Welcome to America’s Unruly Realm of Sexual Chaos

Watching movies from the 1940s is like being transported into a different world. Men wear suits, and women wear beautiful skirts or dresses. No obscenity or vulgarity corrupts the scene. Male characters are manly, while female characters are feminine — both for good and for ill. Few people of loose morals earn the glitzy lights. Traditional family life, with male providers and ladies minding the home, is normative. Think “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Then everything changed.

Joy Pullmann, executive editor of these pages, meticulously catalogues episodes of this revolution in her new book, False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America. But her book is more than just a parade of perversities; it shows how today’s queer politics fails in light of the standard found in the theory and practice of America’s founding.

For Pullmann, queer politics is the leading edge of “regime change,” a move from one way of life (as depicted in those old movies) to a new one (where sex is center stage). Generally, that old, straight regime sought to sustain manners that taught people to restrain unbridled sexual urges, which inevitably fizzle out, so they could find happiness in married and family life. The new queer constitution elevates human sexuality as the primary human preoccupation, remaking family life and public virtue in light of sexual obsession. Most people think through their pants.

Yet Pullmann shows that the queer constitution is not simply a spontaneous product of human choice. A sexual state propagates its hard, almost violent ethical core. Public authorities drape themselves in the rainbow, while those who oppose “pride” are investigated for so-called hate crimes and forced through lawfare to bake the cake in others. Through sexual discrimination laws, the state forces employers to affirm the identities of newly minted “transgendered” employees or to pretend that mothers and fathers do not have different familial duties. Erasures of conscience restrictions force doctors to mutilate confused children and adults. Administrative rule-making is farmed out to the Human Rights Campaign, and public school curriculum is written under the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). All will be made to comply.

As a matter of logic, this revolution leaves a lot to be desired. “Pride Devours Itself,” one of Pullmann’s ringing chapters, suggests that the movement could collapse because of its internal contradictions. Feminists long advocated for women’s sports, but the transgender ideologues build on the feminist principles separating identity from one’s body to undermine women’s sports. Gay groups sought recognition for same-sex marriage, but that entire movement presupposed a steady understanding of sex, which transgender ideology calls into question. Our woke military seems hardly concerned about fighting and winning wars.

Logic, as the saying goes, is the hobgoblin of little minds. The revolutionaries with larger minds simply side-step these contradictions. Every aspect of the queer constitution stigmatizes and destroys the old sexual constitution and aims to build a new ethic. “What unites all these identity groups,” Pullmann writes, “is their wholesale rejection of natural rights and the American way of life based upon them” and their denial that “a stable human nature exists.” The queers can resolve their internal contradictions after this old constitution is vanquished forever.

Pullman thus, at the deepest level of her book, joins a debate about the adequacy of American principles like natural rights and limited government as a coherent alternative to the rolling revolution in sexual matters.

Some, like Patrick Deneen, think the American founding’s endorsement of individualism or natural rights fated America to this queer rolling revolution. Others more gently think a genetic predisposition toward excessive individualism softened the ground for America’s new sexual Marxism (as Pullmann calls it). Pullmann, with the help of Thomas G. West’s excellent book on the American founding, shows how our founding principles are in flat contradiction to our queer constitution. For Pullmann, there is a straight line from natural rights to the traditional family to the complex of laws and mores that sustain the straight constitution.

For West, the American founders distinguished between the goal of government (securing persons and property) and the goals of life (pursuing happiness in the highest sense). Government is therefore limited. The highest things are no longer government’s concern, except as the promotion of the highest things aids in securing natural rights. 

The overlap was, for the founders, significant, and they endorsed significant restrictions on liberty in the name of virtue politics. Endorsed by the founders were efforts to promote distinctive manly and feminine virtues, enduring and fruitful marriage, anti-sodomy ethos, and an atmosphere of Christian faith to buttress the foundation.

As a result, the founders adopted a policy of indirect public power to support and maintain families. This promoted the marital form necessary to promote man-woman, enduring, fruitful, and early marriage while maintaining a climate of opinion that elevated marriage, subordinated sexuality in the name of greater goods, and promoted self-control as necessary to control potentially unruly eros.

Evidence for West’s thesis abounds. Every promoter of our queer constitution attacked the founders; their market economy; their laws against obscenity or fornication or polygamy; their promotion of monogamous, man-woman, enduring marriage; and their objective of uniting sex, procreation, marriage, and parenthood.

Pullmann thinks the founders’ sexual constitution was eroded without the consent of the governed during a century-long regime change akin to a coup d’etat. Many queer innovations, however, have been embraced through democratic “reform” (e.g., no fault divorce, same-sex marriage in some jurisdictions, anti-sex discrimination laws, and pro-queer curriculum at the local level). Few have outwardly revolted against our rolling sexual revolution, even as the stability that undergirds civic happiness has eroded. The totalitarian “woke theocracy” that Pullmann ably describes is detested but somehow also tolerated.

On one level, this stands to reason. Though commercial peoples need the family more than most (as Tocqueville noticed), the market economy nevertheless disrupts most, if not all, institutions, including the family. Capitalism’s churning makes all permanent features of human nature appear evanescent. And markets work in promoting prosperity and peace (just as the founders predicted). Americans enjoying unprecedented luxury are more likely to accept, as John Adams wrote worryingly to Jefferson in 1819, “effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice, and folly.”

Ours is a queer world, as Pullmann shows. Nearly the same queer world is descending on America, Great Britain, France, Italy, Poland, and other countries, though we are among the world leaders. Our tradition provides many resources for a counterrevolution, which Pullmann ably describes, yet so does the Catholic traditions among the French and the Polish (where people do not even use preferred pronouns much). Counterrevolutionaries would do well to draw on every aspect of Western tradition to stave off the decadence and corruption.

Scott Yenor is senior director of state coalitions at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life and a professor of political science at Boise State University.