The Death of Manliness
By Hans Zeiger (10/06/06)
Mark Foley is a sick man in a sick culture. He apparently was abused by a priest as a child, and then he, too, abused House pages (how extensively is uncertain) before it ruined him. By the way, as his attorney affirmed on Tuesday, Mark Foley "is a gay man."
Aside from the political tides generated by Foley's resignation, there are much larger cultural tsunamis swashing round.
The Foley scandal intensifies the strain on relationships between youth and adults. It is particularly damaging for relations between old men and young men, or between men and boys, or between young men and boys. Not only must we be concerned by the crusty old man getting too close with the delicate young lady, we must now be appalled by a male congressman who sets friendly terms with his male page. Where once a fraternal fellowship was revered in the rise and passage of generations, there is a gap. We must be suspect of a man who wishes to spend time with youth in our age, because he is likely out for abduction.
But why must we be suspicious of men in this age more than in others? Because related immediately to the problem between adults and youth is the problem of homosexuality.
When pedophilia became an insurance problem for the Boy Scouts of America two decades ago, the organization began to institute layers of regulations, including a requirement that two adult leaders be present at all troop activities. Adult leader background checks, sex abuse training programs, separate shower hours at Scout camps and separate tenting requirements were enacted and enforced.
The Boy Scouts insist that their policies banning homosexuals and their policies to prevent pedophilia are separate, but there is an evident link between homosexuality and pedophilia. When I made this claim on Penn and Teller's Showtime Network program, Penn Gillette shot back with a mountain of profanity, because there really can be no substantial answer to the charge.
Men who determine to have sex with other men find an easy target with boys. Homosexuality is a violation of natural law; there are no cultural regulations for it once the practice is made acceptable; boys in the process of solidifying their identity as men are vulnerable to sexual perversions of all sorts. In the absence of manliness – of strength, virtue, courage – men find open seasons for gratification, and then boys find an open route to Gomorrah, especially if that route is advertised enthusiastically by a conspiracy of cultural influences. The route then is a rout – from marriage, from family, from community, and not least from God.
Told by the homosexual activists that much of the population is of an alternative orientation, traditionally minded Americans often reply that the proportion is surely much smaller. But then we've taken the terms of the homosexual activists. In fact, there is no orientation but one, and there are no gender identities but two; men are meant to be men and women to be women. It is not merely that there are fewer persons of homosexual orientation, but that there are none. Homosexuality may well grow and expand if things continue as they have, not because closet doors are being flung, but because manliness is being flung.
Thus lies manhood perverted on the grounds of the nation. It knows no purpose. It cannot defend itself; it cannot defend the ladies. Uninstructed in beauty and maturity, it preys upon innocence and childhood. But it is castrated. The best it knows to do is to check itself, like Mark Foley, into a clinic in hopes of some recovery. Yet real manliness does not dwell within a rehab center, or in Congress, and just where it does dwell is now a challenge to know. The simple quiet of manliness is drowned by the metallic screams and the roars and the hideous emotive sighs of deranged wimps, if indeed it is manliness down there beneath it all.
If manliness is finished in America, America is finished. But if real men are still making their struggle toward the surface, it can't be long before manliness – heroic, honorable, bold – makes a comeback.
Hans Zeiger is author of Reagan’s Children: Taking Back the City on the Hill, and Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America. www.hanszeiger.net
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