RIP: Joseph Sobran

My decision 13 years ago to sit down in front of a keyboard and to pay the price to become a writer was greatly influenced by a number of key mentors who paved the way before me.  Some of those mentors, like my dear departed friend Jerry Askeroth, I knew personally and others exercised a profound influence upon me through their writings.  Joseph Sobran was one of those influential writers to whom I owe a tremendous debt for his inspiration.  His passing yesterday at age 64 due to complications of diabetes marks the end of an extraordinary and principled life spent in defense of the cause of liberty.

Joseph Sobran

Joe Sobran was a brilliant writer and thinker, but the thing that most exemplified his personal character was his willingness to remain true to his principles even if it came at the price of great personal sacrifice.  His promising career at National Review was cut short when he refused to endorse the neoconservative agenda of the U.S. warfare state that has brought so much (ahem) good to the world in recent decades.  

For this act of defiance, Sobran endured numerous unjust smears accusing him of anti-Semitism without returning railing for railing.  His defense of God, family, and country--in that order--was a ray of guiding light in an increasingly darkening culture that worships self, power and dominion over others.

His essay How Tyranny Came to America should be considered required reading for anyone who wishes to better understand how our nation came off its Constitutional rails.  Much more needs to be said about this man but for now I'd like to share some of my favorite Sobran quotes as examples of his willingness to stand for truths that some consider unpopular.  Be warned; there are a lot of quotes here, but they offer a great deal of insight into many of the hot-button issues of our time.

Why should a government that increasingly limits the sphere of freedom, privacy, and choice in every other area show such consistent favor to sexual libertarianism alone? Because the traditional code is designed to support the family as the basic unit of society, and the family, like religion and private property, is one of the foundations of liberty and resistance to monolithic state power. 

Without religion, the state faces no rival moral authority. Without property, freedom has no material basis, and everyone becomes dependent on the state for support. And without the family, the individual belongs almost wholly to the state, with no stable competing loyalty. 

The sexual revolution is really an attack on the cellular structure of society. Under communism, “free love,” including abortion, was the only freedom left, because it’s the only freedom the total state finds congenial. Citizenship ceases to be just one aspect of identity and becomes your only identity. In short order, citizenship is reduced to total subjection to the state. 

“Sexual freedom” is what we used to have: the freedom to choose one’s mate and to build a family. But the term has been redefined to mean sexual anomie and irresponsibility. 

There is no real paradox here. The state continually releases us from our duties to our families as it increases our obligations to itself. You can leave your spouse, abort your children, abandon your parents. But you can’t divorce the state. 

The state gives you two options. If you won’t be its dependent, you must pay taxes to support those who are. Living off others’ taxes is legitimate; refusing to pay those taxes is criminal. 

It’s a tangled situation, the sort of mess that results when civil rights comes to mean not freedom of association, but the reverse: compulsory association. When we hear the term civil rights nowadays, we instantly know we are in for more, not less, government power over our private lives. Civil rights has become shorthand for state coercion.

Homosexuals are rapidly being added to the roster of victim categories who may use state power to force others to accept them. “Civil rights,” in this baneful sense, trumps all religious, moral, and other personal reservations. And militant homosexuals have targeted the Boy Scouts for punishment because the Scouts’ code of behavior upholds traditional Christian sexual morality.

There has never been a humane communist regime. Marxism is inherently totalitarian. It recognizes no moral limits on the state. It’s the most convenient ideology for aspiring tyrants; it also retains its appeal for intellectuals, who have proved equally skillful at rationalizing abuses of power and at exculpating themselves. 

If the tyrants had really “betrayed” Marx, you’d expect the true-blue Marxists to be nervously vigilant against pseudo-Marxist despots. But they never are. They are always willing to trust every new ruler who acts in the holy name of Marxism. 

The most successful ideology of the 20th century denied any divine element in man or the universe warranting modesty in the state. That meant the end of privacy. People were punished for their thoughts — even thoughts they hadn’t had yet, but which the Marxist rulers could predict they would have because of their class membership. (“Scientific” socialism didn’t have to wait until they had really committed crimes, not even thought-crimes.)

We are indebted to Marx for the general assumption that everything is the state’s business, and that even privacy is something that can exist only by the grace of the state’s rather suspicious permission. 

An idea has really triumphed when people are no longer aware that there is any alternative to it.

Cultural liberals are scornful of “old taboos,” but they’re always eager to establish and enforce new taboos. Disapproval of homosexuality is rapidly becoming one of the new ones. If you say it’s a perversion, you will be accused of “hate,” as if you were targeting people rather than evaluating practices. Liberals never acknowledge their own hatred of Western traditions; they merely ascribe their hostility to their “idealism,” a motive their self-congratulation won’t allow them to ascribe to conservatives. (They also claim to be on the side of science, while holding that science is “value-free.”) 

So, as usual when liberals control the discussion, the debate quickly turns into a test of motives. If your motives are generous, you will approve of same-sex marriage; if you withhold approval, your motives must be nasty, and the difference between you and the Ku Klux Klan is only a matter of degree. 

This isn’t debate; it’s accusation and intimidation. You can’t have a real debate when one side is stigmatized in advance as bigoted and, heaven help us, “homophobic” — a suitably perverse coinage, which basically means “not sufficiently progressive.” 

In the case of same-sex marriage, conservatives are also under special inhibitions. They believe in public reticence about sex and excretion, so they are accordingly reluctant to discuss rather obvious clinical distinctions — reproductive, sanitary, and olfactory — between orifices. The best comment I have heard on same-sex marriage can’t be printed in a family newspaper (and I guess I wouldn’t want it to be). 

A few years ago liberalism’s bulletin-board orthodoxy (it changes weekly) held, under the sway of feminism, that marriage was an evil, outmoded, patriarchal institution. Besides, what did a “piece of paper” have to do with love? 

Now, it seems, marriage is such a vital institution that it’s cruel to exclude anyone from its joys. And you exclude people merely by declining to redefine this ancient institution to suit their tastes. The “right” to marry means the right to overturn not only tradition, but common sense. 

This position is not just wrong; it’s also — and this is what makes it somewhat awkward to argue with — stunningly whimsical. You hardly know whether to refute it or just wait it out, hoping it will blow over, giving place to the next morally imperative fad.

I’ve noticed that the more you evolve, the further left you seem to go. That’s why I try to resist the evolutionary process. By its logic, the most highly evolved being of recent times was Mao Zedong. To my way of thinking, it behooves one to keep in touch with one’s cave-man roots. 

[Peter] Jennings shares with the president a view of the American people as a sort of gigantic kindergarten class waiting for their tutelage. Their notion of enlightenment is to have the whole class chanting in unison, “Diversity is good! Diversity is good!” 

After all, as the president reminded us, “diversity” is our greatest strength. That must be why he wants the federal government to make sure all children get the same kind and degree of education. 

G.K. Chesterton said that the purpose of an open mind, like that of an open mouth, is to close on something. If you still doubt O.J. Simpson’s guilt, for example, are you really open-minded in any commendable sense? Or is your mind simply closed against the evidence? 

In fact it’s nonsense to say flatly that a mind should be “open” or “closed.” The real question is when, not whether, to close it. Of course it’s wrong to close it prematurely. But at some point you have to make a commitment about the truth of things.

The very idea of abolishing slavery is a modern one, which arose in Christian civilization. The pagan world never produced an abolitionist movement, though individual slaves often gained their liberty

Can it be an accident that back when people were more judgmental, they didn’t shoot each other quite so often? It may seem paradoxical, but it’s quite natural. Simple, even. When you have commonly accepted moral standards, you don’t usually need to resort to force. But when moral rebuke no longer exerts its restraining influence, there is a human temptation to blow the offending party away, as it were. 

I realize that to say that things keep getting worse is highly judgmental. So maybe I should say that they keep getting worse from a judgmental point of view. From a nonjudgmental perspective, of course, everything is fine.

It would be a healthy exercise for every politician to look in the mirror every morning and remind himself that he holds office only because, in a two-man race against another mediocrity, a modest majority of those half-informed people who imagined that their votes mattered reckoned that he was the lesser evil. And they weren’t too sure about that. 

Too often today, the high and holy cause of unbelief is threatened by the smug sanctimony of the atheists. 

Consider Christopher Hitchens, author of the new book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, whose title is perhaps self-explanatory. Religion poisons everything? Everything? Bach and Mozart? Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman? 

And what about atheists like Stalin? Hitchens is ready for that one, citing Orwell: “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.” Besides, we may note, Stalin went to a seminary, where maybe he picked some bad thinking habits, which he couldn’t shake off when he stopped believing in God. Even bad atheists, it seems, can be chalked up to religion. 

Now Hitchens himself, born English and naturalized American, is a learned and eloquent man. (I’ve debated him on politics, and I have the scars to prove it.) But when he gets on the subject of religion — any and all religion, mind you — he turns plain silly. Like so many of his breed, he seems to think he can settle an argument with a combination of British suavity and British snot. After reading him, I’m always surer I know whom he hates (or, less often, loves) than what he thinks.

Mean old nuns whacked my knuckles with a ruler, ergo God does not exist. This is less inductive reasoning than simple free association with a grudge. Religion reminds Christopher Hitchens of a lot of bad memories, even if they are historical rather than autobiographical. That is, they are bad things he’s read about, not necessarily experienced himself. Somehow I’d expected a more rigorous argument. 

If you really think belief in God or gods has always caused so much suffering (such as the Trojan War, a quagmire which I, as a Catholic, would have opposed from the start), then it seems to me that you ought to propagate atheism seriously — not just out of vanity to show how clever you are, but out of those same humanitarian motives to which you say religion is repugnant, and by which you claim to be driven. No need to humiliate the poor believers, is there? 

What it comes to is that your conception of human nature may be not merely wrong, but impolite. If you think God or nature had a purpose in making two sexes, so that sodomy isn’t quite on a par with making babies, please — keep it to yourself! 

In Washington, sodomy isn’t disapproved; but the word sodomy is, and you can damage your career by using it in public. You are expected to let on that you’d be horrified to learn that your son smokes Camels, but proud to learn that he’s gay. Would these be the reactions of any parent you know? 

What hypocrisy! But such is sophistication. We display our refinement by pretending not to have natural feelings. In the space of a few years, the tradition of millennia is repudiated. What’s more, the repudiation is mandatory for everyone. You might think that a liberal, tolerant society would leave a little room for what, until recently, everyone assumed, but no! — no trace of the old attitude is permitted. 

The one thing liberalism has “zero tolerance” for is the past. We live in a pluralistic society now, where everyone must think and talk alike, in keeping with the latest federal diversity guidelines.

But atheists are also typically indignant that some people believe in God rather than Darwin, even though belief in God, however irrational, may deter some people from killing others. Granted, from an atheistic point of view this is often a disappointing universe, but if a bit of superstition makes it marginally more bearable at times, why complain? Out in the jungle, the lower animals, as we used to call them before Darwin abolished the distinction between “higher” and “lower,” kill each other all the time, with a refreshing lack of moral outrage. Why should man take it so hard? Isn’t what we call morality, in the end, a mere matter of taste? 

But people who don’t believe in damnation have an odd way of believing in diagnosis. If they can’t say you belong in hell, they usually say you belong in a loony bin. It’s as if they hate God for not existing, and for consequently failing to damn people who need damning. At the same time, they think the whole idea of hell shows how cruel religion is. Go figure. 

Because we need nutrition, we feel hunger. What does it tell us that all men have spiritual hungers? Only that they are all deluded? Or is it that they all crave the “poison” of religion? If the spiritual is a mere delusion, of which our animal nature has no real need, how odd that it should be a universal delusion, rather than a local cultural eccentricity. 

Even a Darwinian materialist, after all, might concede that piety can have its bright side, just as the love of truth or beauty does. For that matter, how does belief in evolution itself conduce to survival? If it’s necessary, why did it take mankind so long to think of it? If it’s not necessary, what purpose is really served by advocating it?

According to liberals, if you think marriage makes sense only as an objective relation between people of opposite sexes — for the practical purpose of establishing and regulating paternity — you must hate gay people. And hate, after all, is the essence, if anything is, of what it means to be right-wing. It goes hand in hand with logic and defining things, and is but a short step from outright popery. (Let us not forget that the Catholic Church has always persecuted science.) A liberal God, if such existed, would want everyone to have the right to marry, even — or especially — gay people. He would also accept gay and lesbian bishops.

Consider homosexuality. Everyone knows it’s a serious disorder; nobody wishes it on anyone he loves; a parent who tried to turn a child homosexual would be considered monstrous. But the new hypocrisy requires us to pretend that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality except “society’s attitude” toward it, which of course we are supposed to correct. 

In fact the new hypocrisy is a necessary aspect of the “new morality.” There is no “new” morality. There is only the systematic pretense that sexual vice is not vice. 

Under the new rules, you can be called a hypocrite for upholding old standards of virtue that you don’t exemplify perfectly; but you can’t be called a hypocrite for sinking into utter moral squalor, as long as you profess to believe there’s nothing wrong with it. So the defender of traditional morality is kept constantly on the defensive, since only he can be accused of hypocrisy. 

It’s quite a clever system, because it works entirely to the advantage of one side, while the other side has been slow to figure it out. But it boils down to something simple and obvious. 

If you set high standards, there is the danger that you’ll create an embarrassing gap between what you believe and what you do. The actual may fall short of the ideal; in fact it’s almost certain to do so, and you may look hypocritical when you’re only human. 

But if you profess low standards, there’s no danger of such a gap. Your behavior is all too likely to meet your standards. If you openly advocate pedophilia, then the one thing you can’t be accused of when you’re caught in bed with a little child is hypocrisy.

To hear the gay version, you’d think that marriage was created to endow heterosexuals with special “rights” that were denied to homosexuals — a total, and lugubrious, misconception. The institution is prior to the rights attached to it. 

Nearly every society has some version of marriage, simply because the institution is necessary for the care of women and children and for the orderly distribution of property. This social necessity isn’t a matter of creating rights, but of defining pretty basic obligations. The people on whom these obligations must be imposed are, obviously, those who are capable of having children. 

The people most apt to want the pleasures of marriage without the obligations are, as you may have observed, young men. Men complain about marriage. Women don’t complain about marriage; they complain about men. 

The relation between marriage and “rights” is much more complicated than the gay version suggests. In most societies marriage is less a right than a duty, and the failure or refusal to marry can bring shame and other penalties on the unmarried. In many societies parents choose spouses for their children or, even more commonly, reserve the power to veto their children’s choices. The notion that marriage is merely the natural and proper conclusion of romantic love is a recent and dubious Western idea. 

[T]he conception of marriage as an individual “right” is by no means the only view of the matter. At any rate marriage didn’t originate with the idea of the individual’s pursuit of happiness — an idea that, in fact, has proved subversive of the institution and its obligations. 

The simplest refutation of the gay version is that some societies have been very tolerant of homosexuality and pederasty, like ancient Greece and Rome, without feeling any need to institute same-sex marriage. In fact, it apparently never occurred to Greco-Roman homosexuals and pederasts to demand such a thing. They seem to have been content with their informal arrangements, since procreation wasn’t involved. 

Institutions have their own purposes and inner logic. That is what makes them institutions. Their definitions make them more or less exclusive; a Baptist can hardly complain if he is rejected by a Catholic seminary. To say that Baptists ought to be accepted is really to say that Catholic seminaries shouldn’t exist. You can argue that they shouldn’t exist in the first place; but you can’t argue that if they accept non-Catholics they remain Catholic. 

Marriage means a permanent union between people of opposite sexes. That’s the whole idea. The advocates of same-sex marriage aren’t really complaining about discrimination; they’re complaining about marriage. 

We ought to think of our great writers as a perpetually endangered species. Preservation isn’t passive; like maintaining an old house, it demands a lot of work and, sometimes, hard choices. We can’t save everything; we have to know what is worth saving. Surely that includes the core vocabulary of classical English. 

If that language goes to waste, the aesthetic loss alone is tremendous. But there is a further danger. Modern tyranny has made a specialty of perverting language, reducing it to an instrument of propaganda and control. It thrives on a populace without long memories and traditions, which provide anchorage and the ability to measure the present against the past. 

One of the masterstrokes of Chinese communism has been to replace the ancient Chinese ideogram with a modern phonetic alphabet, thereby reducing the entire population to pseudoliteracy. The people are taught to read, but forbidden to remember. The whole Chinese past has been erased. 

The current vocabulary of hypocrisy includes such words as gay, lifestyle, and the ludicrous homophobia, which systematically deny the obvious. We’re talking about an ugly and unsanitary perversion as well as an immoral way of living, the sadness of which should excite our pity as well as our censure. 

Why should we pretend otherwise? Only because of new taboos — social pressures against candor — that are as perverse as sodomy itself. We are to make believe that “marriage” can mean something it has never meant before, that the rectum is as suitable a receptacle for the male seed as the womb, that a filthy and fruitless union is equal in dignity to one that produces human life? And all this with a straight face? 

Oh, Lord. Victorian hypocrisy had nothing on the liberal kind, which insists that all the generations before us were wrong. Overnight we must repudiate what everyone always knew and still knows. We have seen the same obligatory amnesia with fornication and abortion; evils have suddenly become “rights.” 

And this is what our children grow up being taught in state schools and the mass media. Democratic values, you know. Equality. Tolerance. Constitutional rights. Raising public awareness. 

But the lies, being lies, don’t work too well. For some reason, kids still love real love — the fruitful mutual love of men and women. They refuse to accept gay as something positive; they use it as a term of abuse and ridicule. They recognize it as a joke, no matter what their elders try to tell them. Reality is insistent. Humor remains, as ever, the final revenge of the normal on the official. 

The enormous official effort to normalize the abnormal is doomed. Note the root word norm: G.K. Chesterton long ago observed “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.” 

Contrary to a popular impression, conservatism isn’t passive. It can actually be a frantic activity, like rescuing possessions from a burning house. In this world of flux, most things are always perishing, and you have to decide what’s worth saving.

-Joseph Sobran 1946-2010