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TechnoratiAs Esolen understands, the corruption of language has contributed to this confusion. When words like love, friend, male, female, and partner are transformed in a new sexual context, what was once understood to be pure and undefiled is now subject to sniggering and disrespect.
Esolen insists that this linguistic shift was no accident. He accuses "pansexualists" of corrupting the language in order to normalize sexual confusion and anarchy. They have used language "as a tool for establishing their own order and imposing it on everyone else," he argues.
As Esolen explains, "The pansexualists--they who believe in the libertarian dogma that what two consenting adults do with their privates in private is nobody's business--understand that the language had to be changed to assist the realization of their dream, and also that the realization of their dream would change the world, because it would change the language for everyone else."
What does all this have to do with the release of Brokeback Mountain? "Open homosexuality, loudly and defiantly celebrated, changes the language for everyone," Esolen insists. "If a man throws his arm around another man's waist, it is now a sign--whether he is on the political right or the left, whether he believes in biblical proscriptions of homosexuality or not." Esolen offers a blunt and haunting assessment: "If a man cradles the head of his weeping friend, the shadow of suspicion must cross your mind."
One of the words and realities most clearly corrupted for the sake of sexual anarchy is friendship--and male friendship in particular. "For modern American men, friendship is no longer forged in the heat of battle, or in the dust of the plains as they drive their herds across half a continent, or in the choking air of a coalmine, or even in the cigar smoke of a debating club," Esolen notes. Most men no longer find themselves in situations that encourage and inculcate straightforward male friendships. As Esolen observes, "the sexual revolution has also nearly killed male friendship as devoted to anything beyond drinking and watching sports; and the homosexual movement, a logically inevitable result of forty years of heterosexual promiscuity and feminist folly, bids fair to finish it off and nail the coffin shut."
What this means for grown men is bad enough, but Esolen is persuasive when he argues that the most vulnerable victims of friendship's demise are boys. "The prominence of male homosexuality changes the language for teenage boys. It is absurd and cruel to say that the boy can ignore it. Even if he would, his classmates will not let him. All boys need to prove that they are not failures. They need to prove that they are on the way to becoming men--that they are not going to relapse into the need to be protected by, and therefore identified with, their mothers." So? Esolen argues that boys, deprived of normal recognitions of masculinity and safe friendships with other boys and men, often turn to aggressive sexual promiscuity with girls in order to prove that they are not homosexual. Boys who refuse to play this game are tagged as homosexuals.
Esolen is on to something of incredible importance here. He reminds us all that boys need the uncomplicated camaraderie of other boys in order to negotiate their own path to manhood. The friendships shared among boys and young men allowed them to come together around common interests and activities and to channel their natural curiosity and energy into participation in shared activities. As young males band together, Esolen acknowledges that they "might do a thousand things fascinatingly creative and dangerously destructive." This is where adults must step in to guide these energies in positive directions and to erect boundaries to prevent or discourage bad behavior. In any event, these boys would not, as Esolen argues many boys do now, stagnate. "They would be alive," he asserts. Continue »
