Plasma Pool

In the wake of the many victories for the civil institution of marriage over the past weeks—in Iowa, in Vermont, in Sweden—the inaccurately, ominously, unmellifluously named “NOM,” or National Organization for Marriage, has taken the lead in a massive PR campaign to convince straight Americans that their gay fellow citizens are a tangible, heinous threat to the daily lived lives of heterosexuals everywhere. NOM’s members—or, rather, its paid actors—tell us that a homosexual storm “is gathering,” a storm that will strip the straight of all they hold dear as surely and swiftly as Dorothy is whisked away to Oz. “My freedom,” a young woman of color says with affected flourish, “will be taken away.” “America,” a man of color soon continues, is forming a “rainbow coalition,” “coming together in love to protect marriage” and to stem the tide of devastation from the immanent homosexual onslaught.

The only way NOM seems to know to do this is to insist on the universality of its own immoral, intellectually bankrupt, minority view by overstating the diversity of the antigay movement in an attempt to make the overstatement a reality. The gays are coming, the antigay right tells other the minority groups it’s still naive enough to attempt play off one another—the gays are coming, they are a threat, and we can protect you. But setting aside its identitarian politicking, NOM, appropriately for an organization founded in delusion, is terrible with names, having embarked on this anti-marriage campaign under a banner that literally announces the potential copulation of two or more gay men. Not to be outdone in popcultural terminological incompetence, the populist economic right—apparently conscious of its need to appeal to younger voters more likely to engage in substantive sexual foreplay in addition to traditional intercourse—has styled its own nascent grassroots campaign after a sexual activity characteristic of gay men.

Yes, that’s right: at the moment, both the social and economic arms of the American conservative movement are describing themselves and their efforts with terms directly out of gay chatrooms and gays’ bedrooms. Slang anchored in gay male sex is, at least in recent news cycles, the accidentally reigning metaphorical lexicon of the American far right, which seems here almost like a repressed, closeted teen doodling penises unawares along the margins of his algebra test as he waits for the class period to end. Whatever the content of his algebra responses, his teacher is likely to look first and foremost upon his penises. It’s tempting to say that the right, like our young gay boy, appears to wish at some unconscious level to be found out as somehow a wholesale fraud.

That even a minority of Americans could so much as entertain NOM’s argument is saddening and shameful, even if those who entertain it do so largely out of ignorance. Few bigots enjoy remain public bigots once confronted with the object of their scorn in the form of a person they otherwise think well of. Gays are everywhere. Few bigots today persist in bigotry after realizing that their objects of hatred are indistinguishable from their own children, their own friends, even themselves. Those who persist in bigotry under these conditions are sadists. That they base their actions on a (selectively literalist, intellectually dishonest) reading of scripture does not change this; nor does the fact that many of these bigots are otherwise delightful people. Sadism is sadism, wherever from, however soft.

These soft American sadists, led by NOM, may soon become commonly mistaken for gay men on the virtual prowl. From Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler:

Now that activist legislators are legislating from their legislatures to legalize gay marriage, activists are turning up the volume on anti-gay marriage rhetoric.

There’s just one, ahem, kink.

In an unintentional but hilarious nod to gay sex chatters everywhere, the National Organization for Marriage has dubbed their campaign “2 Million for Marriage”. Or 2M4M. Whoops.

The Christianist populist far right is busy steeling itself with a new campaign named for that which it hopes to render legally impossible. The economic populist far right has shown itself to be even worse, styling its own grassroots campaign after the Boston Tea Party—a cute idea, if historically misleading, and entirely overlookable but for the unfortunate transitive verb activists find themselves using, whether with or without knowledge of its common contemporary meaning. Rachel Maddow:

Teabagging. After spending weeks mailing teabags to members of Congress, conservative activists next week say they plan to hold tea parties to proverbially “teabag” the White House. And they don’t want to teabag alone, if that’s even possible. They want you to start teabagging, too. They want you to teabag Obama on Twitter, they want you to “Send your teabag and teabag Obama on Facebook”! They want you to “Teabag liberal Dems before they teabag you”! And all this nonconsensual conservative activist teabagging is just the start….

Using tidbits of American history as analogical memes is a trick pony among conservative rhetoricians, many of whom take history’s having rendered our progenitors, usually by patriotic necessity, morally purer than they really were as uncomplicated evidence of our progenitors’ righteousness (or for some, like Karl Rove, their sheer utility)—transforming a protest undergirded by economic ignorance into a grand recapitulation of an historically valorized American allegory. And so an earnest, errant conservative attempt to claim a central event in the founding of the United States ultimately, inadvertently implies that the Boston Tea Party was an orgy of ballsucking. Amen.

It’s difficult to imagine better evidence of how very little the scions of American movement conservatism understand contemporary America than this absurd confluence of metaphorical mishaps. At no point was there anyone in the rooms where these two strategies were developed who recognized their impending watchwords’ popcultural implications? How, most of us under thirty or so are struggling to fathom, could no one have caught this? No one among those running these key parts of the conservative coalition knows what “teabagging” is? That this could possibly be the case is laughable and pitiable.

To the minorities of young American conservatives who are antigay and/or radical capitalists: if you want any hope of future success, purge your elders peacefully and quick. The majority of young conservatives, who both know what teabagging is and could give two shits about who does it to whom, can sit back with the rest of us and enjoy, for pure sport, watching the far right, including those young conservatives unfortunate enough to cling to it, spiral into semiotic and political incoherency. We must watch this conflagration carefully. We inherit its remains.