Wow and wow.
I've gotten up to the chapter in Liberal Fascism that discusses the links between Alinsky, Hillary Clinton and Michael Lerner. In my half-assed and lazy way I'm not particularly interested in making an extended rant against my presumed enemies in the public on the other side of Prop Eight. Nevertheless I will pay attention to who files amicus briefs, pays for legal defense funds and otherwise stands up on their hind legs. But what is more important to me, as you might have guessed, is to figure out the intellectual provenance of all this activism in first place.
It turns out that 'smash monogamy' was one of the slogans of none other than the Weather Underground. Yep. Dorn and Ayers and all that rotten crew. If you follow Google it lands you into some very interesting sets of commentary. I particularly like this one...
According to the 1989 book Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s
by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Weatherman trainees underwent grueling rituals of self-abasement and abuse in which their dignity, individuality and even sexual identity was brutally extinguished. On pages 84-87, Collier and Horowitz write;
"[The Weather Underground] initiated a 'smash monogamy' campaign to destroy bourgeois sexual hang-ups: Once monogamy was smashed, couples who in some cases had been together for years were harangued until they admitted their 'political errors' and split apart. "The next logical step was group sex. One of the last taboos was homosexuality, and the Weather command forced itself toward experimentation in this direction, instructing male and female cadres to 'make it' with members of the same sex."
Also note this salient criticism:
It has always been impossible for me to read the manifestoes of the Sex Panic group, some of which have been posted here in the last few days, without being reminded of that eminently dumb political slogan of the 1960s, 'smash monogamy.' It invokes, for me, the seemingly unlimited capacity of segments of the American left to position itself in the most self-destructive, most marginal posture possible. In the name of "liberation" and "emancipation," an agenda is put forward that tells people -- straight, gay, lesbian and bisexual -- that the left will invade their most intimate relationships, with an agenda of breaking them up and destroying them. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Leaving aside the incredible capacity for deliberate self-marginalization here, the old 'we are revolutionary, because nobody can stomach our revolutionary ideas' pose, the political issue at stake is how one changes for the better societies under the sway of homogenizing sexual disciplines, in which a singular norm of heterosexual marriage is established and conformity to it is rigorously policed. One can seek to de-homogenize, to pluralize the norm, to make the norm more and more heterogeneous as its reach is expanded to cover more and more diverse types of human relationships and human beings, thus according a greater and greater number of people the rights and privileges which are currently reserved for those within the homogeneous norm; this is the path that the African-American freedom struggle and the feminist struggle has historically pursued, with some successes. Or one can disown the very idea of any norms, however heterogeneous, and insist upon the targeting of relations and individuals within the norm as the 'enemy'. This is the Sex Panic approach, for which the expansion and pluralizing of the norm is simply the reconstitution of 'queer' as 'normal.' For them, it is more important that the 'queer' remain the unassimilated 'queer' than that queers have the full rights and privileges of other citizens.
Uh huh. This rabbit hole gets fairly deep. This is your introduction. I'm not making any hard connections here, but the loose associations speak towards exactly what liberal fascism is all about, a fanatic desire to redefine human life and associations in order to serve Progress. What Progress must be made by redefining all of human sexuality? Why does this kind of thinking even enter into our politics?
