PART 1 OF 2

June 2010 – Ideas have tremendous power. Ideas forged both the American Revolution and the Russian Revolution. They were the engine for Victorian morality as well as the sexual revolution. They led to breakthroughs curing numerous diseases and inventing nuclear weapons. Ideas create civilizations and tear them down.

That is why social conservatives often view with increasing alarm the kinds of ideas that are transforming the culture and politics of the United States. Rather than the traditional foundation of Judeo-Christian morality, a new foundation has been laid that has allowed an alternate reality to be constructed right before our very eyes.

That was clearly demonstrated recently by a controversy in a small town in north Mississippi, when a lesbian demanded that she be allowed to attend her high school prom on her own terms.

Constance McMillen, an 18-year-old senior at Itawamba Agricultural High School (IAHS) in Fulton, Mississippi, had been an “out of the closet” lesbian since the eighth grade. She approached school officials and said she wanted to attend the prom dressed in a tuxedo and in the company of her girlfriend. Since IAHS rules required gender-appropriate dress at the prom as well as opposite-sex dates, her request was denied. When McMillen contacted the ACLU, school officials apparently panicked and canceled the prom.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the school on behalf of the senior, arguing that McMillen’s First Amendment rights to free speech were violated. The suit asked a federal judge to issue an injunction and force the school to reinstate the prom and allow McMillen to attend, as she had originally wanted.

U.S. District Judge Glen H. Davidson ruled that McMillen’s rights had been violated but denied the injunction since a private prom was supposedly being offered to all students in place of the school-sanctioned event.

What is most troubling about the entire incident, however, is that McMillen’s demands, the judge’s ruling and even editorials in the local newspaper – the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal – clearly indicated that the presuppositions underlying the homosexual activist worldview have been accepted as fact. For many of these people, the debate is over.

This means that the pro-family movement’s goal of halting – or even slowing – the advance of the gay agenda becomes increasingly difficult. To succeed, groups like AFA have to first deconstruct the new humanistic foundation, lay again the biblical underpinnings, and then advance a traditional framework for understanding human sexuality, marriage and family. That’s a tall order.

How has that new humanistic foundation come about?

The triumph of hyper-individualism
Our country has always celebrated the individual and the freedom to pursue a personal vision of the good life. But that individualism always fit into the wider context of traditional morality.

The term hyper-individualism refers to an increasingly common belief that the needs and desires of the individual trump all other community concerns and any sense of shared values. When the views of the community infringe on the view of the individual, the community must yield.

As the controversy unfolded in north Mississippi, a Daily Journal editorial applauded Davidson’s ruling and argued that the controversy should end. “It’s time for IAHS students, teachers and administrators to be able to get on with the business of education minus the controversy and distractions of recent days.”

Of course, that is easier said than done when there are individuals who demand that everyone else alter their basic views of reality to conform to sexual radicalism and the homosexual movement. And that is what this was all about. While McMillen played the part of victim in this hullabaloo, this was about a single individual forcing an entire community to agree with her – or else.

That was made abundantly clear in Davidson’s ruling when he admitted that McMillen was out to make a point. “The record shows Constance has been openly gay since eighth grade, and she intended to communicate a message by wearing a tuxedo and to express her identity through attending prom with a same-sex date,” the judge said.

McMillen was “openly gay” for five years prior to the prom, and yet this lesbian student was consoled by many in the national media as if she had never before been able to express her sexual orientation?

Demands like the one made by the Daily Journal editorial to get back to educating kids are both irrational and naïve. Irrational because they ignore the fact that the school didn’t start the trouble that shifted the focus in the first place; naïve because they think simply ‘getting back to work’ is going to end the kind of trouble that radical activists and the predatory ACLU started.

And just what injustice existed at IAHS that caused McMillen to open fire on her school and classmates? Davidson stated that she wanted to communicate “her social and political views” on gender and sexuality.

The judge has it all wrong. It wasn’t that McMillen wasn’t allowed to express her social and political views. Instead, it was that the school, the majority of the student body and the community weren’t allowed to disagree.

It’s all about the individual’s right to bring the community to heel.

The triumph of self-expression
Since McMillen had apparently been allowed to publicize that she was a lesbian for five years, some might be puzzled that she felt muzzled. After all, what was left to tell?

Nothing, because this was not a matter of free speech but selfish self-expression. This was about McMillen making herself the center of attention on a night that everyone else wanted the same privilege. This was about forcing the entire world to shift on its axis and dance the McMillen two-step – accompanied by the exhilarating music of the ACLU band.

An editorial on the controversy by Daily Journal staff writer Patsy R. Brumfield focused on the issue of civil rights. “The school board’s job is to be about the education of our young people, not as The Social Police. Constance McMillen’s rights are all of our rights.”

Exactly what rights were violated? McMillen could have gone to the prom under the school’s regulations and told everyone there that she disagreed with those regulations. That would have been the appropriate exercise of her free speech rights. No one would have hauled her out to a waiting paddy wagon.

But that would have left the policy in place and that is what really grates on the nerves of homosexual radicals. They are offended that the school and community believe there are gender norms and a model of relationships that is based on nature’s design – and many would say God’s design – of humanity as male and female.

For activists, the proper response to a wider culture that refuses to see things the gay way involves self-expression – especially the confrontational variety that frustrates, shocks and, better yet, angers the community.

It is certainly true that many forms of self-expression have been viewed by the Supreme Court as connected to the First Amendment right of free speech. Wearing a T-shirt with a political symbol, for example, is constitutionally protected in most cases even though it is not technically speech.

But the court has also balanced self-expression with competing concerns. For example, a female student would not have been allowed to come to the prom in a bikini because schools have a right to require formal dress at certain events. In that case, even though a girl might have claimed she wanted to demonstrate her personal love for bare skin, the self-expression is trumped by a wider community claim.

However, there are those who seem to want self-expression to be given an almost unlimited right-of-way in our culture. As an outgrowth of the first point – the triumph of individualism – when the individual wants to express himself, the community must endure it.

In Portland, Maine, for example, about two dozen women marched topless in April on the sidewalk of a busy street on their way to a crowded park. Their reason? They wanted to draw attention to the cultural double standard that allows men to go out in public shirtless but not women.

While there is certainly plenty of room for a heated debate on the subject of cultural double standards, it is doubtful the Founding Fathers ever envisioned the right of free speech encompassing a semi-nude discourse.

For these narcissists, such a public temper tantrum is evidence that previous attempts to persuade the community to accept their argument by using mere speech have failed. Now the individual simply does as she wants, defending the actions as self-expression.

Incidentally, Ty McDowell, the woman who organized the Portland protest, told the media she was “enraged” at the number of men who ogled the women during and after the march – many of them snapping photos. Apparently a bunch of randy guys “expressing” their lusts by photographing the nudity freely offered on a sunny day by willing females was offensive. The irony is rich indeed.

The triumph of postmodernism
The soil in which hyper-individualism and unlimited self-expression grow is postmodernism. While not an easy term to define, postmodernism is essentially a denial of absolute truth. Everything “real” becomes the construct of the individual, and no one is allowed to deny the validity of that person’s experience.

Postmodernism sounds relatively harmless when it’s a lesbian who wants to wear a tuxedo to the prom and bring her girlfriend. What’s the big deal? Who is hurt by all of us pretending that two girls are the same as a boy and a girl? Shouldn’t McMillen be allowed to define reality for herself – and then shouldn’t the rest of us just go along?

The problem is that this is the overthrow of a foundational idea – the male-female model of humanity – and its replacement with a different, mutually exclusive concept. Such a thing has real-world consequences. If McMillen has the right to redefine gender roles when it comes to the prom, does another girl have the right to do so when it comes to using a boy’s restroom? How about if a transgender boy wanted to play on the girl’s basketball team? Aren’t these examples just as much a demonstration of self-expression as McMillen’s tuxedo is a manifestation of her sexual orientation?

Such battles are already occurring – and, in fact, occurred at IAHS at the beginning of the 2009 school year. That’s when Juin Baize enrolled after he, his mother and two sisters moved to the community from Indiana. At the time, Baize preferred to dress in women’s clothing.

When Baize came to school dressed as a girl on the first day of the fall semester, school officials sent him home. Repeating the effort the next day, Baize was suspended. His mother immediately withdrew her son from school and the family left Fulton. (In interviews, Baize now refers to himself as a male.)

The ACLU criticized IAHS officials in language very similar to that of the McMillen controversy. “Juin’s case was a situation where a transgender student wanted to attend school dressed in feminine clothing,” Kristy Bennett, legal director of the ACLU of Mississippi, told the media, “and the school district would not even let him attend school.”

Well, no, the school did not refuse to allow Baize to attend school; they refused to allow him to attend school dressed as a girl. The reason the ACLU sees that action as unreasonable is that if Juin Baize considers himself a girl, that settles the matter. To deny Baize the right to determine his own reality is the height of bigotry – at least if one follows the reactions on various gay Web sites.

This is the end result of postmodernism. If there is no absolute truth or reality, then there is no such thing as gender or gender roles. If there is no gender, then there is no appropriate dress code for either sex, and no right to segregate bathroom facilities according to an oppressive – and wrong-headed – community standard.

Without the triumph of hyper-individualism, unlimited self-expression and postmodernism, the juggernaut that is the gay rights movement would never have been able to fire up its engines. Homosexual activists are increasingly finding the American public sympathetic to their demands because Americans, by and large, have accepted the foundational principles underlying the movement.

But these foundational principles will bring the dissolution of community in America. Individuals make demands – and judges issue rulings – that shatter common values. Factions are then created when similarly minded individuals group together to collectively make demands, and then competing factions collide in an ever-escalating war for control of the levers of power.

This is what the homosexual movement is doing. Its views of identity, human sexuality, marriage and family exclude the traditional views of those realities. There is no room for a community to agree with both.

For those like Constance McMillen and the ACLU, that is not their problem. It’s ours.