Gay Liberation

Relax. I've not lost my mind.

What I'm referring to by use of that Byzantine headline is a recent post by renown Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff. In it, he goes to some trouble to explain to lesser mortals why exactly it is that a man (or woman) need not be gay as a prerequisite before setting out to free an oppressed people.

Sound straightforward? Well, not to leftists like the man who Arthur is dressing down; the late psychology professor, Clarence Tripp. Here's an excerpt from Arthur's wonderful post:

Some would say that Abe was too ugly to be gay. Personally, I couldn't care less whether he slept with his neighbors and bodyguards; his greatness as president is totally independent of and unrelated to what he did, or didn't do in bed.

I concur with that as I concur with the rest of his article.

But I would like to add something to Arthur's rebuttal of Tripp's absurd claim.

While Abraham Lincoln did share a bed with a man whilst living and working on the frontier, that does not necessarily mean that he was gay. It was common practice in those days for entire families to occupy the same bed, living as they were under somewhat crude conditions. It does not necessarily follow that they engaged in any form of sexual congress.

But as Arthur points out, Lincoln's sexual predilictions are completely irrelevant to Tripp's main assertion - that being gay provoked Lincoln toward his emancipation efforts.

I quote from Abraham Lincoln's personal diary:

"If I could win the war by freeing the slaves, I would. If I could win the war without freeing a single slave, I would do that too."

That was written in the first few years of the war.

Lincoln, as every civil war historian or enthusiast knows, was a man of his times. Running for the office of president, he sought to prevent the spread of slavery into the new territories. Insodoing, he sought to prevent the spread of slavery, and enhanced influence that would afford slave states in the senate and congress. He knew that if he were successful, the north would begin to enjoy a political majority that would not quickly be reversed... if ever. Things then might be achieved peacefully, and the constantly looming spectre of civil war averted.

The south saw this, and knew that Lincoln (whilst not interested in freeing the slaves) was a threat to their ongoing way of life. If the north held the balance of political power, they were finished. Eventually, if not right away.

And so Lincoln was elected, and the southern states left the union.

For the first couple of years, with the confederate armies enjoying repeated successes against their union adversaries, Lincoln was not the least bit interested in freeing anyone. He did not oppose the Fugitive Slave Act or the decision handed down over the runaway slave, Dred Scott. That the man was no teary-eyed idealist can easily be seen in this excerpt from a speech he made in regards to the Dred Scott verdict:

But Judge Douglas is especially horrified at the thought of the mixing blood by the white and black races: agreed for once—a thousand times agreed. There are white men enough to marry all the white women, and black men enough to marry all the black women; and so let them be married. On this point we fully agree with the Judge; and when he shall show that his policy is better adapted to prevent amalgamation than ours we shall drop ours, and adopt his. Let us see. In 1850 there were in the United States, 405,751, mulattoes. Very few of these are the offspring of whites and free blacks; nearly all have sprung from black slaves and white masters. A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation but as all immediate separation is impossible the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas. That is at least one self-evident truth. A few free colored persons may get into the free States, in any event; but their number is too insignificant to amount to much in the way of mixing blood.

Yes, Abraham Lincoln was a racist. Like all people of his time. He took the north to war because he wanted to preserve the union, and to my mind, his primary reason for eventually releasing the emancipation proclaimation was to prevent staunchly anti-slavery Britain from entering the war in aid of the Confederacy.

Abraham Lincoln wanted to preserve a nation, and was willing to free slaves in order to accomplish it. That it happened at all is the very real miracle. There is no universal force propelling man to do good deeds, or to see to it that the right triumphs. So when the right actually does triumph, we should be glad that it did, and not agonize fruitlessly over how it did.

The (somewhat less romantic) legacy of history is a long but satisfying list of ancilliary benefits reaped from awful, selfish conflicts, which finally culminated in modern, tolerant, and comfortably secular western civilization. There need be no grand or altruistic plan, and individuals need not be gay, or straight, or bisexual, or whatever, in order to accomplish great things. To claim otherwise is plain lunacy.

And before any leftists start to quibble about how that evil Republican Lincoln was terribly flawed, you might want to recall that your ideological ancestors, the Democratic Party of the time, did not want to fight the war at all, did not care for the plight of the slaves at all, served as an impediment to the war effort throughout the course of the conflict, and were willing to allow the confederacy to exist at any price.

To that end, the liberal media even used to draw cartoons displaying Abraham Lincoln as an ape.

Sound familiar?

Nothing ever changes.