To understand the allure of queer ideology is to understand human psychology. We need meaning and purpose. We need identities that are tied to something larger than ourselves. These needs have traditionally been met by organized religion. More recently by material accumulation. Religion has been replaced by science and material accumulation has been revealed to be a rigged game not worth playing. Into this void the Social Justice movement stepped in. Having become institutionalized in Western educational systems, social justice is now the only framework for meaning and purpose that many young people know.
We here at Gay Not Queer think that social justice is, generally speaking, a worthwhile goal. We think social justice as a value should be engrained in our educational system. But it has obviously gone too far. It has become a litmus test to get ahead. The nuances and complexities of social justice that deserve exploration has been sacrificed for raw political power. Reasonable voices got cancelled early on, first on the left and then on the right. When the echo chamber of each bubble only repeats their respective extremist narratives then people start to believe what they hear and see the other side as insane. The shrinking reasonable middle, people like us, remain silent to save our skins. But speak out we must. It is a fine line to walk. We recognize legitimate criticisms of the social justice movement as they relate to queer ideology but we do not reject the larger goal of said movement. Discrimination, after all, does exist.
What went wrong with the social justice movement, and by extension gay rights, goes wrong with all worthwhile movements. Eric Hoffer said it best: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Such is the human condition. Worthwhile values always become rigid ideologies within a social pecking order. Those in power always use said ideology to solidify their power, requiring subordinates to subscribe in order to keep their place. If your paycheck or social connections requires you to serve an ideology that says those who have been oppressed the most must now be given the most, well, serve that ideology you must.
Given this reality of how humans create a social order from social movements, a queer identity was inevitable. It provides a fast track to privileged status. If you don’t think being queer is a status symbol that opens doors, well, you are not traveling in the right circles. Get yourself anywhere in the halls of power, be it financial, social, or political, and you will realize that the more oppressed you have been in the past the more de rigueur you are in the present. Standards like integrity, character, and merit are just so….well… yesterday. Get with the program. Claim as much victimhood as you can. If you can parlay an identity into more than one oppressed group you’ve reached the rarified world of intersectionality. Go straight to the head of the line!
Yeah, it’s degenerated into a racket. But anyone can play and adherents are growing in number because it gives them an edge. If you don’t want to hop into bed with someone of your own sex (or say you do) to claim membership then expand your wardrobe or behavior. Lots of permutations of Queer exists and with sufficient adherents you can get your own letter added on to LGBTQ. California, second only to Canada, excels at growing this alphabet train.
Accordingly, civil rights organizations that in the past served just plain old lesbians and gays like us now welcome all new identities. God forbid anyone feels excluded. But there is more to it than a welcoming ethos. More members means more money which means more influence. And they can’t risk the ire of their most ardent supporters, the queer extremists, who want as many people under their umbrella as possible. Yeah, queer extremists claim to speak for various groups that have nothing in common other than a shared sense of victimhood. And yeah, their take-no-prisoners activism fuels opposition from the larger society (tyranny of the majority having been replaced by tyranny of the minority). But hey, giving queer extremists the reins to power makes prudent business sense. Not just from an operational standpoint. The negative feedback loop that fuels societal conflict, a direct consequence of queer extremism, guarantees future relevance for the organizations. The worst thing for gay rights groups is to become irrelevant because sexual orientation no longer matters. It’s a Faustian bargain.
Yet Queer is, fundamentally, just an idea. While those who identify with this idea are quick to point out there have always been homosexuals and gender nonconformists, they will not acknowledge that the word queer itself has only relatively recently been identified with those things. The word, which historically just meant odd, has now been hijacked to herd a diverse set of victims into a larger oppressed group for political purposes. As understood today, “queer” is a social construction. It was born, nurtured, and set forth to promulgate by the same forces that gave rise to the social justice movement. This artificial tribe is increasingly used to normalize the dangerous philosophy that group rights should supersede individual rights. Amazingly even when the group is a concept. Think about that. Can an artificial tribe, which exists not from any objective measure but simply because people say it exists, override the rights of individuals outside that group? Many think it should. Powerful economic interests also benefit because a focus on identity politics keeps the focus off our rigged economic system.
For all these reasons a large percentage of the West is invested in queer ideology. Believers will actively defend it because of their place in the human social ordering it enables. This attraction is inescapable. To use a term we dislike but find spot-on in this context, Queer ideology is woke at its worst.