A recent discussion on Jack Donovan, author of The Way of Man, and my observation of how the men’s rights movement doesn’t hold his homosexuality against him got me thinking about how ‘right wing’ values have evolved over the years.
I’ll admit it – we, ‘the right’, after a string of victories, including the 1996 passage of the DOMA, threw in the towel on gay issues. And this is not a war we lost at metaphorical cost of blood, sweat and tears – but by throwing down our guns in a conciliatory defeat, a sign of the changing times. The men’s right movement – a subset of ‘the right’ – is indifferent to homosexuality, family formation, and other virtues and vices that the ‘traditional right’ holds dear. You see this shift on Reddit: young people who are economically conservative (neo-conservative economics or libertarian economics), pro-gun, and anti-SJW – but are either pro-gay marriage, want to make it a state issue instead of a federal one, or are indifferent. And even I was behind the times because I still thought sexual preferences were important to ‘the right’ – but in today’s meritocracy, where the value of an individual is in their IQ, wealth and intellectual accomplishments, they aren’t. Peter Thiel, a hero of the libertarian right, is gay, and that doesn’t detract from his accomplishments or his clout; in fact, it’s irrelevant. While the left has a tendency to wear their sexual orientation on their sleeve, as some sort of badge, the alt-right doesn’t seem to care all that much. And on right-leaning sites like National Review and the Wall St. Journal, for example, it seems pundits have largely given up on Dr. Laura/James Dobson-esq moralizing, choosing instead to focus on more fruitful topics such as economics and foreign policy. When a gay issue comes up they frame it as a free market/religious freedom issue (the right of a baker to deny baking cakes to gay couples under the pretense of free market capitalism or religious freedom), not a moral one (it’s ‘bad’ to be gay). In the 80’s and 90’s ‘the right’ wanted to fix gays. Now? Not so much. Forget the family, in these hard economic times it’s every man for himself. To fixate on sexual preferences is like worrying about religion or astrology; such matters seem quaint and obsolete in a post-2008 world.