Hypocrisy on public health

A recent event in Northern Ireland speaks to the real dynamic underlying the transformation of Western culture. The Lord Mayor of Belfast unveiled a new Pride stained-glass window in City Hall that celebrates the LGBTQ community. The window, he declared, signified that the city was inclusive and welcoming, those universal and unanswerable justifications for anything that the cultural officer class happens to want to impose on the rest of us.

One of the central elements of the window is a young man in a white tee-shirt, on which appears the legend “Save sodomy from Ulster.” That is indeed a significant statement but not because it indicates inclusivity or a welcoming spirit. It is clearly a celebration of a homosexual act. Now, it is one thing to want a city to be the kind of place where people are not attacked in the street or barred from employment because of their sexuality. It is quite another to glorify in a civic space a form of sexual activity whose deleterious health effects are well-documented even if rarely spoken of in politically polite circles. Setting aside any moral concerns, sodomy (not my word of choice but that of the Belfast City Council) damages the human body. But that has not stopped it from being promoted in a window in Belfast City Hall.

Modern western culture is weird. One cannot watch a movie from the 1940s now—say, Casablanca or The Big Sleep—without first seeing a trigger warning concerning scenes of explicit and intentional smoking. And it is hard to imagine any stained-glass window being commissioned showing a young man puffing on a cigarette, a cigar, or a pipe. Why not? It would be deemed inappropriate for promoting behavior that damages health. Indeed, some countries are now moving to phase out tobacco all together by making it illegal for people born after certain dates to purchase it.

Yet there is Belfast City Hall promoting a specific homosexual sex act, and in doing so merely reflecting the values of our day. Yet the comparison with smoking indicates there is more going on here. Nobody is going to build a public health policy that takes seriously the physical damage done by sodomy. Rather, as the Lord Mayor of Belfast indicates, they are going to glory in it.

Why? Why damn smoking and smokers on health grounds and promote anal sex as indicating how virtuous a city’s culture has become? The answer is this: The kind of culture to which Belfast’s mayor belongs is not one that is simply liberalizing the moral principles of the past. The modern West is not loosening its behavioral codes to accommodate previously marginalized groups. Instead, it is committed to the conscious destruction of those things once considered sacred.

It wants to slay the old values and then exultantly dance on their graves. That is how it validates itself. That is why we have the immense hypocrisy whereby smoking is so dangerous that we even need to be warned when Humphrey Bogart puts a cigarette in Lauren Bacall’s mouth and strikes a match, but a highly dangerous sexual practice can be celebrated in public space—public space, of course, to which children have access. “Daddy, what is sodomy?” is not a question parents of yesteryear would have wanted their five-year old asking as they toured a public building. But clearly Belfast’s lord mayor considers the possibility of that either a necessary risk or perhaps a positive benefit in his quest for inclusivity.

This window does tell us something about Belfast and about the Western culture of which Belfast is a part: It cares not for public health, regardless of the pious disapproval of smoking. It cares not for childhood, because of its pornification of public space. And it cares not for anybody who does care about these things. Not all are included, welcome, and celebrated.