The French Catholic neoconservative Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has a ridiculously trite article out at The Week entitled “Gay marriage, racism, and what everyone misses about the inevitability of social change.” Normally, I wouldn’t pay much attention to such prattle, but since it is getting attention on Twitter, I thought I’d address it. Gobry, by the way, has had contact with various reactionaries, although he has denounced the Dark Enlightenment as “racist” — shocking. That said, Gobry is not new to parroting the latest nonsense of neoconservatives and Cultural Marxists — whether it’s bombing North Korea, flooding Europe and the USA with Third World immigrants, or demanding that whites pay reparations to non-whites.
I indeed find it interesting that mainstream Christians today – both Catholic and Protestant – seem to have wholeheartedly adopted the mindset of Cultural Marxists, as Gobry does in his latest article by insisting that race is a “social construct”. The one issue that Christians have not yet given into the Cultural Marxists is gay marriage, but this is only matter of time and, as I’ll show, Gobry’s very “reasoning” paves the way for gay marriage.
Gobry, in his latest, argues that gay marriage is not inevitable because tokens of progress have been wrong in the past. His bogeymen of false tokens of past progress are the concept of race and eugenics (with, of course, the obligatory reference to Margaret Sanger). He writes:
“As people on the left of the left, who usually care more about the history of ideas than milquetoast progressives, never tire of pointing out (and rightly), race is a social construct…. [Race] is an idea that has a very specific history, whose birth can be dated, which came to dominate the cultural worldview, and thence changed law and behavior. In other words, it was a socio-cultural revolution.”
At least Gobry is honest about siding with the far left, although he doesn’t correctly identify its origins. (One of the first Marxists to champion the idea of race as a “social construct” was Franz Boas, who recently has recently been proven to be a fraud. Marxist Stephen Jay Gould has also been shown to be a fraud.)
Gobry seems to think that somehow the science of race is wrong since it’s a product of the Enlightenment, or, more specifically, the Scientific Revolution:
This reasoning, however, is wrong on a number of counts.
First, race in and of itself is not a modern concept. As Vincent Sarich & Frank Miele point out in the “Ancient Concept of Race,” the Ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and later Muslims all had concepts of race.
What is different about the modern concept of race is that it is more scientific. And this is supposed to discredit it? Modern genetics is also a product of this “socio-cultural revolution,” so it should also be discredited? Maybe Gobry thinks so, since genetics overwhelmingly proves the biological reality of race:
Like all good Marxist Christians today, Gobry quotes Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus.” I’m not very religious nor am I an expert on Biblical exegesis, but scholars have told me that the traditional interpretation of this passage is one of a heavenly allegory but the more recent Marxist interpretation is that on Earth race and gender aren’t real but are “social constructs”. Gobry obviously sides with the later interpretation.
Which undermines Gobry’s very support of traditional marriage. For, if gender – like race – is but a social construct, then why should any credence be given to traditional marriage grounded in a biological notion of reproduction (as the Latin verb maritare suggests by meaning both to marry and impregnate). If gender is but a social construct, then participants in marriage should not be be discriminated against by gender.
Such deductions, however, may be beyond the intellectual powers of grandstanders like Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry.
Updates:
Michael B Dougherty seems to agree with the article because of something someone might have once said about his ancestors 100 years ago. Newsflash, Michael, the Irish genetically cluster with Europeans and and there were never anti-miscegenation laws against the Irish.
Gobry warns that ideas like HBD must be kept “marginal”.
The Duck tells it like it is.
Occam's Razor 