By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
There is a group of my former students from the mid-1960s that is active on Facebook. I enjoy following their comments. Many of them — who are now senior citizens — post material that is not what I would have expected, judging from their teenage personas. Some former Bronx “tough guys” are now sensitive types, posting those uplifting pictures and comments about kittens and family life that can be downloaded on the Internet. Others have found religion and a fondness for favorite prayers and devotions to the saints; others an interest in patriotic themes and nostalgic pictures of old neighborhoods in New York City.
And there is one fellow who is now an ardent Bernie Sanders leftist. I remember him only vaguely, so I can’t say if he was a latent left-winger back then or went through a conversion sometime during his adult years. Whatever the explanation, you get the impression from his Facebook postings that he is an advocate for every cause that was championed on the bumper stickers pasted all over those hippy Volkswagen buses that could be found at rock concerts and folk music festivals back in the late 1960s.
He wants to save the whales, ban the bomb, split wood not atoms, make love not war, and legalize marijuana. Much of what he posts is taken from the Daily Kos, the website founded by Markos Moulitsas to promote “progressive causes.”
It is not surprising that my former student has added LGBTQ concerns to his list, even though he is a proud grandfather these days. His latest cause is transgender bathrooms; he mocks those who oppose the idea. One of his tactics is to post pictures of macho-looking former women, with crew cuts and weight lifter’s arms, with the question, “Do you want this person in the same bathroom with your young daughter?” Also pictures of former men who are now buxom blondes in earrings and mascara, asking, “Is this who you think should be in the boys’ locker room?”
It turns out that many homosexual activists are using this ploy. There is no reason to fall for it.
Let’s admit it at the outset that it is true that transvestites and transgendered people have always used the bathrooms of the sex they have adopted as their identity. (I was tempted to say, “The sex they are pretending to be,” but let’s not raise any more hackles than is necessary.) How would we know, one way or the other? I have never met anyone who peers over the top of the stalls to verify the physical characteristics of people in the restrooms with them. It has never been an issue. If they look male, they go to the men’s room; if they look like women, they go to the ladies’ room.
It is only an issue nowadays because homosexual activists have decided to make it an issue. The activists are not looking to protect the rights of those who are disguising the sex they were born with. They are trying to make a point; to get the rest of society to acquiesce, openly, publicly, and contritely, in what transgendered individuals have done to themselves by forcing a confrontation with societal norms about sexual identity.
The issue is not the muscular transgender with the crewcut and bulging biceps. It is the high school student whom everyone knew as John a week or two ago, who now calls himself “Joan” and who is demanding the right to change in the girls’ locker room, with nothing different about him other than his insistence that he is no longer what everyone knows he is.
“Joan” was using the boys’ locker room for years. He found a way to deal with it. His insistence that he now use the girls’ locker room is calculated to make a point. It is one that someone put him up to make.
Who is that someone? New Left deconstructionists or those shaped by their work. I am not claiming that every high school boy who wants to change in the girls’ locker room or wear a strapless dress to the prom has read Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Gramsci. He probably has never heard of these Marxist writers. It doesn’t matter. He has absorbed their message from the books, magazines, and films published and edited by their pop culture advocates.
That message is that every trace of propriety, purity, modesty, decency, and respectability in sexual matters must be “deconstructed” and seen as a “bourgeois” hang-up, imposed upon society by corporate powers to guarantee them reliable and compliant employees.
New Left Marxists adopted this tactic when they gave up on the hope that the working class, Marx’s “proletariat,” would serve as the street fighters in the revolution against capitalism. Working men and women frustrated the New Left deconstructionists by “selling out” to their capitalist overlords; they put American flags on their hard hats and stayed loyal to their patriotic instincts and religious convictions, in spite of the attempts of the Marxists to convert them to socialism, one-worldism, and atheism. Working men and women clung to their guns and religion.
So the New Left Marxists looked elsewhere in their effort to overthrow bourgeois capitalism: They turned their efforts to undermining — deconstructing — the moral and religious beliefs of the Christian West. Marx had taught them that these beliefs were the “opiate of the people,” a tool used by capitalists to deaden the revolutionary anger of the working class. With Marx’s words in mind, the New Left intellectuals concluded that bourgeois capitalism could not survive in a society with a citizenry that had abandoned its self-restraint in favor of sexual promiscuity and a destructive immersion in drugs and alcohol.
The New Left radicals have a point. All one has to do is look at the street people panhandling in our major cities. They live in search of drugs and sexual encounters far removed from the Christian idea of marriage. Transgender bathrooms make no difference to them. Whatever else they are, they are not going to be reliable employees. They are what Herbert Marcuse and the other Marxist deconstructionists were working to create through their writings and the classes they taught, a “lumpenproletariat” of societal dropouts who would make the capitalist order unsustainable if they became numerous enough.
The deconstructionists’ premise is sound: Self-governing free societies and free markets cannot endure without the moral codes that provide their foundation. Once those moral codes — such as the sense of decency that led to the creation of separate bathrooms and locker rooms for men and women — are undermined, an authoritarian government must be created to restore order.
The hope of the New Left deconstructionists is that that government will be a Marxist dictatorship. Whenever leftists maneuver to promote behavior that was once seen by society as degenerate, perverted, and debauched, they are working to achieve that end. It is a form of treason as contemptible as the Old Weather Underground planting bombs in our public places. Do they still make millstones?
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