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Extremist Movements

Religious Right “Intellectual” Claims Marriage Equality “Opens the Door to Unlimited Statism”

Nancy Pearcey has made a name for herself in the Religious Right as a chief advocate for intelligent design, which emerged as the leading anti-evolution 'science' following the Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard that public schools can’t teach Creationism. She is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, the leading propagandist of intelligent design, and scientist and evolution-defender Jeffrey Shallit called Pearcey the “Creationists’ Miss Information.” But Pearcey, who has no scientific credentials, appears to have replaced evolution with the LGBT community as her latest target.

Having previously called homosexuality the “denigration of physical anatomy,” Pearcey is now attacking the claim that sexual orientation is not a lifestyle choice. Writing for The Daily Caller, Pearcey defends the organizations boycotting CPAC over GOProud’s involvement because she believes that once sexual orientations other than heterosexuality are respected, affirmed, and considered equal, the U.S. will subside into government oppression and lose “the foundation of the American republic”:

By voting with their feet, however, social conservatives are not giving up, they are taking a public stand — which creates a forum to make their case more effectively. They should take this opportunity to argue that the practice of homosexuality has a negative impact not just on the family but also on individuals — that it expresses a profound disrespect for a person’s biological identity.

Biologically, physiologically, males and females are clearly counterparts to one another. The male sexual and reproductive anatomy is obviously designed for a relationship with a female, and vice versa.

Homosexual practice thus requires individuals to contradict their own biology. It disconnects a person’s sexuality from his or her biological identity as male or female — which exerts a self-alienating and fragmenting effect on the human personality.

And the logic of alienation will not stop there. Already the acceptance of same-sex relationships is metastasizing into a postmodern notion of sexuality as fluid and changing over time.

In other words, yesterday I was straight, today I may be homosexual, and tomorrow I could be bisexual. One’s psychosexual identity is said to be in constant flux.

In the past, homosexuals employed the defense that they were born that way. But now they are beginning to embrace the postmodern idea that you can be anything you want to be along a sexual continuum.

The CPAC walkout is a chance to highlight what is at stake. Jesse Hathaway at NewsReal Blog defends CPAC, saying “I’m a bit fuzzy on why it matters what a person does in the privacy of his or her bedroom, as long as it doesn’t affect me.”

But it does affect him — and everyone else. Every social practice is the expression of fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human. When a society accepts and approves the practice, it implicitly commits itself to the worldview that supports it — all the more so if the practice is enshrined in law.

If America accepts practices such as same-sex “marriage,” in the process it will absorb the accompanying worldview — the redefinition of human personhood as a purely social construction — which opens the door to unlimited statism, because there is no human nature that an oppressive state could possibly offend.

Those who resist will be compelled by the state to go along, or face penalties for “discrimination.”

Margaret Thatcher used to say, “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.” Instead of caving on this issue, the leaders of CPAC should be vigorously advancing the core arguments of conservatism. Not just to win the vote but to preserve the foundation of the American republic.