William F. Buckley, Jr., is dead, after poisoning the mainstream of American political thought for decades. You may think this has nothing to do with gays, but it does. Andrew Sullivan points out the connection:
He was much too civilized to have been personally hostile or rude. He published Marvin Liebman and David Brudnoy - and in his day, National Review was not as uniformly homophobic - or virtually Homorein - as it now is. But Buckley never challenged what he believed was a necessary moral and social injunction against gay love, marriage and sex. (In a heated debate with Gore Vidal, he responded to the vile accusation of being a Nazi by accusing Vidal of being a "goddamned queer." At least being a NAzi is a choice.) Gay men were allowed sex, as a function of a civilized society's benevolence, but only allowed. We were never to be regarded as equals, and our rights were always contingent on others' toleration.
Given Sullivan's normally flabby thinking, it's not surprising that he seems to want to excuse Buckley his hideous position on gay equality because he was "polite" about it. Of course, Buckley really wasn't much of a thinker himself. My favorite quote from him is the bald assertion I heard on a television broadcast sometime in the 1970s that "Morality is an absolute." I laughed about that one for days. Even the most casual acquaintance with the history of Western civilization will show it to be poppycock. This is not much better:
"You are absolutely correct in saying that gays should be welcome as partners in efforts to mint sound public policies; not correct, in my judgement, in concluding that such a partnership presupposes the repeal of convictions that are more, much more, than mere accretions of bigotry. You remain, always, my dear friend, and my brother in combat."
No one ever accused Buckley of being less than arrogant. Of course, those convictions really are nothing more than "accretions of bigotry." Just because you've been a bigot for a few hundred years doesn't mean you're any less of a bigot.
To my mind, the real conservative was Barry Goldwater, although his hawkishness repelled me. Buckley, by comparison, was simply a rigid reactionary. Here's Goldwater on the issue of gay equality:
"The Constitution says that all men are created equal, and it doesn't say that all men are created equal except for gays. Just like everyone else who is born in this country, gays are endowed by their creator, God, with inalienable rights, and among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Somehow, I find that much more palatable than the mean-spirited pontifications of Buckley. (Which, by the way, might have been the template for the contemporary attitude of Democrats: "Sure, you're welcome to join the fight and fund our efforts, but you're never going to be real people.")
Sullivan concludes:
Liebman was indeed a brother in combat, one of the great gay foes of totalitarianism, up there with Whittaker Chambers and Alan Turing. But he was always reminded that his gayness would bar him from full inclusion as an equal in the conservative movement. I wish that times had changed. But the stance remains - absent Buckley's grace and manners, and compounded now by the dark strains of fundamentalist bile.
I don't see how bile is any better for being sugar-coated. When it comes right down to it, Buckley was a small man who had a pernicious influence on American politics for far too long. The adulation is full-throated from the rightards, but keep in mind that Buckley is the man who epitomized the right wing's racism, homophobia, religious bigotry, isolationism, and exceptionalism.
Hardly praiseworthy.
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