Dance of the Gay Puritans

Our sharp-tongued pal Bern Chapin has written an excellent rejoinder to Mark Gavreau Judge's article on the American Spectator site in which the latter claimed that people on the Right should abjure popular pleasures such as NASCAR, country music, and even rock and roll and football, as well as down-home clothing styles such as tee shirts, sneakers, and jeans, and that we should all shop at Brooks Brothers instead of Wal-Mart.

On our site, Hunter Baker took exception to Judge's suggestion that Christianity requires an individual to wear certain types of clothes and enjoy certain types of entertainment, a claim which Jesus would certainly have found ludicrous. Hunter is absolutely right about this.

Judge seems to be going for a sort of Gay Puritanism here.

Hunter is correct to take him to task for it.

Now, as I said earlier on this blog, I do agree that "Most prominent conservatives today have little appreciation of the fine arts, and they show little respect for style, just as Mark says. Among the causes for this, I would suggest the fact that conservatism used to be a more elite position than it has been since Reagan, who made real the populism that Goldwater's candidacy had begun." (I then left Judge and went into a discussion of the Omniculture.) But Hunter and Bern are right to bring out these other implications of Judge's elitism. The notion that the right should be a movement of people who shop at Brooks Brothers and not Wal-Mart is a guarantee of marginalization. There just aren't that many people who can afford to do the former and not the latter. (Otherwise, the president would be a member of the Green Party.)

In addition and even more importantly (if you can imagine anything as being more important than partisan politics), it's silly to place stylistic litmus tests on morality. Either people love God above all things and love their neighbors more than themselves, or they don't. Wingtips and sneakers provide not the slightest clue of an individual's position on that—or, if anything, one would expect a person who really keeps those two commandments to be wearing the more humble footwear.

Of course, if one has a certain amount of the ready and has come by it honestly, sure, looking nice is better than being a slob, and attending to elevating and edifying art is far better than wallowing in trash. But the particular standards Judge is suggesting are overly specific and snobbish, and they also praise a phenomenon, "metrosexuality," that should be laughed right off the earth as soon as possible. As Bern says,

A metrosexual is one who possesses a woman’s taste, and anyone who has ever cringed at the color pink or had glitter rub off on them knows that female taste cannot always be equated with the word “good.”

Another mistake is apparent as metrosexual has never, to my knowledge, been applied to opinions about art and music. The term has always been used in reference to fashion, grooming, habit, and social interest. I have never heard it applied to intellectual interests, but that is an assumption on which the rest of the piece rests.

This is an important point. In praising "metrosexuality," Judge is, perhaps unintentionally but definitely, siding with the notion that the differences between men and women are not largely natural but are in fact culturally determined. This is a crucial point, and one which Judge really should revisit and reconsider.

So, thanks to Bern for bringing this to the fore.

In addition, I want to add an angry complaint about Judge's disgusting, outrageous dismissal of football as a low-class endeavor. That is a simply contemptible assertion: football is in fact the greatest sport of our time. It gives young men a way to excel in an area that the modern world seldom allows, and it is a thing of great beauty, complexity, and subtlety. It teaches individual achievement within a structure of essential cooperation. A boy who plays football, and to a lesser degree anyone who watches the sport, learns that group success comes from each individual doing the very best at whatever he or she has been told to do. It is a beautiful matter of individuals cooperating to bring their personal abilities together in a group effort. The team that wins consistently is the team in which the most players do exactly what they are supposed to do on the greatest percentage of possessions.

I have coached football at the junior level, and it is a great way to help silly, uncontrolled boys become serious young men. It doesn't always work, as so many cases attest, but of the millions of boys who play organized football, I would suggest that it benefits all of them in some way. If Judge has never played or coached football, and is not even a fan of the sport, well, that says a lot about him, and something any real male would rather keep quiet about. Any woman who finds a contempt for football attractive would be far better off simply finding another woman to live with.

Now, I do think that style is important and that nice things are much better than crap. Much, much better. But Bern and Hunter are absolutely right to point out that Judge is into some very dubious stuff and shouldn't force his weird tastes on other people. Keep that in the closet, girl!

I think that the styles people choose do say important things about them, and I like to be as jaunty and prosperous-looking as possible, but to associate Christianity with metrosexuality strikes me as utterly grotesque. Brrrr.

I suggest that Mr. Judge punt and try to get his defense in order.