After lecturing on Plato’s Symposium at my august university in the early 2000s (that is, when student safe zones, trigger warnings, and cancel culture were still in their infancy; though they persist in maintaining students in a state of infantilism), I received an email from the English Department’s interim Chairman who hired me to answer an accusation from a student that I was “homophobic.” My first reply, intentionally sarcastic, was that I suffered from no irrational fear of homosexuals or homosexuality. I say “intentionally” because at the beginning of the year, the incumbent Chair—I use the gender-neutral language here only because as a lecturer he was regularly described by his students as “wooden”—had the patronizing temerity to warn us new hires that students (and we’re talking about English majors here!) “wouldn’t get irony.” Thus I felt impelled to see if one of their professors could himself detect it. He didn’t. My second, non-ironic response was that I ventured no moral judgment on the subject except to read the passages in Plato in which he condemned it, thereby, apparently, “triggering” my accuser.
As a parenthesis to the above, I might add that the first course on Plato I took as an undergraduate fifty-odd years ago at the same institution was taught by Allan Bloom. As it happens, Bloom himself had been “denounced” for the very same heresy. Students in his class were aghast to discover that Plato vehemently disapproved of homosexuality, and doubly aghast to discover that Bloom (who was known for his sexual adventurism) wholeheartedly agreed with him. (Bloom went on to become, in fact, an active opponent of gay “marriage.”) Such, of course, is the tribalist assumption—in this case, that a homosexual must be an advocate of homosexuality—that remains an article of faith in today’s identity politics. (I knew I was in for a splendid semester, by the way, when at the beginning of his very first lecture, Bloom lit a cigar directly beneath the enormous “No Smoking” sign that hung from the end wall of the lecture theater: a “teaching moment,” as I took it, in the spirit of Socratic questioning of the irrational certitudes to which the almighty god of Public Opinion is inclined.)
Unlike others at universities across the (forgive the pun) fruited plain, I was absolved (on the aforementioned technicality) and released, and only once again called to defend myself before the progressive heresy tribunals that have ended the careers of so many academics and non-academics since. But that was probably only because homosexuality and transgenderism had not yet become one of the three highest sacraments (along with abortion) of progressive orthodoxy. Even at the time, however, I recognized that the progressive elites who are now the political masters of the universe were the priests and apostles of a fanatical new religion. Indeed, the Church of Progress has become the established religion of the West, notwithstanding that one of the founding principles of post-Enlightenment democratic pluralism was religious disestablishmentarianism.
As Joe Sobran has observed in his Subtracting Christianity, the underlying animus of the progressive war on the norms and traditions of Western civilization is a barely disguised anti-Christian bigotry. The hatred of Christianity is especially rabid amongst the alphabet people, since their risible argument that homosexuality is innate, as opposed to what they would call a “social construct”—heterosexual marriage and gender are “social constructs” but homosexuality is immutably inborn, which is an irony they certainly don’t “get”—depends upon the premise that gays have abounded in every age and culture but been abominated exclusively by narrow-minded Christians. Just look at the Greeks, who practiced it routinely and celebrated it with pride!
Except that they didn’t. Pausanias’ speech in the Symposium makes it clear that Plato regarded carnal relations between men and young boys as disgraceful, and in the denouement of the dialogue, Socrates’ ruthless rebuff of the romantic fixation upon him by the world-renowned hedonist Alcibiades appends the most dramatic exclamation point to Plato’s disgust. Indeed, it would be difficult to overestimate the contempt exhibited by all the schools of Greek philosophy, including Epicureanism, for the life enslaved to sensual passions and pleasures. Unfortunately for progressives, the only kind of earthly love of which Socrates and Plato approved was that which occurred in marriage, whose purpose, besides, was the nurturing of children in virtue and wisdom and the eternization of beauty through procreation (from which homosexuals are, unfortunately, biologically disqualified). Needless to say, even these “lower mysteries of love” (as Socrates’ teacher, the priestess Diotima of Mantinea, called them) had nothing to do with the sexual licentiousness that is celebrated by homosexuals, but roundly condemned by the Greeks in general as an irrational vice that reduces men morally to the rank of beasts. The “higher mysteries of love,” towards which the philosopher always aspired, was the spiritual, supra-sensual love of the rational intellect for the Divine, and the invisibilia dei that reside in the Divine Mind.
But since any attempt to epitomize Plato’s doctrine of love in a few words must be reduced to the grossest of simplifications, let me merely quote what he says about homosexuality in The Laws:
…similar institutions [the gymnasia in certain Greek cities in which carnal relations between men and boys have sometimes been tolerated] seem always to have had a tendency to degrade natural love in man below the level of the beasts….Whether such matters are to be regarded jestingly or seriously, I think that the pleasure is deemed natural which arises out of the intercourse of men and women; but the intercourse of men with men, or of women with women, is contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was originally due to unbridled lust.
Laws, I, 636
Lest you think that the free spirits of the Renaissance were any less disparaging of homosexuality (given that epoch’s supposed reawakening from a dark medieval night of Christian sexual repression and contemptus mundi, and its revival of a pre-Christian “neo-pagan” validation of sensual beauty and erotic passion), consider the commonplace attitude of Marsilio Ficino, the celebrated humanist and first scholarch of the Platonic Academy re-inaugurated by Cosimo de Medici in 15th century Florence.
In his seminal De Amore, Ficino remarks that “it often happens that those who associate with males succumb to vulgar lust.” But “it should have been noticed that the purpose of erections of the genital part is not the useless act of ejaculation, but the function of fertilizing and procreating.” To this he adds that “it is by the same error” that another “wicked crime arose,” the killing of the unborn, that Plato “roundly curses as a form of murder.”
Well, as Saturday Night’s “Emily Litella” used to say, “Never mind.” Notwithstanding that both the ancient Greeks and the “neo-pagans” of the Renaissance found homosexuality repellent, for progressives, Christianity remains the principal enemy. Anyone who doubts this should have been reminded of it by the Olympics’ opening ceremonies in Paris, whose centerpiece was a deliberately blasphemous mockery of the Last Supper, all, according to an IOC spokeswoman, in the name of “tolerance” (where “tolerance,” as it is used in progressive Newspeak, is always a one-way street). Christians, as we all know, are the only “identity group” that it is permissible to hate or subject to ridicule. If the designer of the opening ceremonies in Paris had blasphemed against Mohammed, he would now either be in hiding or dead; and if he had burlesqued some of the lunatic delusions and sexual deviancies of the LGBT community itself, he would be facing a criminal charge of inciting violence against one of the ever-proliferating victim groups now protected under international non-discrimination law.
The ceremony began with the entrance of what looked like either an AI or Lego version of the “pale horse” of Rev. 6:8, described therein as carrying Death and leading Hell in its train. Presumably, given the tableau of the Last Supper that followed, the horse came as a harbinger of the end of Christian civilization, from whose ashes would rise the new LGBT Utopia (gender dysphorics of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your anatomical chains).
Vaguely modelled on Da Vinci’s famous painting, presiding at the center of the table was a grossly obese self-described lesbian, as proud of her corpulence as the obese (the latest official victim group) have recently been encouraged to be of theirs, exposing her breasts to her navel. She wore a glittering tiara (Jesus’ halo? his crown of thorns?) and was flanked on both sides by twelve figures in various degrees of flamboyantly fay drag-queen undress, involving a number of deliberate “wardrobe malfunctions” including that of one man (?) whose member (whether real or surgically appended is unclear) was exposed beyond the hem of his speedo. At this point, another naked blue-tinged nature sprite reclined upon the platter in front of the lesbian “Jesus,” symbolic, one must deduce, of the sacramental bread (but reminding the sane that the myth of gender fungibility is more miraculous, in the sense of being far less credible, than the Christian dogma of Transubstantiation).
Besides deliberately offending the billions of Christians around the world who would inevitably regard it as sacrilegious, the point of the tableau’s designer was at the same time to borrow the sanctity of a genuine religious mystery (cultural appropriation, anyone?) In a social media post, the lesbian “Jesus” proclaimed the parody as “a new gay testament.” As the means of liberation from the sins of an oppressive Christian civilization (patriarchy, heterosexual marriage, racism, homophobia, sexual repression, et al.), homosexuality and transgenderism have indeed been proselytized as a new religion that promises moral and psychological redemption from Christian evil.
The faddish explosion of the number of prepubescents “self-identifying” as their non-biological sex of late marks it as either a psychic contagion or an enormously successful campaign of indoctrination (especially amongst captive children in the schools, a practice regarded as scandalous when undertaken by the Christian missionaries to the New World or in Canada’s residential schools). The forms transgenderism takes are almost always mock-religious, and as a kind of anti-Christianity, progressivism in general has mimicked all of those episodes in the history of the West for which their enemies never fail to rebuke Christians. The State-established religion of wokeness has its heresy hunters, its inquisitions, and censors to ensure that no one in the remnant of the normal dissents from its orthodoxies without risk of being arrested, charged with a hate crime, or dismissed from their jobs.
For the fanatical apostles of transgenderism, heteronormativity–like whiteness for leftist race baiters–is an inherited evil propagated in a way that parodies the Christian idea of original sin, just as putting off one’s original biological sex parodies the Pauline idea of dying to and “putting off” the original mortal and carnal man, in order to put on the new heavenly man of the spirit. It is a reeking Orwellism that failing to “affirm” a gender-dysphoric child’s aberrant (and usually transient) desires is legally forbidden and denominated as “conversion therapy” (for which a Swiss parent has recently had his sixteen-year-old daughter removed from his custody and placed in a State facility), whereas the word “conversion” is precisely apposite to the transmutation of one’s natal gender to its opposite.
Of course, “conversion” is a religious term, and while “conversion therapy” is intended to conjure up such dark historical junctures as the coerced confession of Christianity by Jews and Muslims in Torquemada’s Spain, the gruesome genital mutilation involved in the conversion of children to their “self-identified” gender is preached as a rite of salvation. In innumerable examples similar to the recent case in Switzerland, the State invariably comes to the aid of the transgender heresiologists, and foments a perverse species of hatred in gender-dysphoric children for their mothers and fathers that suggests a demonic parody of Jesus’ injunction to his disciples in Luke 14:26.
As Jung has observed, with the waning of an authentic and living Christian religious culture, the most murderous revolutionary mass movements of the twentieth century appropriated all the idioms and energies of a State theocracy of the most debased and primitive form. Thus, I don’t consider it merely adventitious to note that today’s State-established Church of Progress, like Milton’s Satan, Sin, and Death, also has its anti-Trinity, worshiped in the form of the abstractions “diversity, equity, and inclusion”; nor do I consider it insignificant that its acronym (DEI) means what it does in Latin, and demands the appropriate posture of idolatrous reverence from its cultists.