mind, QM.

  12. DaveO
    January 24th, 2014 @ 9:16 pm

    Don’t disagree with you. Bush-41 believed the SoCons would suck up the taxes because they had no place else to go. So they stayed home.

  13. Oiko11
    January 24th, 2014 @ 10:11 pm

    What is the conservative obsession with birth control? It’s completely demented! are you telling me that not a single conservative couple uses birth control and only has sex to make babies? Really? The problem is you know you’re wrong, and have been since the 60s’, but and wont admit because you cant stand that you were wrong and the liberals were right. And come on…”contraception culture”? LOLOLOL! Come back to reality, dummy.

  14. Oiko111
    January 24th, 2014 @ 10:13 pm

    He’s a metrosexual because he want’s to have a healthy and fun sex life and doesnt believe sex is only for baby making? Then you’re better off a metrosexual. GROW UP.

  15. Oiko1
    January 24th, 2014 @ 10:19 pm

    The history of drug prohibition has racist roots and was designed to destroy minorities and other “undesirables”. FACT. The United States was founded on a bedrock of racism from the extermination of the American Indian, to slavery, to Jim Crow, to he disproportionate amount of minorities locked in prison and targeted by law enforcement.

  16. I’m A Woman And Nothing Mike Huckabee Said Offended Me | The Lonely Conservative
    January 24th, 2014 @ 10:29 pm

    […] Huckabee is taking all kinds of heat for his remarks to RNC members this week. Via The Other McCain and Yahoo News, here is the direct […]

  17. JeffS
    January 24th, 2014 @ 10:43 pm

    People can use all the birth control they want to.

    BUT DON’T EXPECT ME TO PAY THEIR BILLS.

    Is that clear enough, asshat?

  18. Oiko11
    January 24th, 2014 @ 10:56 pm

    No, asshat, and i don’t believe for a second that your only opposition to birth control is whether or not the government is paying for it. The right has opposed birth control for decades and long before Obamacare and state subsidies. This article claims there’s this thing called “Contraception Culture” which is another way of saying America has too much sex which makes us weak and feminists and birth control make it so. It also violates your religious beliefs.

  19. RS
    January 24th, 2014 @ 11:04 pm

    This comment is predicated upon a deliberate misreading of both RSM’s post and Huckabee’s remarks. Easy to win an argument when you’re arguing with yourself.

  20. richard mcenroe
    January 24th, 2014 @ 11:04 pm

    I’d have to forget too much life to dumb far enough down for “cool” these days.

  21. darleenclick
    January 25th, 2014 @ 12:00 am

    Hey, twatwaffle, please cite your source that GOP put forward any anti-contraception legislation over the last 20 years.

    Maybe you should learn the difference between legislation and people giving OPINIONS (which you can accept or not) on how and why is the wisest course to follow.

    I’m SO up to here with deliberate bad faith bleats from Left cultists.

  22. Oiko
    January 25th, 2014 @ 12:14 am

    I didn’t say you put any actual legislation forward you silly twat, but your stance on birth control is clear: it’s bad, even though you’re all probably using it. What’s hard to fathom is WHY you have an issue with one of the most pragmatic, and liberating inventions of the 20th century? Your bs herd morals? Look, the Christian epoch and all the accompanying sexual mores are over. Yeah, it seems like you’re still fighting a war over this, but you’ve completely lost, and in a few decades there wont be a mention of something as silly as an opposition to birth control. And you’re up to here with leftists? That;s nice, but Im not a leftist and im beyond sick of social conservatives.

  23. Oiko
    January 25th, 2014 @ 12:24 am

    Well, there’s passive nihilism where you simply lament your sorry state of affairs and believe life is a sick joke, and then there’s active nihilism where you realize you have the ability to do as you please and you act accordingly. Im the latter type. I’m not dragging you down. You simply need to liberate your slave mind. It was inevitable that the Christian era, or the age of Osiris or Pisces if you will, would die and give way to the new age, and an erotic, creative, beautiful culture, free of Christian repression. I understand this frightens you, but there’s nothing to be scared of. All we have to fear is fear itself!

  24. Cube
    January 25th, 2014 @ 12:38 am

    THIS!. Now if only a candidate were smart enough to offer RSM the job. That whole “writing for money thing”, y’know.

  25. anon
    January 25th, 2014 @ 12:42 am

    Go away.

  26. Elena
    January 25th, 2014 @ 12:47 am

    I can’t believe I have to say this…but calling someone a twat doesn’t make women..or anybody…want to listen to you.

  27. oiko11
    January 25th, 2014 @ 12:59 am

    Did you not read her comment? She called me a twatwaffle. I simply returned the favor.

  28. darleenclick
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:12 am

    Are you 13 or just congenitally stuck in your own juvenile “now”? Western Civilization is not based on Eastern mysticism nor druids nor pre-Columbian fertility gods. Judeo-Christian ethics, morality & principles are foundational and if you claim to have “evolved” away from them, then you’re tossing out a future with America in it.

    Move to dying Europe, poltroon.

  29. Zohydro
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:14 am

    +1 for “poltroon”

  30. darleenclick
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:15 am

    You eschew personal responsibility and the principles inherent in that phrase. Leaves you to being either a collectivist or nihilist. Misanthrope either way.

  31. Zohydro
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:23 am

    I am absolutely fascinated with this Cultural Marxism and Emerging Awareness™ stuff… I consider these things a much belated part of my political edification, and I’ve learnt a great deal about them here at TOM…

    Today’s article is another piece of genius from RSM, but the comments tonight have devolved into an intersectional catfight pivoting on matters of ideological purity! It’s disturbing…

  32. Oiko11
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:38 am

    I eschew personal responsibility by having sex for some other reason beyond pro-creation? Christianity is nothing more than mythology and the historical Christ is not in any way like his modern incarnation.

  33. Oiko11
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:40 am

    Yeah, and what you have come to believe is “western civilization” is over. I dont need to move to europe. We’re adopting their mores and tossing the puritanism that they tossed a few hundred years ago.

  34. Oiko11Oiko11Oiko11Oiko11
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:46 am

    You never answered about what your opposition to birth control is really about.

  35. darleenclick
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:47 am

    You’re a deliberately ignorant bigot. And you have the chutzpah to attempt to lecture on what the “real” Jesus was?

    #blessyourheart

  36. NeoWayland
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:47 am

    Stars above, you want to take on their sexual ethics, their politics, and their religion at the same time?

    It seems to me you might want to choose your battles…

  37. Oiko111
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:50 am

    There was no divine Jesus. he was a Jewish nationalist who sought to push Rome out of his homeland. That’s it. Oiko11The rest is just a Hellenic version of his story which painted him as a god man no different from Dionysus or Osiris.

  38. darleenclick
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:50 am

    I have never had an objection to birth control. That’s like having an objection to cars.

    But I would object to a school handing over car keys to my 12 y/o without my knowledge and I wouldn’t want my tax dollars going to give everyone a “free” car because ENTITLEMENT.

  39. Oiko111
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:51 am

    LOL! Good point.

  40. darleenclick
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:51 am

    You’re entitled to your opinion and I’m entitled to be laughing at you.

  41. darleenclick
    January 25th, 2014 @ 1:53 am

    Yeah, EU has tossed a lot of it (including the being responsible for oneself) and they are dying out. As in not reproducing. As in having given up on their own future.

  42. Adjoran
    January 25th, 2014 @ 3:20 am

    No, you idiot, he’s a metrosexual because he moisturizes and talks about his freaking feelings.

  43. ‘Helpless and Hopeless Creatures’ : The Other McCain | Dead Citizen's Rights Society
    January 25th, 2014 @ 5:45 am

    […] ‘Helpless and Hopeless Creatures’ : The Other McCain. […]

  44. DaveO
    January 25th, 2014 @ 9:49 am

    The GOP has no Pattons. Half of them can’t sort whether Custer had the right of it, or should they emulate Benjamin Lincoln.

  45. rmnixondeceased
    January 25th, 2014 @ 10:21 am

    Heh.

  46. rmnixondeceased
    January 25th, 2014 @ 10:26 am

    and i don’t believe for a second that your only opposition to birth control is whether or not the government is paying for it.
    The problem is that you think ‘government’ pays for anything. The taxpayers do the paying, not the government. The government produces nothing, only consumes the resources of her citizen taxpayers (who both in actual numbers and in percentage are rapidly declining). Your failure in cognition of reality is noted, all future comments safely ignored as the rantings of an uneducated and willfully ignorant naked ape.

  47. rmnixondeceased
    January 25th, 2014 @ 10:30 am

    Heh. He’ll be moving somewhere a bit warmer than where I am in Purgatory …

  48. rmnixondeceased
    January 25th, 2014 @ 10:34 am

    Give Darleen an extra +1 for “twatwaffle”, a favorite of mine and a derivation of the English slang usage (i.e., “Oi me old twat, cheers!”, a phrase shared between friends and not to be confused with the Aussie “Oi me old c*nt” another affectionate slang phrase).

  49. rmnixondeceased
    January 25th, 2014 @ 10:37 am

    BTDT, grew up.

  50. rmnixondeceased
    January 25th, 2014 @ 10:43 am

    A believing and practising Christian is required to stand forth as a bastion against sin. Thus any who would proclaim themselves as a Christian and does not condemn sin is a faux Christian. This is not my interpretation nor am I judging anyone as that is God’s purview, not mine. However, I discern as I am required to according to God’s Word.