One of the most divisive issues in American politics is the legal and cultural status of citizens identifying as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender).
These terms, which have both assumed the status of legal determinants of benefits and advantages, or disadvantages, in practice and policy, are remarkably unscientific and even subject to abrupt change depending on the subjective experience of the individual.
Although there is clearly much suffering that results from misunderstandings of those who are sexually confused, this is state as much resulting from the bombardment of citizens from childhood by sexualized media content designed to stimulate consumer needs and shape behavior to match the needs of corporations, as from personal choice or inborn tendencies. That is to say that LGBT as an identity issue created from a combination of real needs and concerns with an induced and created culture and environment, is fundamentally different than previous issues of racial or gender based discrimination.
What is clear is that the sexual identities of gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals display tremendous variation that defies legal definitions, and that at the same time, there is still very little understanding of a scientific nature concerning these tendencies and traits. Transgender falls in an entirely different category and the connection of this term with actual human behavior and culture is far from clear to start with—as we will discuss later.
Public intellectuals and the commercialized media have lumped the discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender together under the rubric LGBT and made it a hot topic that is used to promote various politicians of the left and the right—making it more of a political tool than a humanitarian cause.
Not only has the divide between traditional progressive and conservative groups in the United States been deepened by the debate on LGBT issues in the mass media, but the issue has also served to divide the left (progressives) between those who see the issue as critical to creating a more equitable society, and those who see obsession with gender as a distraction from traditional (leftist) concerns with class and capital.
It does not take a rocket scientist to see that the splits between the left and the right, and between different factions of the left, that were created by this LGBT debate are just what the doctor ordered for billionaires and the managers of trusts, private equity firms, and investment banks who will do literally anything, and pay any price, to make sure that citizens are fighting each other over culture and identity issues, and not rallying together in response to the class warfare of the very few against all of humanity.
As independent candidate for president, and also as candidate for the nomination of the Green Party US, I was warned repeatedly to stay away from the tar baby of LGBT which threatens to take down any well-meaning soul in politics who tries to trim its tentacles.
But just as Martin Luther King Jr. came to the conclusion that he could not separate the fight for civil rights from the opposition to the Vietnam War, as best represented by his historic speech “Beyond Vietnam,” I also have concluded that we must take LGBT by the horns and expose what is real and what is exaggerated, or even fabricated, for political purposes and for the manipulation of the population.
Let us start at the beginning. The United States of America was launched, imperfectly, as an experiment, a constitutional republic that had no king, monarchy, or nobility, and also was not controlled by the Catholic Church, or other religious authority. That step forward in political evolution was unprecedented and it influenced the course of reforms thereafter such as the French Revolution, the German revolutions of the 1840s, the Paris Commune, the Korean and Vietnamese independence movements, and beyond, down to the present day.
We did not get the American Revolution, and our Constitution, entirely right, however. There were powerful forces who supported slavery, and who wanted the United States to be part of a global finance and trade system linked to the British Empire and its imperialist agenda.
Although true equality was a goal for many involved in the founding of the nation, there were also those with fingers in that American project who wished to subvert the best of the Declaration of Independence, or to render these powerful legal foundations for civil rights as dead words to be locked up in libraries or museums.
The three major struggles to achieve the potential for freedom and equality that was buried in the founding documents, but not fully realized, were the battle to end slavery and to give African Americans their full civil rights in accord with the Constitution (to read the Constitution as it was written, and not as it was interpreted by the landlords of plantations), the battle to defend the rights of native peoples, and the battle to give women the full rights.
These three battles, which go on to this day, have come to be accepted as legitimate extensions of the spirit of the Constitution. In the historical process of realizing these three ideals, however, those fighting for the three causes were not always on the same page. Some who opposed slavery and upheld civil rights for African Americans, were not interested in similar rights for native Americans, and some were opposed to equal rights for women. Some who fought for equal rights for women did not support civil rights for African Americans. To this day, the cause of the native peoples of the United States is a cause overlooked by many of those who wrap themselves in the flag of justice for minorities. For example, many who advocate for reparations for African Americans are silent on the cause of reparations for Native Americans.
In the 1950s and 1960s, however, in part because of the harsh criticism of the United States that was offered by the Soviet Union and that threatened to discredit the entire American project on a global scale, the partial strides made to bring equal rights to African Americans and women over the previous two centuries were taken up in mainstream politics to an unprecedented degree and tremendous strides were made.
Civil rights for African Americans became common sense, even if imperfectly realized. Many habits of discrimination against women were no longer acceptable—even if not explicitly made illegal.
It seemed that America had been permanently transformed in the 1970s and 1980s. Tragically, we would learn later, the move to detach racial and ethnic identity from fundamental issues of class and assets, the economic oppression of so many citizens, resulted in the growth of a banal and disempowered identity politics swamp that drowned many a well-intentioned soul.
The 1980s was the period in which the move for gay rights started in earnest to go mainstream and we started walking down the path towards LGBT politics.
The debate on homosexuality began with the opposition of homosexuals (later to be called gay or lesbian) against the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association between 1952 and 1973. That struggle in the 1970s clearly has commonalities with the fight for civil rights and women’s rights. The cause was entirely legitimate. It was questionable for the medical establishment to call a preference, or identity, that had precedents dating back to ancient times and that did not have relationship to mental illness, a “mental disorder.”
That effort to change the status of sexual orientation led to a battle to end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace, in society, and in legal status.
The move to assure basic civil rights to all citizens, and not to use a personal, a private, preference or identity as the basis for discrimination, had a solid argument to support it.
Gay Marriage as the Turning Point
The next step in this political evolution was the fight for gay marriage. That fight was a global one, not merely American, and it was complex in its ramifications.
Image: Newly married couple in Minnesota shortly after the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States, 2015 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
The move to institutionalize gay marriage was without any doubt a turning point in world history. The Netherlands was the first country to legalize same-sex marriages in 2001. In 2007, Vermont was the first state in the United States to approve same-sex marriages.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that same-sex marriage was federally legal, overruling the restrictions and prohibitions on gay marriage of individual states—although the battle still continues.
Although many saw the legal status granted to same-sex marriage as a sign of greater human advancement, achieving justice in the tradition of the civil rights movement, there were problematic aspects of this legal development that were understated at the time.
One can draw a historical lineage in which same-sex marriage is the natural consequence of the drive for civil rights, for women’s rights, and for a more equitable and inclusive society.
One can also, however, make an equally convincing argument that same-sex marriage is a fundamentally different issue from civil rights and women’s rights. Whereas rights for minorities and for women, have clear precedents in human history, from ancient times, and the ethical reasoning for such reforms are is well supported, same-sex marriage as an institution approved by government is essentially unprecedented in human history.
Moreover, same sex marriage goes against certain foundational assumptions for human society that are universal across civilizations. That is to say that the basic unit of society is the family, which serves as a model for government and civil society, and the foundation of the family, and the extended family, is marriage between a man and a woman—often with the intention to create a family.
To institutionalize same-sex marriage is to form a clear break with the fundamental accepted norms in human civilization, a break that could have profoundly destabilizing impact on society as a whole, even if the individual marriage between two loving individuals seemed entirely positive and nurturing.
The decision to dismiss all those who raised doubts about same-sex marriage, or who suggested that civil union could be used to create an economic partnership without changing the definition of marriage, as reactionary and right-wing was a mistake.
Let us remember that the leaders of the campaigns for civil rights and women’s rights in the 19th and 20th century would most certainly not have approved of same-sex marriage, and they would not have seen it as a natural extension of their quest for justice. Martin Luther King, or Malcom X would most have been deeply opposed to something that so threatened their view of marriage as the bedrock of society.
There was no trace of a move for same sex marriage to be found in any of the painful struggles to obtain equal rights for blacks, or women.
The failure of progressives, and the left, to address the serious implications of the push for same-sex marriage has deeply undermined their cause, much in the same way that their cowardice in addressing the 9/11 incident, the COVID-19 operation, and the Federal Reserve counterfeiting regime has completely undermined their moral imperative today.
One need only to look at the socialist and communist teachings of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, or other socialist nations at their peak in the 1950s and 1960s to see that their opposition to imperialism and capitalism had absolutely nothing to do with gay marriage or the promotion of an alternative gay lifestyle. A healthy, monogamous, and straight family was the model for socialist nations. If anything, gay rights was considered as a form of Western decadence (fairly or unfairly) in socialist countries.
The traditional left in the West as well, with rare exceptions, was focused on class inequity and spoke out clearly against moral corruption and cultural decadence, from Eugene Debs, to Vladimir Lenin, to Rosa Luxembourg, not gay rights and gay marriage.
The current “left” is not left in the traditional sense at all. It may pick up a bit of the cultural indulgence popular in the Weimar Republic, but for the most part it is blind to the concern for cultural and institutional decay, moral decay. In the place of a concern with decadence has come the glorification of ethnic and sexual identity, often forming a hidden parallel with the indulgence and consumption of a corrupted political economy in the United States.
I found myself out all alone among my colleagues when I first questioned the concept of same-sex marriage in my writings from the 1990s. The topic was shibboleth; and yet I was far from a traditional conservative.
There is an argument that can be made that discrimination for sexual practices is a violation of the constitution, and that equality must extend to marriage. But the Constitution, and the entire legal system based around it assumes marriage to be between men and women.
To overturn such a definition of marriage opens the gates to various demons of which well-meaning progressives were not even aware of.
But today we are led to celebrate women, Hispanics, and African Americans who are rich and famous, who are CEOs of exploitative multinational corporations, or who are generals charged with leading imperialist wars. The moral imperative has been gravely diluted.
The result has been identity politics in which people are judged for their ethnic zoology, or their sexual identity, and the fact that they come from privileged families, are CEOs of banks and corporations that promote wars and pornography, is no longer important.
Class and decadence are not topics of concern.
The Transgender Agenda
The final stage in the decay of the angel was the introduction of the transgender challenge which now is a core issue in the LGBT agenda.
Image: The Transgender Pride flag was designed by Monica Helms, and was first shown at a pride parade in Phoenix, Arizona, USA in 2000. (From the Public Domain)
It is important to note that transgender as social, cultural, political and military phenomenon is complex and multilayered, and what we see today is an interference pattern resulting from multiple hidden factors.
First and foremost, we must recognize that the proliferation of identity politics and the obsession with a racial and ethnic diversity, is directly linked to the intentional ignorance of social and economic inequality in a society that is facing the greatest concentration of wealth in its history. The feeble and indulgent left, in part because of its intellectual collapse in the 1980s, and in part because it is infiltrated with operators for the banks and multinational corporations paying bribes to public intellectuals, is incapable of addressing class issues at all, true global finance, let alone cultural decadence.
The only forces in America who take those critical issues for the traditional left seriously are on the far right, not the contemporary left.
Traditional historians, socialists and Marxists, philosophers and poets from ancient times have recognized that decadence is a serious problem in any civilization, and can bring an empire like the United States to its knees. And yet the self-appointed left, with all the support from hidden partners, assumes that there can be no such thing as decadence and cultural decay, only racism and intolerance of different, equally valuable, ethnicities and lifestyles.
The millionaires and billionaires, and their banks and corporations, were profoundly aware of the dangers resulting from economic disparity in America from the 1990s, and their consultants offered advice as to how to breakdown and to defuse the anger and frustration of citizens so as to be certain that no organized and motivated opposition to the rule by the rich emerged, and that there emerged no effective leadership offering an alternative—other than just complaining.
The rich, whether using government agencies, or corporate research institutes, conducted much classified research from 1960s on concerning how to distract, confuse, and misdirect opposition to financial monopoly. The solutions offered were a mass media intended to dumb down the population, and create dependency and addictions to certain forms of stimulation, as well as the promotion of cultural identity, over class and economic issues, as a topic for debate.
The shift in thinking meant government should help people because they were from certain ethnic groups, rather than because they were economically disadvantaged. Such policies led to an inevitable battle with poor whites who observed the pampering of ethnic minorities in a series of high-profile incidents, and were rightfully incensed.
Cultural identity politics is an ideal way to keep the working people of the United States from coming together. In a sense, the cultural identity politics served much like Jim Crow to create unnecessary antagonism between working people that served the rich well.
Thus, behind the curtains from the 1990s, but especially in the last decade, a variety of private foundations, Homeland Security operatives, and other invisible players started to fund, and to encourage, the growth of identity politics at the university, and in the media precisely to keep the country from focusing on, and coming together on, financial monopoly and rule by the banks.
I would go so far as to say that the banks, perhaps working through think tanks and private intelligence agencies, poured money into making ethnic identity, and then gay/lesbian identity, the major source of conflict.
The growth of identity politics operatives receiving payments from Homeland Security, or Booz Allen Hamilton and CASI, is difficult to calculate, but the manner in which certain identity politics players suddenly took over large parts of the Democratic Party or Green Party suggests that there was lots of money to be had.
The final consequence was the launch of the transgender cultural movement, identity movement, and disinformation operation of Homeland Security.
You might say that transgender is the identity politics equivalent of COVID-19. If Covid-19 was a massive psychological manipulation meant to turn the common cold and influenza into a horrific plague using classic hypnosis and propaganda techniques, transgender was an operation to use an obscure condition as a means of creating completely unnecessary social conflicts through propaganda campaigns and blatant assaults on the rule of law and science that were meant to alienate large parts of the population and make it impossible for citizens to unite against the super-rich.
There is such a thing as gender dysphoria and this tragic disorder, which is poorly understood originally affected less than 0.01 percent of the population, and almost always boys suffered from it.
But then suddenly, just as wealth was concentrated to an unprecedented degree, just as influenza was renamed COVID and became the Black Death, media campaigns, government and corporate campaigns, and the unabashed collaboration by academics and doctors, made it possible for the United States to witness a rise of more than 1,000 percent in those who claim to suffer from this gender dysphoria, increasingly including girls/women.
Moreover, suddenly the government and corporations were pushing gender treatments using hormones and disfiguring surgery for “transgender” conditions. The condition was no longer a disorder, but the equivalent of an ethnicity that demanded equal rights.
Of course, many of the so-called conservatives in the political realm who correctly denounce the misuse of the new term “transgender” to allow men to compete in women’s sports, and even use women’s restrooms if they feel like a woman, are also corrupt. They take as much cash from Homeland Security disinformation programs as do the fake leftists. Their dishonest explanations are part of the operation.
When the conservatives blame all this chaos in the United States on a “radical left” and ignore the obvious signs that this identity politics is part of a divide and conquer strategy funded by the rich, they are not helping matters.
The current efforts to resist the promotion of transgender ideology and fake medical practices is intentionally outsourced to the most reactionary forces in the nation, those that support militarism, xenophobia, and law-and-order campaigns to weaponize the judicial system.
The decision of the Texas Supreme Court to uphold the ban on transgender hormones and surgery for children is a perfect example of this trend. Of course, conservatives are opposed to this sort of gender manipulation. But so are many other Americans. The more likely explanation for why Texas took this stand is not that conservatives are more honest, but rather that courts in regions deemed as “progressive” by the masters of the universe, are simply not allowed to address this psychological operation—and only conservatives can do so in order to keep the population properly divided.
The New York Times, which falsely represents progressives in America, stated,
“The Texas Supreme Court upheld a state law on Friday that bans gender-transition medical treatment for minors, overturning a lower-court ruling that had temporarily blocked the law and dealing a blow to parents of transgender children.”
Much like the Covid-19 campaign embraced by the New York Times, the transgender operation has also assumed a similar trajectory.
This is no accident.
The embrace of transgender ideology is often combined with the embrace of the COVID-19 fraud on the left, with the prominent leftists being paid off to embrace both. The purpose of this operation is to alienate conservatives unnecessarily, and to keep leftists from considering that there might be some agenda behind gender politics. Many thoughtful leftists have proven to be remarkably cowardly on this point.
At the same time, we must be sympathetic with young people who feel that they are somehow “transgender.” Many of these youth are not the pay-to-play operatives who beat women at women’s sports as a way of creating culture wars to avoid class wars. Rather they are the innocent victims of culture and media operations around them that every day suggest that this new trans culture (sometimes reenforced by statements from their schools, or their local governments) is natural, even cool.
Granted the confusion that youth face through in any case, not to mention the stress resulting from living in a corrupt and decadent society, it is no wonder that many of them embrace trans culture, or even magical wear masks against the mythical COVID-19 demons. We are looking at the overlap of a decayed culture, a degraded scientific and intellectual environment,t and a motivated and focused campaign to undermine solidarity among citizens using identity politics and sexuality for the sake of the rich.
Raising doubts about sexuality is a powerful way to undermine self-confidence, and self-sufficiency because identity itself is under attack—from an early age—through the promotion of androgenous images in mass media and the forced promotion of transgender ideology in schools. The gender confusion is a result both of the identity confusion and blurring of sexuality that is common to decaying civilizations and of actual Homeland Security operations with big funding from billionaires that are intended to target sexuality as a way of undermining identify for youth. The point is to create a passive narcissistic and self-centered youth incapable of organizing resistance to the takeover of society by the rich.
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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments.
Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: The Rainbow flag is the symbol of the LGBTQ+ community. (From the Public Domain)
