by Robert Stacy McCain
Many years ago, when I was just out of college, my friend George Hall introduced me to a punk rock song from the soundtrack of the 1984 film Repo Man. “Institutionalized,” by the group Suicidal Tendencies, is the darkly comic saga of a teenager named Mike who finds himself committed to a psychiatric facility merely because he asked his mother for a Pepsi. The chorus of the song contains this frantic refrain:
I’m not crazy. (Institutionalized!)
You’re the one that’s crazy. (Institutionalized!)
Lots of Americans are feeling that way these days. We live in an increasingly crazy world, and yet it is we — those of us still stubbornly clinging to reality — who find ourselves accused of mental disorders by the maniacs who are now running the asylum. This madness is everywhere, including the White House, which saw fit to celebrate “Pride” month by inviting a transgender social media personality, Rose Montoya (who boasts more than 100,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 800,000 on TikTok), to an event where Rose exposed his/“her” surgically enhanced breasts on the South Lawn. When this stunt provoked widespread criticism, the Biden administration quickly issued a statement condemning Montoya’s “inappropriate and disrespectful” behavior, promising that Montoya would “not be invited to future events.” Unspoken was the question every sane person must have been asking: Who in the administration thought this event — with its guest list of assorted weirdos — was a good idea to begin with?
One must not say such things out loud nowadays, however, or you’ll be accused of “hate” and perhaps diagnosed as suffering from a “phobia.” Some of us are old enough to remember when the basic demand of what was called (in that pre-inclusive era) the Gay Rights Movement was merely to be left alone to pursue their proclivities in privacy. And if you’re old enough to remember that era — discos and bathhouses and nitrite “poppers” — you’re likely to feel a certain nostalgia for an era when “gay” was synonymous with hedonism, rather than militant identity politics.
In the 21st century, there is nothing to be gained by denying the accusation of homophobia or transphobia, by making one of those “some of my best friends” protestations, or insisting on one’s general agreement with notions of equality and freedom in matters of sexuality. The erstwhile libertarian spirit of Gay Rights has long since been abandoned in favor of Rainbow Flag Totalitarianism; dissent is impermissible, and you can now be “canceled” for the mildest criticism of the ever-expanding acronym agenda (“LGBTQIA2S+” being the latest iteration, with “2S” referencing the alleged Native American identity of “two-spirit” and the plus sign signifying the inclusion of who knows what else). A popular videogame player recently got the cancel treatment for reacting to a California controversy over a Pride Month school celebration with a simple statement: “They should leave little children alone. That’s the real issue.” OMG! HOMOPHOBIA!
Words have meanings, however, and “phobia” denotes an irrational fear. The person who accuses you of harboring a “phobia” — in regard to gay or transgender people, or anything else — is claiming the authority to make a psychiatric diagnosis. The obvious question is, what are their credentials to make such a diagnosis? As a critic or opponent of the LGBTQIA2S+ political agenda, do you really fear or hate people based on their sexual preferences? And whatever your beliefs or opinions may be, are they really irrational?
This is the crux of the matter — the dispute is actually about authority, including the authority of LGBTQIA2S+ activists to destroy the livelihoods of anyone who opposes them. It is easy to laugh at the excesses of “cancel culture,” until you confront the reality that people are losing their jobs over it. And this is what got me thinking of those old punk-rock lyrics:
You’re the one that’s crazy. (Institutionalized!)
Like poor Mike, who ended up in the psych ward just because he wanted his mom to bring him a Pepsi, many Americans today find themselves threatened with career destruction merely for speaking out against the shrieking craziness of the Rainbow Flag agenda.
How did we get here? Without recounting every step of the way from disco-era Gay Rights to 21st-century Rainbow Flag Totalitarianism, we might digress briefly to note a few milestones along the route. It was in 1977 — my last year of high school and the first year of the Jimmy Carter administration — that singer Anita Bryant became a cultural lightning rod for leading a successful campaign in Dade County, Florida, against a local anti-discrimination ordinance that included sexual orientation as a protected category. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, media coverage still used the word “homosexual” to describe the people upset by Bryant’s stance: “Homosexual demonstrations broke out in several major cities following that Miami vote.” Let it be noted that Miami-Dade County was then, as it is now, a very popular place for gay people, and it is by no means clear that they suffered much if any real discrimination there as a result of what reporters described as a “battle between singer Anita Bryant and Miami’s homosexual community.”
Bryant won that battle, but she became a casualty of the larger war, as she was targeted by a boycott campaign that led to her losing her status as spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission and becoming a widespread object of ridicule. “Cancel culture” is just a new phrase for a well-established pattern that began with Anita Bryant. Despite their posturing as an oppressed minority of victims, the “homosexual community” (as it was then called) proved to be quite powerful, and this was demonstrated a few years later when the AIDS epidemic became a rallying point for gay activism. Ronald Reagan was smeared as a bigot by activists who claimed that he was literally responsible for the deaths of thousands killed by the sexually transmitted virus. It was during the 1980s that the Democratic Party became the de facto political vehicle of the gay-rights agenda. Thus, when the allegedly “moderate” Democrat Bill Clinton got elected president in 1992, he immediately began implementing policies demanded by gay activists, including repealing the ban on homosexuality in the U.S. military, provoking a firestorm of controversy eventually resulting in the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” compromise.
It has become fashionable to lament the hyper-partisan polarization of American politics, with Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) claiming that Republicans are somehow responsible for this. But which party was it that decided, decades ago, to ally itself with the militant fringe of gay activism? Those of us old enough to remember the deranged protests staged by ACT-UP are unlikely to be persuaded that the partisan divide widened because of Republican “extremism.”
Believe it or not — and many readers under 40 might be astonished by this — the demand for legal recognition of same-sex marriage was long considered such a kooky fringe idea that even most Democrats opposed it (or at least pretended to oppose it, since no Democrat can ever be presumed to be honest about such things). Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all once swore up and down that they were against same-sex marriage, and yet … Well, here we are in 2023, with rainbow flags flying at the White House while topless transgender TikTok personalities prance around the South Lawn.
This LGBTQIA2S+ insanity has been escalating rapidly in the eight years since the Supreme Court’s 5–4 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling made same-sex marriage the law of the land, and I for one continue to endorse every mocking word of the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in that case, e.g., “The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a ‘fundamental right’ overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since.” And what did any prudent person expect to follow that decision? Was anyone so foolish as to suppose that the activist army which had triumphed on same-sex marriage would just strike their tents, stack their weapons, furl their banners and go home? No, of course not — they immediately began scouting around for new fronts to continue waging their cultural war, with “diversity” and “inclusion” as their rallying cries.
Amid this seemingly endless political crusade, one notices a certain clown-car quality to the LGBTQIA2S+ coalition, which attracts a lot of people who are daft, demented, deranged, bonkers, berserk, off their rockers, nuttier than a Snickers bar, a few fries short of a Happy Meal, and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. It’s a coalition of crazies, blurring the line between the gay-rights lobby and the mental-health lobby, if not obliterating it altogether. Consider a few recent incidents:
- In March, a young woman named Audrey Hale, who had recently begun identifying as transgender, calling herself by the male name “Aiden,” went on a shooting rampage at a Christian school in Nashville, killing three children and three adults before dying in a shootout with cops. Police said Audrey/“Aiden” left behind a “manifesto” that might explain the otherwise mysterious motive for this massacre. However, authorities have refused to release the killer’s “manifesto,” perhaps because its contents might reflect badly on the transgender community.
- The actress formerly known as Ellen Page disclosed in an interview last week with the Los Angeles Times that she/“he” had decided to undergo a double mastectomy (“top surgery”) after an episode of deranged behavior while isolated in a Nova Scotia cabin during the COVID-19 pandemic. Page began “hearing voices in her head and engaging in a brutal round of self-mutilation, including punching herself in the face,” prior to deciding to become transgender, calling herself “Elliott.”
- Last weekend, a dentist was stabbed to death in his $2-million home in Virginia Beach. Police arrested the dentist’s 34-year-old son Michael, AKA “Norah” Horwitz, who had performed as a drag queen in Seattle before declaring himself/“herself” to be transgender.
Perhaps these are merely random incidents, and don’t constitute evidence that the LGBTQIA2S+ movement is giving rise to violent craziness. On the other hand, if you’re concerned about such a trend, your concern can’t be dismissed as an irrational “phobia.” For many years, I’ve been warning about the seemingly widespread insanity in our society by repeating a simple phrase, “Crazy People Are Dangerous.” Of course, this exposes me to accusations of “stigmatizing” mental illness, but that’s a trivial hazard compared to the risk of being gunned down by some poor kook driven to madness by all this “diversity” and “inclusion” talk.
Did I forget to mention that a former Biden administration Energy Department official keeps getting arrested for stealing women’s luggage? The lunatics are truly running the asylum nowadays, but it’s the rest of us — the sane and normal folks — who stand accused of harboring irrational fear and hatred for not going along with their clown-car craziness. More and more of us can relate to the protagonist Mike in that old punk-rock song:
So you’re gonna be institutionalized.
You’ll come out brainwashed with bloodshot eyes.
You won’t have any say.
They’ll brainwash you until you see their way.
All Mike wanted was a Pepsi. Maybe we can settle for a Bud Light instead. Oh, wait a minute … Never mind.
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Robert Stacy McCain is the author of Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature. He blogs at TheOtherMcCain.com.
