Jerry Mitchell, in a campaign photo, made a bold move this week to support homosexual unions as a city ordinance.
By David Tulis
Please indulge a speculation as to the price of shares in two economies. One is the gay economy, whose shares come with a premium today and whose valuations are sky high. The other is national economy, whose valuations in nominal dollars are also at or near record highs (the Dow broke 16,000 two days ago).
Chattanooga city council Tuesday enacted an ordinance of a leveling nature — a rule to let city employees who are homosexual or shacking up with a member of the opposite set obtain health insurance for their partners. The vote was 5-3, with one opponent of the plan missing from his seat.
Equalizing relationships in Chattanooga
The city’s buy order for shares in the homosexual economy commits city government to nominal initial outlays of taxpayer funds, under F$200,000 the first year in a trickle of applicants. In out years, the system will be heavily gamed and costs will rise.
The city’s investment is also accounted for in the world of ethics, of right and wrong, good and evil. The commitment of Jerry Mitchell, the swing vote, and the other backers of the plan is to a scheme that in the 1800s was known as leveling. Today we would call these progressives, socialists or egalitarians. Their theories encompass many aspects of life. But the brief for the claim of Mr. Mitchell is that two homosexual men having anal sex is legally equal to a man making sweet love to his wife after the children are in bed, and Eros beckons them to a tete a tete and marital bliss.
The question is: Has city government bought low so it might make a profit by selling into a rising market? Or has it bought at the top of the market, and faces ahead only losses as valuations tumble, credit becomes scarce, and one is sickened by the dogs in the portfolio?
I am not qualified to answer this question. But suggestions of the gay law market is peaking are abundant. Last week Hawaii became state No. 15 to legalize homosexual unions as marriage, two years after it had legalized gay domestic unions. In the past month several states have gone gay. In Tennessee, Knoxville and Collegedale city councils have enacted poofter benefits. The federal supreme court overturned DOMA, the federal defense of marriage act, and overturned a referendum in California in which its people declared marriage to be between one man and one woman.
Levelers bring down those from above
National economy is notable for its financialization, its churning of financial assets that are the opposite of productivity and real wealth, and what one analyst calls “poaching.” He explains: “The rising Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other simulacra of ‘growth’ are masking the real model of growth in America: overbuilding and poaching, as in poaching customers and sales from competitors.”
The gay lobby in Chattanooga seems to be sharing in this phenomenon, poaching upon the marriage state while producing not the fruit of marriage, namely children, enterprise and capital.
The levelers were egalitarians who made their appearance as among the first free-love communists during the Protestant Reformation, who ran naked through the streets of Muenster, Germany. The levelers hated distinctions between rich and poor, the elite and the commoner, the wife and the sister.
The theory of the leveler is described by Samuel Johnson in a chat with James Boswell, his biographer. “Sir, your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear leveling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them; why not then have some people above them?” ‡
Jerry Mitchell and city council have brought marriage down to the level of domestic partnership, despite constitutional and statutory prohibitions of their act. But will they now bring up other forms of sexual life that are beneath them? Will they, to level things and make all equal, elevate pederasty and pedophilia — or polygamy? Polygamy is heterosexual, to which they are indifferent. So, no to that one. And abuse of animals and children, in the theory of Nambla, or the North American Man/Boy Love Association? Not in view here in the conservative South with its Christian orientation and more family-oriented mores. Well, that is that.
Without the acid of ideology society recognizes superiority and inferiority. It recognizes place, and differences among people. Society recognizes a mistress as inferior to a married woman, an employee as inferior to an employer. Put any two people together for 20 minutes of conversation at Camp House coffee shop, and you will find one to be the superior of the other, an authority over the other. “All true authority is under authority,” R.J. Rushdoony notes in a study of the seventh commandment against adultery, “since God alone transcend all things and is the source of all power and authority. A colonel has authority because he is under a general, and his own authority grows as the power, prestige and authority of those above him grow, and his unity with them in mind and purpose is assured.”
Chattanooga city council, poaching on marriage, shares in the faults of national economy, which is less about capital than about debt and alienation. Gay shares come with a premium; the market has been oversold by the media, which misrepresents Americans as a whole. Days of reckoning await national economy and the emptiness of the legal shells that are domestic unions.
‡ Dr. Johnson proposes, about happiness: “Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher.”
Also:
“Sir, there is one Mrs. Macaulay in this town, a great republican. One day when I was at her house, I put on a very grave countenance, and said to her, ‘Madam, I am now becoming a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, Madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us.’ I thus, Sir, showed her the absurdity of the levelling doctrine.”
Sources: James Boswell, excerpts from “The Life of Samuel Johnson” in Eighteenth Century Prose & Poetry, Ed. Louis I. Bredvold et al, prepared by John M. Bullett (New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1973), p. 903
R.J. Rushdoony, “The Seventh Commandment,” Institutes of Biblical Law (The Craig Press, 1984, 1973), p. 349
