Dolce and Gabbana: the end of intellectual freedoms?

In case you have not been following the story, this last week the high-end Italian fashion designers Dolce and Gabbana expressed in a Panorama magazine interview their concerns about homosexual marriage legalization in Italy. Although they were a longstanding homosexual couple nevertheless they think that the traditional nuclear family has for a long time been essential to the success of Italy’s cultural fabric and that homosexual marriage legalization would jeopardize that. Gabbana, at least, also believes that children have a right to a mother and a father – at least ideally – and that homosexual marriage legalization would be an anti-child development in Italy.

I find the views of Dolce and Gabbana to be intriguing, in part because of their status as a longstanding homosexual couple. But I have been at the same time dismayed by the public’s widespread hostility to their opinions on homosexual marriage, and especially by the apparent willingness of a lot of high-end fashion shoppers to boycott Dolce and Gabbana merchandise over this magazine interview. As I was reflecting further on this issue over the weekend it dawned on me how deeply anti-tolerant the homosexual marriage movement has become. Think, for example of the ousting of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich a couple of years ago. Or think of the suspension this last week of a Catholic High School teacher in New Jersey, for a posting on her blog in favor of traditional Catholic church teaching on homosexuality. Or think of the recent targeting of Archbishop Cordileone in San Francisco, by lawmakers intent on controlling what is taught in the city’s parochial schools. Then there are the numerous wedding bakers, photographers, and designers who have been fined or shut down in recent years.

The homosexual marriage movement at one time employed the language of toleration when it was a cultural minority and when it needed to convince the larger culture of the legitimacy of its views. But this one-time commitment to toleration has dramatically been thrown out the window now that the movement appears to be on the cusp of victory in the western societies. The powers-that-be in the homosexual marriage movement are not now in favor of allowing for dissenting views at all. Rather, the movement has in the last couple of years taken a dark turn – regardless of your opinions on the homosexual marriage issue – because of its emphasis on threats and conformity. It is now describable as being a ‘tolerance buzzsaw,’ where anyone who dissents from the views that are deemed to be ‘tolerant’ and ‘correct’ by the powers-that-be will get chewed up and spat out by the buzzsaw.

This is all deeply troubling, not just because of the homosexual marriage issue, but for any issue which might arise in the future and on which there might be dissenting cultural voices. To be sure, all societies have to have some measure of intellectual conformity in order to survive and succeed. But the western societies, since the late-18th-century, have been beacons of human hope because they have been built on the idea that societies could survive and succeed even when there is a much larger amount of intellectual diversity than was tolerated in past societies – like Imperial Rome or 17th-century France. That idea might now be fading. The period of human history in which a grand experiment was conducted and in which it was thought that people could be given widespread latitude in the formation of their opinions appears now to be drawing to a close. While the notion that there could be widespread intellectual and expressive freedoms was once seen as being a source of hope and promise for many, now it seems perhaps to have been only, at most, a temporary dream.