Nah, obviously the most important issue facing women today is making sure the neocons get their way on abortion. Not just the most important issue facing women, actually, it's the most important issue, period. We got Kristol's word on that, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan no less.
Here is a writer in The Standard, taking a rare break earlier this year from the Lewinsky obsession:
Republicans talk a lot about being a majority party, about becoming a governing party, about shaping a conservative future. Roe and abortion are the test. For if Republicans are incapable of grappling with this moral and political challenge; if they cannot earn a mandate to overturn Roe and move toward a post-abortion America, then in truth, there will be no conservative future. Other issues are important, to be sure, and a governing party will have to show leadership on those issues as well. But Roe is central. . . .
Who wrote this paragraph? Pat Robertson? Patrick Buchanan? Randy Tate? The answer, again, is William Kristol. His seamless merging of the Lewinsky scandal with the right's other social concerns is perhaps what makes him so integral to the new conservatism. Always, however, the key social issue is abortion. He put the argument most revealingly in the February 1997 issue of the neoconservative political monthly Commentary. ''The truth is,'' Kristol wrote, ''that abortion is today the bloody crossroads of American politics. It is where judicial liberation (from the Constitution), sexual liberation (from traditional mores) and women's liberation (from natural distinctions) come together. It is the focal point for liberalism's simultaneous assault on self-government, morals and nature. So, challenging the judicially imposed regime of abortion-on-demand is key to a conservative reformation in politics, in morals, and in beliefs.''. . . andrewsullivan.com
Or maybe Kristol hadn't quite fully digested the importance of the PNAC program at that point, who can say? Elsewhere in that article, there's this other interesting tidbit indicating what strange bedfellows warblogging as a way of life can make, in Sullivan's case anyway:
The only issue to rival Lewinsky for prominence among conservative intellectuals in 1998 was homosexuality. But in some ways, this was only apposite. For the new conservatives, the counterattack on homosexual legitimacy is of a piece with the battle against Presidential adultery. They see no distinction between an argument for same-sex marriage, for example, and a Presidential defense of adultery, because in their eyes, there is no context in which a homosexual relationship can be moral. Homosexuality, for the puritanical conservatives, is not a condition or even a way of life; it is a disease. And again, the intellegentsia led the way -- with Kristol at the heart of it.
If most Americans were a little surprised by the religious right's advertising campaign last July in defense of ''curing'' homosexuals, then they had not been following closely the drift on the intellectual right. As usual, Bill Kristol was at the heart of it. In June 1997, he gave the concluding address at a Washington conservative conference dedicated, as its brochure put it, to exposing homosexuality as ''the disease that it is.'' Kristol shared the podium with a variety of clergy members and therapists who advocated a spiritual and psychoanalytic ''cure'' for homosexuals. One speaker, a priest, described homosexuality as ''a way of life that is marked by compulsion, loneliness, depression and disease,'' comprising a ''history-limiting horizon of a sterile worldview divorced from the promise and peril of successor generations.'' Another speaker decried legal contraception and abortion as the ''homosexualization of heterosexual sex,'' and bemoaned that nonprocreative trends among white Europeans was leading to ''race death.''
In the broad advertising campaign last summer, sponsored by groups allied with those who organized the D.C. conference, homosexuals were portrayed as sick and in need of therapy. The notion that homosexuality was involuntary was dismissed, with Starr-like certainty, as a violation of ''the truth.'' The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, said that homosexuals were guilty not of a public crime, but of a private ''sin.'' Again, The Standard had pioneered this politics, routinely decrying any public destigmatization of homosexuals, and calling, in one article in late 1996, for the ''reaffirmation by states of a sodomy law'' that would imprison gay men for private sex as a counterstrike against the threat of same-sex marriage.
The weekly Standard's obsession with the Lewinsky scandal and homosexuality may seem an odd conjunction of issues, but the joint crusades have uncanny echoes in the halls of Congress. So Representative Bob Barr was the pioneer of the Defense of Marriage Act, and the author of the first resolution to impeach the President. And Trent Lott, while leading the charge against the President's immorality in recent weeks, also insured that the nomination of James Hormel as U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg was held up purely because of Hormel's homosexuality. And among the most aggressive supporters of impeachment -- the House Judiciary Committee members Charles T. Canady and Bob Inglis, for example -- have been the most virulently hostile to gay rights in the current Congress. |
