They say, in effect: For us to feel fully autonomous, you must positively affirm our sexual choices, our transgression, our power to disfigure our natural bodies and redefine what it means to be human, lest your disapprobation make us feel less than fully autonomous.Īhmari is drawing a sharp line between the minimal tolerance he is forced by the law to exhibit toward the LGBTQ community and the acceptance he furiously believes the culture is demanding.
Only, the libertines take the logic of maximal autonomy - the one French shares - to its logical terminus. The movement we are up against prizes autonomy above all, too indeed, its ultimate aim is to secure for the individual will the widest possible berth to define what is true and good and beautiful, against the authority of tradition.
As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg reminds us, it was the phenomenon of Drag Queen Story Hour, “a public event series founded in 2015 in which drag queens read to children and lead singalongs.”įor Ahmari, this and similar signs of acceptance of LGBTQ people in American society are enough to make one revolt over the whole ethos of civility and mutual respect: Many of us who observed the “don’t make me be civil” controversy among conservatives stirred up by New York Post op-ed page editor Sohrab Ahmari went right to some of the more alarming ideological implications of his rejection of liberal democracy as normative, and may have given too little attention to the immediate impetus for his freak-out. Do these people look like they’re being persecuted?